Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. George Bernard Shaw
“I broke my vertebrae and suffered from a traumatic brain injury in a car accident” my friend told me.
He had acute back pain and depression after the accident.
He started drinking heavily.
“Due to depression, I began to have suicidal thoughts” he added
One night he went to his bed and stared in his medicine cabinet.
He said to himself, “if I take all of these prescription pills, what do I have to lose?”
Right then his cell phone rings.
He closed his eyes and said to himself, “don’t answer it, it’s my time.”
But he didn’t know why he looked over and saw it was his mother.
He picked up and his mother said, “son, I know you are suffering, I am quitting my teaching job and coming to your place. You need me at this point, I will be there if you need anything.”
“I don’t know why my brain turned upside down that day, I thought, my mother is quitting her job for me and I’m thinking of taking my life” he said.
“That day I began rethinking and it became a habit in my life, from that day forward, I never looked back in my life again,” he continued.
“I’m a design engineer now and work for one of the fortune 500 companies” he said.
Design engineering is his bread and butter at the moment.
He said to me, “The habit of rethinking is fundamental to my profession if I have to survive but for me it gives more energy in my personal life.”
At best what he assured me is he is constantly aware of his limits of thinking but still expects something out of his everyday task and he is convinced that it is possible by the practice of rethinking.
He always doubts what he knows and he is always curious about what he doesn’t know.
I was very impressed by what he was telling me.
I was more interested in how he does it.
I realized that I should update myself as much as I can based on what he was saying.
We definitely need new data from our own as well as others’ experiments and experiences to make a habit of rethinking.
Not only you and me but every single individual should update from his or her inner and outer experiences through thinking and rethinking process.
Recently, I also realized that being a scientist or engineer itself isn’t only a profession, it becomes more and more of a pattern of thinking.
It improves other parts of life significantly.
Though my friend works in design science, I believe working on any science is a lifestyle of thinking and rethinking which is completely different from preaching and prosecuting.
Why do scientists and engineers think and rethink is because they are trying to find the truth out of something.
To find the truth, they have to run an experiment to test their hypothesis and make the result known called knowledge.
These experiments and results are so crucial that they not only guide their daily decisions regularly but also the norm of our society.
Look around, the most luxurious and essential things we use everyday are products of scientists.
Scientists are always trying new things.
Their experiments often fail, but they should become happy in the newness and shouldn’t mind the failures. They never think of overinvesting in their experiments and don’t take it personally if a new experiment fails.
My designer scientist friend told me, “science is not only an academic concept and doesn’t come only from literature.
My mother’s telephone call is one example of how our mind changes subconsciously.
Many things at work come from experience.
Experience teaches us that as a scientist we shouldn’t fall in the trap of confirmation bias and desirability bias. This is the problem of academic people.”
In his words, the former bias is to see what we expect to see and the latter bias is to see what we want to see.
These biases stop our curious intelligence.
They make us good at thinking but worse at rethinking.
We become lazy on rethinking because we just accept linear thinking.
I learned from my friend that rethinking is a skillset, but if we go deep down it’s also a mindset.
We have many mental tools that we need in life.
We only have to get them out and remove the rust.
Rethinking habits helps us to find the correct mental tool.
He further added that the curse of knowledge is nothing but knowledge itself because it closes our mind to what we don’t know.
Good judgment depends on having the skill and the will to open our minds.
Mind only opens when we rethink and think continuously in a cycle.
Every time when we take a step forward with an open mind, we have to revise and update our understanding of the task and the world.
“My mother opened my mind and helped me to live and understand the world,” he said.
Any task is for the world so all tasks in life are connected irrespective of the nature, professional or personal.
This revision usually involves a lot of thinking and rethinking regarding our facts, opinions, beliefs, taboos, agreement, and disagreements.
The most important thing is we have to readjust our expectations that shape our findings.
