Lets take an example of – wanting dessert after dinner. You’r sure that you’re gonna get it – because you have immense faith that God has prepared dessert for you. You’re sure of it.

But then you don’t get dessert. How do you justify having the faith then? Should you keep having faith when there really is no guarantee?

Unless of course, the paradigm is incomplete. Another way of looking at having immense faith in God, is  having faith that everything that happens – even the worst of the worst – is all part of the plan. Most of us are only able to reconcile with things and derive meaning in hindsight. In Steve Job’s words – “connecting the dots from behind”.

So going back to the example – whether you get the dessert or not – you are convinced it’s for the best. It’s a more zen approach to life.

It is after all just a paradigm that helps us live. As is religion. After all there is no reality – only perception.

And lately I’m not able to keep the blind eye on the fact that most of the blocks in my life are caused by discrimination. I’m not going into detail about the who’s and the when’s etc… but I can safely say that in more than two very huge aspects of my life – i’m not succeeding because even if I have found what I want – and have done everything humanly possible to get it – what I want has been given to someone else because they were born into a certain race or religion. And I’m being subjected to the options of my race and religion, which I’m sorry to say is the short end of the stick.

I’m not going to make this a post about racial (or any other form) of anger against the outside world, and I’m certainly done whining about it. But the fact remains that life is freakishly unfair most of the times. People are freakishly unfair – and that’s the truth.

It doesn’t matter if their partiality is based on religion, race, language, age, caste whatever – blind partiality based on this to the extent of denying deserving candidates some hope… ah well, I’m on the wrong end of the problem here so maybe that’s why I’m about to condemn these discriminating bastards to hell. But I don’t believe I discriminate or ever have. Yes, I’m not expecting everyone to hold up to my ‘high standards’ of looking at life, but when I’m suffering for it I have something to say.

To all the people in the world who cover your asses and insecurities and closed minded fears by sticking to race and religion – please go directly to hell. Do not pass Go, do not collect 200. You have caused suffering in the hearts of other human beings and you’re not worth the crap under your shoes.

Oh wait. So this post did turn into a rage filled rant. Oh who the hell cares.

If you’re reading this and you see discrimination at hand stopping you – let me know if you overcome it. It will definately brighten my day. I will salute you. And if you don’t overcome it – well, you have my salutations anyways for putting up with it and enduring.

A lot of the things we do aren’t just motivated by pleasure based chemicals – they’re also motivated based on pain that we’ve experienced before. Our brain’s full of neural pathways. When we go through an experience that results in pain, a pattern is established that tells us that anything or something related to that pain, should be avoided. That’s why in addition to going towards things that give us pleasure, we find ourself conciously or subconciously going away from that which can potentially cause pain.

So, far from being computers that act on unbiased logic, our brains are constantly churning out decisions that are based on the amount of pain and pleasure that we experience. If we experience pleasure, we’re drawn to it more and try to get more pleasure – creating an addiction. If we experience pain, we try and escape the pain if we can – and if we cannot, it causes a complex or a neurosis.

(I feel like i’m reinventing neural sciences and applied psycology, but at this point i’m kind having fun and it’s even a little therapuetic for me )

In life we make decisions the best we can, most of the time. However those decisions may be skewed by the kind of emotional hang ups we have based on the kind of pleasure versus pain equation we have with the subject of the decision. There is no way of ensuring it is going to be pure and the highest logic when it comes to those decisions unless you recognise and accept and even overcome the pain versus pleasure variables in the equation.

If there is a bag of fertilizer in the room spreading it’s smell, then you can spray air freshner and perfume all you want, to try and sit in the room with peace of mind – but untill you get rid of the bag, it’s not a permenant solution. To get rid of the bag, first you have to find it – and do not underestimate this step, for most people don’t bother to examine themselves (many only manage through therapy with shrinks). The next step would be to acknowledge it’s there (there’s a fine line between accepting one’s flaw and being a hypochondriac …or reckless about it) The third step would be to remove it effectively.
The fourth and final step would be to reconcile with the fact that it’s been there so long without anyone doing anything about it – accepting responsibility and moving on.
The first place to look for weaknesses would be your known insecurities and hang ups. But to acknowledge these insecurities as rooted in a flaw or a weakness takes a lot of courage.
Acknowledging it means looking past ego and saying “yes, I can be flawed. This is one of them.” It may be quite a task for a person who is very confident about themselves, and it may be a slippery road for someone who totally isn’t. In fact for the latter, there might be a lot of false positives.
Removing it is something that happens with a lot of therapy – inward reflection might work but because of the already existing bias and the proverbial “too close to see the whole picture” problem – has less chances of succeeding, or at a minimum would take much longer and much more effort due to potential wrong turns.

