The Four Dimensions of Well Being

Most of my blog posts center around positive thinking or self-improvement. For a change, I wrote a post with tips on managing money. I was amazed to see the overwhelming response on this post. In just a few months, it became the popular post on the blog. My blog aims to provide material to help “charge your batteries”, so this post was somewhat out of place. I am no financial expert either, so I wasn’t sure what was going on here. I thought some more about it, I came up with the following possible answer:

As this picture shows, we are sum total of four distinct parts – Body, Mind, Heart, and Spirit and we need to continuously charge our batteries in these four areas. You can call them four dimensions of well-being.

• Physical well-being relates to our body, health, material comforts, and money.
• Mental well-being is about knowledge, thinking, and intellect.
• Social / Emotional well-being includes love, relationships, trust, family, and friends
• Spiritual well-being is about the meaning in life, purpose, values and religion

All the above are vital dimensions and we need to nurture each of them to achieve the right balance. If we ignore any one of these aspects, it will affect our happiness adversely. So far, the physical part was neglected in this blog, as it focused around mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The post on money management addressed this neglected area, and that may be the reason why people liked it so much.

So, I decided that there needs to be a better balance in my blog, hence in future you will see more posts on money and health matters. As a validation of this hypothesis, I came out with a follow up post on how to make money in stock markets, and as expected, it rose to top three posts in just one month. :)

Don't Break the Strings

Here is an inspiring story with the message that we should never break away from our roots as they keep us stable while we fly high.

A father and son are flying a kite.

After some time, the son observes "Dad. Because of the string the kite is not able to go any further higher."

Hearing this, the father smiles and breaks the string.

The kite does go higher initially just after the thread has been broken off; but shortly after that, it begins to go down and finally falls on the ground. The child is very dejected and sad.

The father sits next to him and calmly explains to him,

"Son, in life we reach a certain level of prosperity and then we feel that there are certain things in our life that are not letting us grow any further like our roots, home, family, culture or friendship. We might feel that we want to break free from those strings and attachments that we believe are stopping us from going higher.

But, remember the lesson from the kite. Going higher seems easier at first, but a little later it is difficult to stay up without the string.

Friends, family and our roots and culture are the things that help us stay stable at the heights that we have achieved.

If we try to break away from these strings, we may become like the kite."

न कोई उमंग है, न कोई तरंग है
मेरी ज़िन्दगी है क्या, एक कटी पतंग है।

Essentialism - How to Organize your Life

These days I am pulled in many different directions at work – there is so much to do and not enough time for everything. Everything seems so important that I get fragmented and it becomes impossible to decide what to take up at the moment. I get stretched thinner and thinner trying to accomplish all of it. I end up making a millimeter of progress in a million directions, feeling overworked and underutilized.

I have also noticed that my attention span is eaten up by my smartphone with such a constant inflow of emails, calls, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, that it is impossible to sit down and concentrate. I do not feel as if I am in control of my life and my time.

It went to the extreme when I was praying in a temple recently; one after other wishes came to my mind and soon I had about twenty wishes in the list. I knew it is ridiculous so I tried to identify the most important one from this list, but did not succeed. Then I said, “Let me try to prune this list down to top three wishes”. It did not work either. I could not drop anything from the list. I was surprised to find that it is so hard to decide the three most important things I want in life.

Something has definitely going wrong here recently. I was not like this earlier. Greg McKeown provides the answer to my problem in his book “Essentialism”. He says that the root cause is that we have started chasing more and more in modern times – and the solution lies in what he calls “the disciplined pursuit of less”. When we deliberately focus our energy on fewer important things, we can utilize it more effectively. This is what he calls “Essentialism”. The picture here illustrates the benefits of being an essentialist.

According to McKeown, the situation has become worse in recent times as there is an exponential growth in the information and choices available to people due to advances in technology. There is tremendous social expectations to do everything and be everywhere. Today’s generation grows up with a notion that “you can have it all”, which adds to this pressure to get more and do more. We have corporate environments that talk about work/life balance but still expect their employees to be on their smartphones 24/7/365.

The word ‘priority’ is singular and means the very first or prior thing. It is not meaningful to make it plural and talk about multiple first things. People and companies now routinely try to bend reality by talking about top ten priorities. This gives the impression that many things are priority but actually means nothing is. How is it possible to focus on ten different things?