At present we have to view our experiences as periods of our lives. Youth, apprenticeship, marriage, parenthood, sickness, death, and so on are connected to our task. Everyone has to capture this progression when we think of the next step.
The career that we always worry about nowadays is the capacity to navigate this course of progression through experiences rather than facts.
This is how my friend views his life as a design engineer.
He added, “In driving, we learn to identify our visual blind spots and remove them with the help of mirrors and sensors. But in life, our mind doesn’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly”.
I have seen that the smartest minds today who study computers, biology, and math have come to understand that the world no longer only sees predictable, linear thinking.
Instead, our life is filled with chaos, challenges, and complexities.
We experience periods of order and disorder, linearity and nonlinearity. If we go deeper in thinking and rethinking, in place of linearity, we see loops, spirals, wobbles, twists and turnabouts.
Linear thinking sees the world in quantity and symmetry but non linear thinking removes those boundaries.
That’s what my designer friend experienced.
If we understand these life principles on a deeper level, each one can become a better scientist as well as a better human being.
“The obstacle of rethinking is arrogance, which I have experienced across the labs and offices” he continued.
Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction in one’s mind, that stops rethinking.
Our humility and kindness is a permeable filter that absorbs life experiences and encourages us in rethinking to convert them into knowledge and wisdom.
Rethinking is the integrity of a scientist.
We have to live and we cannot live without making mistakes.
When people make mistakes, we as scientists, have to take it as an opportunity to explore.
So we have to make mistakes but learn from them. Once we repeat these mistakes in life, we acquire wisdom. Eventually, we realize that the wisdom that we acquired is not real wisdom. This realization brings the invention of new wisdom.
We only live truly and happily once we continue the cycle of this old wisdom replaced by new wisdom for the rest of our life.
This is the ultimate consequence of thinking and rethinking.
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters our mind.
It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters our heart.
Scientists who are right a lot listen a lot, and change their mind a lot.
If we don’t change our mind frequently, we’re going to be wrong a lot.
The power of listening is not just talking less.
It’s more than that.
It gives the luxury of skills in asking and responding.
The most important thing is to show interest in other people’s interests or work rather than trying to judge their position or prove our own agenda.
Always think this way.
Scientist is a person who is in outer space and observing things very carefully.
When you get to see an overview of the earth from outer space, you realize you share a common identity with all human beings.
If you are in space then you see the Asia and Africa continents below, they behave like cities that would move from an airplane.
The amazing thing is that we can circle the entire planet in 90 minutes from space.
Moreover, from space, stars look the same as from earth but our planet earth gives us a different perspective about life and humanity as a whole, we start to think how fragile the earth planet is where all of humankind exists.
There is a difference between thinking effectively and thinking efficiently, that you realize more when you think from outer space.
As my friend said, thinking effectively means working a thing in the right way but thinking efficiently means thinking only the right things as I did when I received my mother’s call in the time of turmoil.
Though the job of thinking is not difficult, but, most of the time we don’t put it into practice. This is the difficult part in life.
Difficulty is not always proportional to importance.
Just take some examples in this respect which are not difficult at all but very powerful for our lives.
In medicine, simply washing hands has proved to be second only to penicillin in saving lives.
How difficult is it to wash hands?
Immunocompromisation is a way to explain a weak immune system in our body.
When our immune system is weakened, our body can’t fight off viruses, bacteria, or fungi very well. This can lead to serious infections and thousands of people die every year.
To improve our immunity, just taking more cranberry juice and chill peppers do a vital job.
Cranberry juice changes the acidity of the urine, preventing bacteria from gaining foothold for infection. Research shows that cranberry juice has a beneficial effect on gamma delta T cells, a special type of immune T cell. These cells are found in the lining of the gut and other mucous membranes of the body including the urinary tract.
Similarly, the bright red, yellow, and green colors of chile peppers contain bioactives like Zeaxanthin, lutein, and beta-carotene.
The bioactive form that carries the heat, capsaicin, activates the immune system and increases the number of circulating white blood cells and antibody producing beta cells.