Accepting that you had a major flaw in your emotional make up is all about accepting that we aren’t perfect. We weren’t brought up in a perfect world. We were brought up by imperfect parents who tried thier best, grew up with imperfect friends who were brought up by their imperfect parents, taught by imperfect teachers in imperfect schools…. perfection just doesn’t really exist around here.

Don’t punish yourself for being imperfect. The important thing is the journey towards perfection. Which is possibly what god / evolution wanted for us – a journey towards perfection, rather than the destination itself. Proof exists in the fact that we’re usually more happier and get more dopamine from the milestones along the journey than the destination itself (unless it’s a painful journey like a prison sentance or my college years)

I’m wondering now if the respect and kudos that we got for decisions that were supposedly based on logic, morals, emotional strength – is invalid because those decisions were probably based on the pain versus pleasure equations in our head.

But as a friend told me – are we really supposed to be worrying about respect from others?
I think to an extent – yes. If maslow’s laws apply, then respect from our peers is important.

However, instead of respecting you for the decisions that you did, they would probably respect you more for understanding yourself better, finding your flaws, and overcoming them – even the flaws that made you make those decisions in the first place.

More importantly you need to find respect for yourself. Just because certain decisions were made because of pain/pleasure variables instead of values – doesn’t mean you don’t have the values. Look at other decisions in your life, look at yourself and what you believe in. If you have a set of values that does still stand true, then there’s no need to worry.

There are so many sources of these chemicals: worship, food, sex, love, adventure sports, classical music, playing video games also does the same.  Why can’t life be about unrestricted enjoyment of these things that pump those chemicals into our brains?

Actually we could take it a step further. Why not just take in pure and concentrated dopamine? Or at the very least put everyone on Prozac? But does this mean we remove the taboo on drugs and go for a free-for-all? Drugs like ecstacy, dope and coke ultimately increase the amount of dopamine in our heads – isn’t that what most people’s lives are about? To enjoy as much as possible? “The pursuit of Happiness”?

I know the obvious answer is – but those drugs are dangerous. They’re addictive and the side effects are destructive.  What if they weren’t?

Would you do it? Take drugs to be happy? If there was a drug that could allow you to be happy instantaneously and achieve the level of pleasure that people get from chocolate after sex? Most people would say no and their answer would either be something about being too noble to resort to such “low” measures, and that there shouldn’t be any shortcuts in life, and there are “always consequences”. Well, we take drugs to heal our bodies. Aren’t those shortcuts? We take coffee (which has another drug – caffeine) just for headaches and other trivial reasons like needing to focus on work or studying for an exam all night.
You can justify Caffeine, but you cannot justify ecstasy if it came with no strings attached?

In the book “The Happiness hypothesis” Johnathan Hadt asks his students – what if a brother and a sister decide to try making love, while on birth control. Is there something wrong with that?
Most people will come up with all kinds of responses to why that is just wrong – despite the fact that genetic dilution isn’t happening due to no progeny being created. Where are these reasons coming from and why?

People are born with a set of emotions that go back to caveman times. Disgust is one of them. Its something seen even in other animals – ever see an elephant come across a dead body?
Why is ‘disgust’ there? Most vegetarians are ‘disgusted’ with even the sight or smell of meat. And then there are the majority of the world, who feast on meat and cannot live without it being a part of every meal. Some of these carnivores ironically were born vegetarians. And even more funny are those who go from being carnivores to vegetarians. But the last category do it seldom out of disgust – unless they’ve stepped into a meat factory. What function does disgust play?

I’m going to take a step back here and look at the whole picture:

1) We’re a collective of machines controlled by computers
2) There’s either a higher intelligence – or just a series of scientific laws governing the universe (whichever it is, let’s call this entity ‘Max’ and it could be just a framework of science and math)
3) ‘Max’ is pushing everything in a certain direction. The big bang caused the universe to form in a distinct way based on the laws of physics, chemistry and math – and caused us to form from evolution
4) If ‘Max’ had a purpose of doing so, it’d try and design the project so that it’d succeed in the equations of probability
5) ‘Max’ has embedded in us also elements of those design to help us succeed. Things like love, fear, disgust, anger… (Max – as god, or as evolution has definitely put them there)

6) Why?

