Kal Aaj Aur Kal

I am a strong believer of the benefits of living in the present moment. It is the simplest way to get rid of 90% of your mental stress. Very often, when we find ourselves sandwiched between yesterday (Kal), today (Aaj) and tomorrow (Kal), we spend such an inordinate amount of energy on yesterday and tomorrow that it starts to rob us of our happiness today.

Let us take the case of past first. When we are not happy about the way things happened in the past,  we brood over and re-live those unpleasant memories again and again feeling the pain and guilt and becoming unhappy as a result. At other times we nurture a happy memory of glorious past when the going was much better, and we starts to feel unhappy about our present situation. In both cases, we choose to live in the past, letting it ruin our present. More importantly, we end up feeling immobilized – unable to do anything about it; which is only natural since you cannot go to your past and erase or correct anything that has happened.

Similarly, think about future now. How much time do we spend worrying about future? Will I get good enough marks to get admission into the college of my choice? Will I succeed in my business? Will I have enough savings when I retire? Will my marriage work out? There are so many unknown dimensions of future that keep our mind constantly entangled, and cause us extreme anxiety and stress. Again, we sacrifice our present by spending all our energy on future, and this immobilizes us – unable to do anything about it.

So, wise men over the ages have advocated that to be happy, you must learn to shut the door on past and future, and live exclusively in present. Forget about the past that is gone.. you can not change it. Forget about the future that has not yet come.. it’s a distant thing. Focus all your energy on the present – today is what you have with you. In other words, to be happy, you should choose Aaj from Kal, Aaj, aur Kal.

Sounds like obvious stuff? Most of us have heard about this wisdom, but we refuse to believe that it is right to forget about the future. "I have to worry about the future, else the future will be bleak". Well, be assured that living in present is not only good wisdom, but its a natural principle that can not be violated. Any amount of worrying about the future can not help you improve it. You can not fast forward to the future and change even a second of it. By all means, think about the future, carefully plan for it, but eventually what helps build a bright future is the positive action you take today.

Dale Carnegie said, "The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."

The principle of living in present is such a fundamental one in my mind that I have discussed it in many of my earlier posts as well – if you are interested to find out more, take a look at the following posts:

• A great Present you can give yourself
• When the Things go Haywire
• A Magic Formula to Find the Right Time   
• Don’t be a Victim of Success

So, you got convinced that living in present is a natural principle and following this principle is good for keeping happy. However, every now and then we keep running into contradictions that challenge it and makes us take a fresh look at our assumptions. As an interesting example, I attended this leadership workshop recently that defined the key characteristics of good leaders and had extensive discussions on the practices that set exemplary leaders apart. It was stressed that leaders have the following two key attributes:

• Ability to continuously learn and change
• A compelling vision of future

In other words, good leaders take a careful look at their past and take a lesson from it, and they are good at looking ahead and painting a picture of the future that inspires people to work towards it. Does this mean that the best leaders have to spend considerable amount of their time on yesterday and tomorrow in contradiction of the principle of living in present? Or does it mean that every leader has to pay a price – that he cannot choose to be happy by staying in present?

I thought a lot about it in an attempt to find an answer, and then one fine day it popped in front of my eyes. Leaders are not living in past or future, but they are living in present. They look at the past briefly to determine what they can learn from it. This is an objective look at the events as a passive observer without any emotions attached to it. Once the analysis is done about what can be done better next time, the door is shut tightly on the past, and the lesson is used to improve the actions taken today. They do not hold on to the memories of the past beyond this point. Similarly when good leaders look ahead to paint a vision of the future, they do so without any feeling of anxiety. When they share their vision of future with others, they stay firmly in the present, with a keen focus on what steps should be taken today to move towards their vision.

So, the bottom-line is that Yesterday and Tomorrow can be like a helpful friend to us if we learn to handle them in a positive way while staying firmly in Today. Use your present to learn from your past and take action now to create a bright future for yourself. Always keep the principle of living in present in mind. How-so-ever hard you try, you cannot go back to the past or go forward to the future. This day, this hour, this moment is all we have with us.

आगे भी जाने न तू, पीछे भी जाने न तू
जो भी है, बस यही एक पल है

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About this Post

• The idea of writing this post took seed in my mind while attending a leadership workshop last month, but it took more than four weeks of thinking to give it a final shape.
•  I chose the title Kal Aaj aur Kal. Kal means yesterday in Hindi, it also means tomorrow, while Aaj means today. So while Aaj denotes present, Kal represents both past and future.