How difficult is it to drink more cranberry juice and eat a little more chili peppers?
Scientific transactions are similar to investment transactions.
A lot of professional investors always say that the key to market success is not your skill and knowledge as an investor compared with other individual investors, but the skill and knowledge with which each specific investment transaction is made.
Exactly the same way, the successful scientist is not equipped only with skill and knowledge compared with other scientists but also with scientific transactions based on skill and knowledge.
This scientific transaction is nothing but the practice of thinking and rethinking.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
What is your daily ritual?
“I have had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” -Mark Twain
When I visit my parents now, every morning I celebrate daily rituals with my mother.
Rituals are very common for her: celebrate the tulsi puja in the morning, read a few pages of Gita (holy book of hindu), celebrate the sunrise, and in the evening, repeat the same.
When it turns dark, we go inside and talk about her years growing up in Solma Tehrathum, Nepal or her schooling in Solma, or her calling to join a religious community recently.
My mother may say these moments in her life as listening to the voice of God but I say it is the tuning of her life to live in the moment.
She is happy going for long periods of time in complete worship.
When my mother was sixteen years old, she met my father, they got married, and together they created four children.
My mother has studied up to grade six formally but she can read fluently and write in moderation in our native language.
My mother and father had an amazing relationship, but through it all they maintained a deeper connection to their god.
It wasn’t always fun, there were a lot of problems and scarcities in the family, I saw them growing up but my mother was good at living in the moment to cherish what she had.
I learned the lesson: cherish what you have, live in the moment and move forward.
I am sharing my mother’s story with you because her story might be similar to your mother’s story.
Happiness and satisfaction always comes from the connections we build around our family.
Ritual is what binds a family.
Ritual is what makes a family differentiated and unique.
We each nurture an essential creativity that evolves with sharing and listening to the rituals.
When we have rituals in the family, we pass on to our future generations, that help them to live their lives with dignity.
When I was in high school working on the farm, I used to daydream about the things that I didn’t have.
I didn’t know then but I know now, that was my ritual without me knowing.
Even daydreaming during that time inspired me because I didn’t have an electronic gadget then like today’s smartphone in my fingertip.
It doesn’t really matter what we do and what we achieve in life, if we don’t live with our rituals everyday, life becomes complex.
Once we adopt ritual, we don’t worry much about the past, and not much time worrying about the future too.
In other words, staying in the present is the way to live, cultivating the focus on the here and now and avoiding unnecessary concerns about the future.
Ritual is living in the moment that just proliferates us.
When we live in the moment, we broaden our diaspora, we see the world in different eyes.
At least, I view the world this way.
Sometimes, I used to think and still feel that I couldn’t become wealthy by this time, probably, one of my regrets occasionally appears inside me, but after reading Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness” I realized why I should be happy even though I am not wealthy.
Because I am living with my rituals, and in the moment now.
I had won little money in the past which was twice as sweet as the money that I earned.
I thought I could be wealthy.
But I also lost that won money immediately.
After certain times, I felt that money has a way of creating anxiety when there isn’t harmony in the way it flows into and out of my life.
I realized that it doesn’t matter how much I make or how much I spend, I must maintain harmony with money.
If money creates only anxiety and saps my energy, then I must stop worrying about more money, I must live in the moment.
I remember David Rubenstein’s advice to new investors, a renowned author and investor, “find areas outside of investing that can enable you to broaden your scope as a human, and experience things other than the pursuit of money and professional success.”
I still don’t understand how to apply this in real life.
In the moment of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, I encircle the world with my thoughts and gratitude.
I think around one billion people on the planet even today struggle everyday to find clean water, they work all day just to eat a meal at night.
There are another one billion people with an income that provides for most of life’s necessities.
Probably, I am in that category now.
And the remaining 6 billion are struggling to make the transition to access clean water to fulfill all their life’s necessities.
Living in the moment teaches us very different things about why we should enjoy what we have.