Would Max have brought us this far to be in a perpetual state of dopamine induced high?

That’s a pretty damn powerful question. The answer is obviously a no, because we didn’t need to get to the phase we are at if that was the goal. It sort of negates the idea that we’re here for “the pursuit of happiness”. But then is happiness the same as a dopamine induced high? Too hard to say. Regardless, man is going at spectacular speeds to progress at science. He’s constantly bettering himself. It’s safe to say, despite the odds of disease, global warming, and everything else – man is probably going to make it to “star trek” level growth. Was that the purpose? Or is our purpose even beyond that?

What if our purpose hasn’t been revealed to us yet? What if only when we reach a certain point of evolution, is our real purpose revealed to us?

OK. But what now? There are billions of people who live today who have nothing to do with that purpose, or at least cannot see it – even if the hypothesis is correct. What do they do? As far as they are concerned, they want to live a selfish life in the “pursuit of happiness”. Should they?

Billions have come and billions have gone from this earth. Did all of them help in furthering the progress of mankind? The question is like asking do you need every single cell in your body? Did you really need those nails on your fingertips? No. Life doesn’t work in absolute perfection. It works with risks and probabilities and majorities and minorities. Without the majority of a population that was working like normal, at jobs that in some small way help an economies that supports countries, which each have universities, that house the minority of the population – research scientists who further mankind’s knowledge – we wouldn’t be going forward. Everyone’s a cog in a machine.

Each cog needs to be well oiled and serviced to work well. Which is probably why the pursuit of happiness is relevant. However for each cog to continue working without getting too oily and too serviced, it needs to draw a line – at what exactly it does to continue to be in working condition. Hence the religion, love, disgust, anger, fear, hatred… and the inner workings behind those being adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin.

But each person must draw the line between how much is optimal and how much is excess when it comes to injection of dopamine into their computers. For optimal performance.

Regardless, I was in a terrible mood for some time that day – I even wrote a long blog post about what I really felt about this day that was a travesty upon single people in the world – and thankfully had the good sense to leave it as a draft to look upon it later in retrospect. I did just that today and the first thought that came to mind is – how much emotional state of being can change over a period of just a month.

The second thought that does come to mind is that, while it was not right for me to be angry / jealous / envious / hurt about being single in a world that seems like it is full of lovers in our faces – it needs to be accepted that the want for love is a fundamental need.

Maslow dedicated a whole layer of his pyramid to love: Friendship, Family and sexual intimacy (which I think can be encapsulated in Romantic intimacy and is what I’m going to focus on)

The funny thing about the pyramid is that generally you cannot proceed to higher layers and fulfill higher needs on the upper layers of the pyramids if the needs on a lower layer or not met (sort of like another system I’m normally working with)

However in Hinduism, like most religions, detachment from all ties like friendship, family and romantic intimacy is encouraged as it actually aids the achievement of Self Actualization / Enlightenment (I will use those two terms interchangeably for now). I actually agree – I don’t believe a person HAS to have even any of those three type of loves to be able to be happy – much less reach enlightenment.

However we all know ourselves and have lived our entire lives with wants and needs, long enough to know that they come naturally. Using monkeys in a lab set up, scientists actually have proven that a mothers love is necessary for normal psychological growth and behavior. It blew my mind when I read that most of human pleasure comes from the release of dopamine – a chemical neurotransmitter that’s created during the times we enjoy something. It’s mostly created during two events:

1) when we eat

2) when we have sex / are in love

Why?  Because of evolution, we’re wired for survival – and the two things we need to do to survive are feed and procreate. So the brain is programmed to automatically reward us with joy when we do something linked to our survival – on a purely anthropological / biological level.