Let us take the example of your wardrobe. If you do not spend effort to organize it, it may get cluttered over time with the stuff that you rarely wear. When it gets out of control, you try and purge the wardrobe. But unless you have a disciplined system, you will either end up with not discarding anything out of it or with regrets after discarding some useful cloth in a hurry. The essentialist will approach the same wardrobe differently. He will use the following disciplined approach to organize the wardrobe or his life:

1.    As a first step, the essentialist explores and evaluates the entire contents of wardrobe to identify the dresses that he likes most. In real life situations, this amounts to identifying the activities that will make the highest possible contribution towards your goal.
2.    In next step, the essentialist eliminates the rest of the stuff from the wardrobe. This is same as discarding everything but the most important activities from your to do list.
3.    The final step is to execute the most important activities with complete focus to get the best possible outcome.

You can immediately see the power of this idea – it helps you move from a cluttered, out of control life to an organized, effective and less stressful one. It also resonates well with the time tested principle of Aprigrah in Jainism which stands for eliminating unnecessary things from your possession.

Let us all make an effort to embrace Essentialism or Aparigrah in our day to day life, and increase our effectiveness by bringing back the lost focus.
  

Laughter with God

How do you relate to God? Do you fear God or do you love Him? How do you behave in His presence? Can you stay at peace or do you always look for wishes to ask and ways to please Him? How do you take it when someone cracks a joke involving God? Do you instantly see it as blasphemy?

Be assured, God wants us to be happy, so He is not likely to take offense on small jokes. Why should religion be a dry affair with no humor?

Here is a collection of such jokes that I have heard over time. It is just meant to create some lighter moments and no offense is meant to any religion.

Parking Problems
Prakash was driving down the street in a sweat because he had an important meeting and couldn't find a parking place. Looking up toward heaven, he said, "Lord, take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to temple every Sunday for the rest of my life and give up drinking.”
Miraculously, a free parking place appeared. Prakash looked up again and said, "Never mind. I found one."

Ganpati Dance
Once a person was drowning in the river. He immediately started praying frantically to Ganpati. Ganpati immediately appeared, looked at him, and then started dancing. The person was confused and angry - "Lord, I am drowning and you are dancing" Lord Ganesh said - "Son, at my immersion, you also danced like this"

Prayer for Lottery
Pappu was complaining to God - "Dear God, I have been praying for years to get a Lottery Prize, but you have not listened to my prayers".
God says to him, "Sure I will make you win the prize, but can you at least buy the ticket first?"
 
God’s Share
A man, who needed some cash very badly, was walking on the road. He prayed to God,”Lord, if I somehow find Rs 1000 today, I will make sure to donate half of it at the temple.” Suddenly a miracle took place and he found a Rs 500 note lying in the middle of road. As he picked it up, he thanked God profusely and said, “Thank You Lord, it seems you do not trust my promise, hence you deducted Rs 500 upfront.”  

The Massive World of God
Mohit had an encounter with God in his dream and he started chatting with him.
Mohit - O Almighty, I have heard that everything is massive in your world. How long is your one second?
God – Equal to one hundred years of earth.
Mohit – How much is your one paisa?
God – Equal to one hundred crore Rupees of earth.
Mohit – O Lord, just give me your one paisa.
God – OK, Just wait a second. 

The Dishonest Postman
Raju was a postman. One day, when he noticed a letter addressed to “Dear God”, he got curious and opened it. The letter was from a local farmer Bhola. He wrote in the letter,”Dear God, as you know, my crop was damaged by rain this year. I have no other source of income. Please send me Rs 1000 as soon as you get this letter”. Raju knew that Bhola was in genuine trouble and he was impressed by Bhola’s strong faith. He immediately decided to help and shared it with others at the post office. They managed to collect Rs 800, and delivered it as a money order from God. All of them felt very satisfied to be of help to someone needy.
Next week Raju found another letter from Bhola to God that said,”Dear God, Thanks for such a quick response. I received Rs 800 yesterday. I know you must have sent Rs 1000, but we can’t help it, the dishonest postman must have kept Rs 200.”