Let’s see the picture, how the human mind operates.
First we want to access clean water.
After this, we want to access nearby clean water.
After this, we want to access clean water at home.
After this, we want to access hot water for showers at home.
After this, we want to access hot water for showers attached in our bedroom.
The essence is that the pursuit of a better life will never end.
It keeps moving, this is another reason, living in the moment is so crucial.
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie.
It’s deliberate, contrived, and dishonest but the dissatisfaction, the dissatisfaction inside us.
Generally dissatisfactions are persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
Those dissatisfactions will settle once we start to live in the moment.
One of the ways to live in the moment is to make something a ritual in your life.
For anything you do or want to build, you have to start somewhere, no question.
Make it your one ritual.
Just start and see what happens.
See your internal power setting that runs through your mind.
Make small adjustments in your task as you progress along the way.
When we do adjustments, it inspires us to move ahead further with more refined thinking.
Do it again whatever time interval is convenient for you.
Do it again when you feel.
You may not accomplish anything substantial but you sleep nicely, you feel happy and satisfied. You enjoy each moment of your involvement. You live in the moment.
Living in the moment teaches us one more thing that nobody makes a perfect thing, and you will never create a perfect thing, because it doesn’t exist.
However, the thing you create or the work you do, whatever it is, will reflect the life you want to live, that is what we all want.
What matters most is living in the moment, creating harmony with our desires, embracing the life of abundance, and making small progress every day in this world.
You, your family, your mundane work, your ritual. Just think.
We have to slow down our life to live in the moment.
We must celebrate our daily mundane work, the more we celebrate these works throughout the day, the more we live in the moment.
Over the last few years, one ritual I have developed is reading the books that interest me beyond books of my profession.
Sometimes I read one page or few pages in a day, sometimes I don’t.
But I always keep the book of my interest in the house in my access, maybe in the living room or bed room or dining table.
This ritual helped me learn a lot about life and purposes.
Recently, I have been reading a book that explains about food as a medicine, and various research labs across the globe are working on it, where I found out about prostate cancer.
I found that tomatoes decrease the risk of prostate cancer by 30 percent.
I am amazed that I am a chemical scientist by training but I had no clue what tomatoes do in my body.
I knew that tomatoes contain a bioactive lycopene that inhibits angiogenesis (blood supply to cancer cells).
Tomato skin contains 3 to 5 times more lycopene than the flesh.
Eating the cooked tomato is the best because naturally lycopene remains a trans-isomer which is poorly absorbed by the body.
But by cooking, lycopene turns into cis-isomer which is readily absorbed by the body.
Moreover, lycopene is fat-soluble so that if you eat tomatoes cooked in olive oil, the amount of lycopene goes up by threefold in our body.
This is just one example of how we transform our and other people’s lives just by cherishing our mundane ritual.
One question that should continue to come up is how can the global community continue to move to the next level by our own mundane ritual.
I am relating one example of my family friend who is suffering from cancer now.
I knew this when I was involved in running a campaign for awareness of cancer.
I can feel how painful this disease is.
If you have cancer, or have ever had it, what would be your ritual in life?
Of course, your number one focus would be to kill those cancer stem cells.
But how?
I know there’s no medicine that can kill cancer stem cells yet, but there are a growing number of foods, and their bioactives’ roles in our body.
Many of those bioactives of foods are being studied for their suppressive effects on cancer stem cells.
Fortunately, foods that target cancer stem cells don’t harm beneficial stem cells.
My friend’s current ritual is to read about those foods and their bioactives that might suppress the cancer stem cells.
Once we cherish our ritual, we have to learn to get in touch with the silence within ourselves, and we must know that everything in life has purpose.
One thing I learned growing up in a farming family is that there are no mistakes, coincidences, and regrets, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Just cherish those moments and move forward.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
What kind of choice do you have in your life?
“A man has two lives to live, and the second one begins when he realizes he only has one.”