At any level – as a human being, a living animal to the electrons in the atoms of our cells – we all try to move from a state of unrest and higher energy to a state of stability and lower energy. That means we try and run from pain and run towards joy. It’s what we’re programmed to do. The closest thing almost everyone will get as the answer to “what is the purpose of life” is “the pursuit of happiness” (with an implied “and the escape from pain” stupid )

However is that a need? Pumping dopamine into our brains? Dopamine is a highly addictive substance – which would be the root explanation for every sin and vice imaginable. Because we are addicted to dopamine we run towards what gives us joy – whether it be gluttony or lust… or any of the other sins the Vatican have declared… and your local legislation has declared a crime.  So dopamine is the enemy? It’s the fruit in the garden of eden, whose temptation if we succumb to – we incur the pain of hell. I think I’ve just decoded the biblical story of Adam and Eve!  yay

Before I get a head of myself and write “the Christ Code”, I should also point out that gluttony and sloth and the sins are all excess versions of things that are actually normal and sometimes needed for survival. Ever watch the movie “Se7en”? I’m a big fan of David Fincher, and as tribute to that movie I’ll list those seven deadly sins caused by an unregulated addiction to dopamine.

The need to eat to live  :  The excess is Gluttony

The need to have sex : The excess is Lust

The need to win at competition : The excess is envy

The need to sleep : The excess is sloth

The need to get money / material objects : The excess is greed

The need for self respect : The excess is pride

The need for defending ones self : The excess is wrath / anger
(this is one exception to the “dopamine addiction causes sin” theory)

What’s the moral of the story? The same answer to a lot of things, and one of the central pillars of hinduism, buddhism, greek philosohpy – Balance.

The need for romantic and sexual fulfillment must at least be acknowledged. But it cannot be allowed to overrun your senses, judgment, action and life.

OK, honestly, because “figuring it out” is the hardest thing one can do in this life. Heck, that 80% I talked about surely hasn’t figured it out, and neither has most of the remaining 20%. But then, I’m comparing myself to them – which is one of the root causes of the inferiority complex. I created the definition for myself “insecurity = fear of inferior” in my last blog post. Since then I’ve been scouring books and the internet trying to find a way to deal with inferiority complexes, and not as surprisingly- I found very little. You see, most books that come out that promise to make you successful, talk about how you can become successful on the outside – wealth, spouse, achievement. They don’t mention much about dealing with the inside.

Of course, there are exceptions. NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming, from what I’ve seen is a sort of hypnotherapy. Which works pretty well, when executed, but I don’t have enough knowledge on this topic yet to recommend it.

The only other source I have found that helps people deal with their insecurities, inferiority complexes, etc – is spirituality. Not religion mind you, but spirituality. The two (religion and spirituality) are quite different, but they are not contrary. They can blend very nicely and go hand in hand, as they have for tens of thousands of years so far. It’s only lately I think, that people are able to separate themselves from religion and still be spiritual – which I think is not just perfectly fine, but maybe recommended in today’s world of using religion to create divide. However religion gives the vast fabric of guidelines and knowledge that can be used to better your spiritual advancement. The point is – Spirituality is, in the end, one of the greatest ways to stop misery. The other two ways I believe, are medication and cognitive therapy. I think some self help books, and those that teach about maintaining an attitude of gratitude for the Law of Attraction teach a system that borders on cognitive therapy. Which is why they also tend to succeed in creating a massive change both on the inside and the outside of a person. However they still focus on material attachment – or at least they do not focus on balancing or moderating that attachment, which is the opposite of the spiritual approach.

But is material attachment important on the road to vanquishing inferiority complexes? Yes and No. One of the earliest lessons I learnt while dealing with my inferiority complex caused by weight issues was: There are two ways to overcome that feeling: deal or solve what is causing it. i.e. make peace with being overweight, or stop being overweight.

While the latter sounds more direct and permanent, it is only a stop gap, if the weight problem is not the root cause, but just one of the weapons of the root cause. It will only be a matter of time before you find something else that causes you to sink back into misery.

In which case dealing with it sounds like a better example. But deal with it and live a life being overweight? That doesn’t sound right either.

Sadly, as much as I hate to say it, the lesson that I can never seem to learn and inculcate – yet the one lesson that keeps coming back to haunt me from the universe – is that balance is the key. You are supposed to be mindful of your weight, in this example, but not to the point where you punish yourself for looking overweight and feel bad about the effect it has had on your life so far.

The ultimate destination, is after all, to overcome the inferiority complex. Being over weight is an external thing. As within, so without. Once you overcome the inferiority complex, you can then focus, without being sensitive to the thoughts of your life-engineering process on whatever you want. I.e. once you overcome feeling bad about your weight, you can then work – with patience and slow progress on permanently overcoming the weight.

Weight is still under ones’ control, and is thus an easy example. The tougher scenarios are the ones where the resolution is not completely under your control – such as finding a partner / spouse or dealing with one. This is a situation where it is even more important that you resolve inner issues to prevent it from causing you to get further apart from your goal.

So what’s the bottom line? Dealing with a problem that apparently affects a significant part of the world is funnily tougher without enough directly obvious resources. However the quest should not end – find tools that suit you like spirituality and NLP and at least try. Don’t feel bad about yourself – every negative emotion that we have is linked to this one root problem.

Fear: We feel we will lose something, making us worse than we were before – or others
Anger: We feel that someone thinks we are less than who we are
Envy: We feel that because we do not have what the other person has, we are less

All of these deal with a feeling of ‘lacking’.

Regardless of whether you use spirituality to deal, or LoA to manifest with the lacked – who we are is enough. Just existing is good enough. This is where detachment works quite well, because that’s why people who renunciate. They don’t feel they lack anything, because they’ve given up the need for anything – except their basic bodily functions of eating, breathing, excreting and sleeping.

There used to be a time when “survival of the fittest” was the reality of the situation, present directly in daily life as opposed to a guiding principle of evolution. But that was a more linear, lateral version where fitness implied physical fitness.

Does this principle apply in todays world? The average man lives in a city where safety is pretty good, where tigers are only found in zoo cages, where he’s capable of living a successful life without much attention to physical fitness. Survival, in its literal form, is a guarantee (except if his arteries clog up early and he has a heart attack, or if he ends in a car accident)
But I believe it applies in other planes now. Survival today has been replaced by success, and to achieve success you have to dedicate to being fit in different aspects.

For example, three men apply for a job – A, B and C. C is not as qualified and experienced as A and B. So he is rejected.
A and B are equally qualified and experienced. But A has better interpersonal skills. So on a regular day A should be able to impress the interviewer better. But A is suffering in his relationships, and has come to the interview not focussed as he’s just had another big fight with his wife. Thus B wins, because he has better peace of mind and seems the more stable, happier, team playing person.

The survival instinct is programmed into man. When we are alerted that our survival is uncertain, we immedately go into a heightened sense, and the flight or fight sequence initiates. It’s inbuilt. I believe that similarily, the survival of the fittest principle is also programmed into us. We know instinctively that unless we’re at a sufficient level of fitness in a cetain aspect, we may not achieve success.

It is the fear of being inferior. And I believe that this is what an insecurity is.

Why are we afraid of being inferior? Because we may lose something or lose success at something. Usually it’s respect of others, even ourselves. Sometimes it’s success at a relationship, or at a job. Losing at anything is not something the ego handles well, especially if it is because we are not fit enough. So like the resistance against an imperial dictator, our insecurities live within the far regions of the city where they can hide and look for weaknesses to strike against the tyrannical ruler.

What happens when the brave soldiers of the insecurities manage to hit the death star of the Darth Vader called Ego?

Ka-boom.

In the words of another great master from Star wars called Yoda:
“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

George Lucas, creator of star wars, actually was inspired from the hindu epic, the Mahabharata, where krishna pointed the same out to Arjuna.

So at the root of it all – hate, anger and suffering – is fear. Fear of being inferior. Fear of losing something. And this is what stops us from having true peace of mind – and thus allowing our minds to be at thier fittest.

The next logical step should be to eliminate fear, right? Maybe not. Our instincts were put there for a reason. A fearless person is a person who may not be prioritising and judging the situation correctly – it’s the extreme opposite of a person who is paralyzed by fear – and still equally wrong. Dealing with the fear by summoning courage is probably the better way. However that is just one way – some eastern religions such as hinduism prescribe that giving up your attachments is one way. The concept of “moksha” or liberation, works on many levels, the most basic of which is the liberation from attachment. And giving up attachment implies also giving up any fear of losing the object of attachment.

But we’re still living in the material world. Do we have that option?
Fear of losing something is, in a balanced way, a good thing. It keeps you on your toes. It is only when the fear gets out of hand that an insecurity is born. An example is – being aware that eating a little too much can make you easily overweight can be a mild fear. And that fear of becoming overweight can keep you fit and healthy. But when that fear destroys your self-image to the point where you’re constantly asking people if you’re  thin / attractive would not be a comfortable state of being, to say the least.