– Confucious
One day many years ago I was having an especially bad day at my teaching job. I was in school late in the evening. I called my wife and said, “I’m sick of this crappy job, not by the job itself but by its corrosive working environment. Let’s quit this job and run away to the USA. I’m not entirely sure I knew how to go to the USA at the time.”
My wife said, “Sounds like a pretty good idea. I can help you to research how to go to the USA and if successful, I can also help you to buy the air tickets too.”
One year later from that phone call, the lovely Macomb city of Illinois welcomed me. I was learning I’d need to be careful what I suggested around this woman I married.
She is my hero not because she is a great wife, although she is.
She is my hero because she is a great human being.
She takes the time to care about people in her life.
She talks little but thinks distinctly beyond the periphery.
When I was a PhD student a while back, at midnight around my PhD qualifying exam, pregnant with our first baby, she sensed I was struggling to cope with the incoming baby, life and, of course, the hectic pressure of research proposals. She paused, and then, in that tunnel of life circle, told me to spend less time staring at what’s in front of me (the book), and more time visualizing the outcome.
Having a clear image of the outcome, as she suggested, in my mind pushed me going.
It gave me clear purpose, direction, and intent.
I remember many of those life lessons from her during the course of living.
Jack Canfield said beautifully, “ Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
I sometimes think, “really.”
What is the other side of fear?
Most of us: fear of losing our job, fear of losing our investments, and most importantly, fear of losing our loved ones.
I understand, we can control some fears, we can minimize some, but some we can’t.
This is one of the basic rules of life.
As humans, we have one obligation to society.
To ensure we, and our parents, sons and daughters, are not a burden to others.
The rest is our personal choice.
Make your own and make the world a far more interesting place by picking one choice at a time, influence others by that choice and live the life happily ever.
How to make personal choices is another hurdle in our life.
We have to deep down to understand how choice appears in our mind?
I would like to share a parable about the monk and the minister.
Two very close friends grow up and choose their quite different paths in life.
One becomes a monk and the other a rich and powerful minister to the king.
After many years they meet in a place.
As they continue talking, the minister uses pity words on the monk.
He continues, “if you would have learned to serve the king, you wouldn’t have to live this poor monk life.”
Monk replies, “if you would have learned to live on monk life, you would not have to be a servant to the King.”
I guess, the essence is, the majority of our lives fall somewhere between monk and minister.
It’s up to us whether we want to go closer to the monk or minister side.
Personally, I want to go closer to the monk side.
Choosing to do something is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we’ve created.
Understanding it mentally is critical.
If we choose something to master, the chosen task becomes a wonderful servant. If we don’t, it will surely make us servants.
“But dad,” my little daughter inquired.
“I know choice is important. I just don’t want to spend my life thinking about it.”
“Many people in this world have much more to do with their precious time and mind than thinking about a single choice. We have to build roads, discover medicines, break world records, create amazing technologies, teach new generations, and establish new businesses,” she added.
I told her, “take time, pick one at a time and start doing.”
Here is one more example, from my personal experience, of how choice appears to us.
Recently, I experienced some health issues in my body, and no doctors clearly diagnosed it so far and I chose to read about body, disease, and nutrition.
I was looking for some answers myself.
I realized.
We are at the point of transition.
I believe we are moving forward from a focus on survival of the fittest to sustainability for all.
World is challenging us to use our essential creativity and shared wisdom to address problems from new dimensions, new structures, and new concepts.
We definitely have to reinvent ourselves along the way.
These thoughts came to my mind once MDs were unable to diagnose my problem.
Initially, I never thought that our body and mind works this way, but my mind forced me to read things that are relevant to me in the current circumstance because, the bottom line, I have to live healthy and happy, if I can.
I learned some interesting facts about our body which are related to my current health issue.
I learned one defense system in our body: microbiome.
We have 40 trillion bacteria in our body to defend our health.
One special bacterium, Akkermansia mucinophila, is very important out of trillions of bacteria in our body.