How do we balance fear? It sounds like the most outrageous thing. But I suppose we can, by being aware of our fear and not letting it run amok and cause havoc. At the end of the day, we could balance between fear of losing and total liberation from the attachment that causes the fear. Or we could go all the way and take life a little more lightly, and go full-on with the non-attachment. i.e. “who cares if i’m fat?”. But then prepare for the consequences of gaining weight and losing “attractiveness”(to most people). But then you won’t survive, cos you have to be fittest – in every aspect

There’s another scenario where having more people around trying to compete for the same thing as you works against everyone – comparison.

When I was in school, I used to appear in one of the top three positions in my class consistently. But my folks weren’t ever satisfied (or if they were they made sure not to show it) and instead they motivated me by comparing me to people who’d have done better. I came in First Rank only once – in 3rd grade, and even then they didn’t give me the praise I hungered for. Later they told me it was thier way of good parenting, because that way I wouldn’t let constant praise get to my head and become arrogant. Fair enough.

But one of the things they said stuck with me throughout – “Do not compare yourself to those you are better than. Compare yourself to those who are better than you”. Valid logic – that’s how one improves in a world where grades in predefined syllabus is everything and competition results defines your future. You get complacent if you compare yourself to those you are better than, and stop improving. But you also never feel satisfied with yourself, because there is always someone better than you who you can compare yourself.

I think what I will teach my child (when I have one) is “Do not compare yourself to others”. This way he/she works to better himself/herself.

But competition can be good for you, because it pushes you to succeed and grow. I myself have benefitted from that concept in school – and I was satisfied immensly with the efforts I made, even if I came in second place – just because of the marvelous growth in character and discipline that happened. So competition can be a good thing – and competition’s automatically implies comparison. And without comparison, would we be able to function? There wouldn’t be something called “quality”. So, I have to revert back to my dad’s version. But I must add a disclaimer that ensures he knows where to stop with the comparisons too.

So it becomes “Do not compare to those worse than you. Compare yourself only to those better than you. But compare yourself only to learn how to better yourself – not to look down on yourself or others“

Comparing yourself to people can become a virus. It damages your self-esteem and provokes the ego to defend itself. You develop insecurities about things you are not good at, or do not have. This is obviously not a great way to live, and it’s hard to break out of that pattern.

How does one break out of it? By trying to replace a competitive attitude with an abundance attitude.

Instead of trying to justify a lack of something within you, or an advantage someone else has – try and imagine that instead of competing with that person, you wish well for them and want them to have everything – just like you. If they have succeeded more than you, then it is a good thing. I know it’s hard at first to think like that, but with practice it probably can be achieved.

Suppose someone is rich because of a company thier parents left to them, and you are struggling to send money back to your parents – or they have had flings all thier youth and now have a beautiful marraige, while you’ve been single throughout – just think “good for them” sincerely and end it there. Thier success does NOT magnify your failure – if what you were was a “failure”in the first place. Your success at something where they have not succeeded does not imply a complensation or your “win”.  You getting what you want is not related to whether they have it or not, and since when they’ve had it.

Try to think instead, that you live in a world where everyone should and can be happy and get what they want – even if they already do and you don’t. Be positive enough to believe truly that you and everyone deserve to have everything, and they just got some things earlier – but you will get yours soon. And that is where the other people cease to exist in your equation and you focus on manifesting that into your life.

Being grateful about the things you do have, without thinking if other people have that thing to be grateful for or not, is also a way to help overcoming the negativity that stems from comparison. Your statements of gratitude shouldn’t, for example,  even start with “Sure, I”m not as rich…but…” but it must certainly have “I’m still grateful I have my health”.  Comparison that way, can be bad for the Law of attraction and manifesting good things in your life.

You show up at the start.
You run.
You pass the finish line.

Simple, isn’t it?
It’s fun too. Getting to the start position, excitement in the air of a beginning of a journey, people all huddled together with friends, laughing and smiling. The gun goes off and the adrenaline pumps to the beat of the music in your MP3 player, and you settle into a smooth rhythm running against the cool wind and the early morning sun brightly shining but not hot. Even if your friends are with you, you race ahead or are left behind and then it’s every man embarking on his individual journey against the endless horizon…

But usually the fun doesn’t last – stress from your muscles start to creep in, the pain from pounding your feet against the gravel of the road starts to affect your  knees and your energy,  you start to lose your energy and start getting tired, you get thirsty… and you start wondering – “why the hell am I running when I could be in the audience, looking on and enjoying thesmelves, or better yet sleeping comfortably at home!”

But you’ve started the marathon. You’ve signed up for it. You went online, thought to yourself while in that cushy seat behind the laptop “going for a marathon will be great for me! A worthy achievement to make sure I stay committed to my health n fitness”. You’ve only finished a quarter of the distance and you feel like you can’t go any further.

The gallop turns into a stride, and that into a walk. Eventually even a full stop, where you catch your breath and suddenly whoosh! – you see the crowd that was behind you suddenly charging forward like a stampede. And you see people who are older, younger,fitter, more out of shape than you leaving you behind – and you say “this can’t be right -I can do better” and off you go again.

After a few kilometers, the energy runs out. Your muscles are screaming “STOPPPPP”  and you oblige. You would have kicked yourself but even if your foot could reach your rear, you’re too tired. And you start slowly walking along, lost in your tiredness and thoughts. Suddenly someone pats you on the back and tells you to keep moving! You’re motivated again! You CAN do it, and you try and keep pace with that person and just that keeping pace helps you through so much more distance.

By now the thick crowd of thousands has been hammered into a evenly distributed thread of people stretching from the fastest runners to the slackers kilometers behind – everyone is running at their own pace and has their own pace. And then you sight the finish line – at first it angers you again that there are people who at that very moment have no idea of the amount of pain and tiredness you’re dealing with. But then you look at the actual finish line – and suddenly you find energy you didn’t think you have, and you spend every bit of it running past people. You’re carrying yourself, and you’re pushing past the pain, but now the object of your goal is just minutes away.

And finally you pass through the finish line. In a way it was no great feeling. It’s just walking under another door. But in another way, you’ve just finished a marathon and you’re proud of it. It’s over! First of all, no more pain! Second of all, no more pain!

And the medal they hand you means nothing – the thought of finishing it is enough. You tell people you ran the marathon, and they’re amazed and filled with respect and awe. They salute you for having the fortitude and discipline of doing something they weren’t able to do. Honestly, they can’t even see the logic of waking up early and pushing themselves through something like that.  You know that even though it feels good – you didn’t run the marathon to impress people. You did it for yourself. And that does feel great in the end. It stays with you for years on after too, a reminder that you are a person who at that point of time for sure, was one of discipline. And you remember the journey of the marathon with fondness – the journey itself made you a better person in a way.

Life has many marathons. They’re totally optional – you can decide if you want to run or sleep at home and both choices would be valid. You can choose the length of your marathon depending on how far you can run, or how fast. Even while running, it’s upto you how fast you want to run, and whether you’re going to let the strain stop you from running. You choose also if you want to take a break, or quit entirely. It’s also a mind game, where you’re comparing people who’re running with you – trying not to wish you were one of the people who wasn’t running.

But you run anyways. You run because you chose to run – and that is not from a point of blame – it is perspective on character. You run because of who you are. And the running itself, and the satisfaction of reaching the finish line more than medals or prizes help make it worth it.

Ask any marathon runner whether crossing the finish line was worth the effort it took. You’ll probably always get a yes.

It inspired me to do a few things:

1) I tried exchanging some of my meals for raw food (mostly fruit) and I could notice that within weeks my weight / flab levels dropped. I haven’t tried a trial where I was doing that 24×7, but I plan to.

2) Think of applying the 30 day trial on somethings I want to do.

Currently I’m occupied by a couple of goals, that I’ve not been able to target and finish easily or early enough. It can be argued that these are formidable goals from where I started from, but then I take the blame for being terribly inconsistent sometimes.

I have a separate private journal where I chronicle the journeys towards those goals in detail, but I can give some overview here, without going too personal (It’s still not rocket science to trace my real name from this blog if you know how to hack a little )

But what habits do I want to inculcate?

These are the ideas for the 30 day trial I would love to do:
1) meditate and do yoga everyday
2) keep my room absolutely cleaned everyday
3) train myself in taekwondo everyday
4) read a non-technical book everyday
5) speak to a stranger everyday
6) sketch a portrait everyday
7) read and blog about a few shlokas from the bhagvat gita everyday

It’s still a small list. But if you have any good ideas, feel free to know in the comments section.