It is key to control our body mass, metabolism, and immunity.
Lean people have more of these bacteria in their gut than obese people.
Pomegranate, cranberry, turmeric, green tea, and chili pepper help this bacteria to grow in the gut.
These foods make the intestine secrete more mucus making the gut environment better to thrive.
Foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, cheddar cheese, and sourdough bread are very good for our microbiome system.
In reality, our bacteria eat what we eat.
They metabolize the food and drink we consume.
After that they create either beneficial or harmful byproducts that influence our health.
I learned about another defense system in our body: immunity.
Foods like blackberries, walnuts, and pomegranate are very good for our immune system.
I learned about angiogenesis in our body, which I had no idea before how it works.
Angiogenesis is the process by which 60 thousand miles of blood vessels are formed.
If all our blood vessels were lined up end to end, they would encircle the earth twice. Remarkably, it takes only 60 seconds from the time your heart pumps out a drop of blood for it to circulate throughout the body and back again.
I learned that soy, green tea, coffee, tomatoes, red wine, and hard cheese influence our angiogenesis.
Green tea contains a bioactive compound called epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), which is a potent angiogenesis inhibitor.
It reduces abdominal fat and waist circumference.
Foods like turmeric, soybeans, ginseng, and broccoli all prevent unwanted blood vessels from supplying nourishment to cancer cells, and they suppress the growth of fat cells too.
I found an amazing fact that Asian people, especially Japanese, live so long, why?
Probably, because they consume lots of soy, vegetables, and tea in their diet.
“Really”, I thought.
These foods reduce the chance significantly to lower risk for developing breast and other cancers.
As we embrace our life choices, whatever is yours’, I invite you all to share our life experiences, knowledge, and wisdom.
Deep inside us, we are designed to share our wisdom with the global community to make it a better place.
It is this great energy with our choice in life the Universe that drives communities, cultures, companies, and countries to new heights.
The more we can put our good energy with our choice into this great unfolding, the better off we all will be.
We owe it to each other to make this a rewarding place to live called the world.
I love to read about body, health, disease, and nutrition, though I’m a chemist by training.
What’s yours’?
Together, we will continue to change the world, one person and one choice at a time.
It is time for us to slow down, breathe, and push on our choice.
What we do certainly makes a difference, and we have to decide what kind of difference we want to make.
Remember, you owe it to yourself to live a life you richly deserve with your own choice.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
What drives you to enjoy your lifestyle?
“Let food be thy medicine” -Hippocrates
“Three years ago, a fellow came in. He explained that he wasn’t here simply for a coffee, but also because he had heard that I’m a food expert. ‘I don’t know a thing about food, nutrition, health, and any of that stuff,’ he confessed. ‘The only thing I know about health is to eat different varieties of vegetables throughout our life. The rest of it makes no sense to me”, Jacob remembered.
By the way, Jacob is a 96 years old man still running his coffee shop in Nampa, Idaho.
He still works 10 hours everyday.
“Even a sleeping person doesn’t relax as much as a vegetable eater does. It’s about being alert and international in what we fuel our body,” Jacob continued.
“We cannot do a lot of things in life. One thing we can do everyday that has a massive influence on our health and longevity is the decision about how to run our lifestyle.”
Jacob’s story made me remember two very close friends of mine during my undergraduate years.
One became a civil servant and the other an entrepreneur.
Both had a passion in their respective areas, both would work very hard to achieve it.
But, both had completely different lifestyles, they modified their lifestyle according to their passionate occupation.
My friend who became an entrepreneur had amazing interests and attitudes.
I saw on him that being an entrepreneur is more a lifestyle as much as it is a job because you never escape your tasks on holidays and weekends.
I saw my entrepreneur friend tired from it but he wouldn’t just quit.
He carried it all, both the success and the failures.
But my friend who became a civil servant had a lifestyle of dedicating his holidays and weekends to his hobbies like hiking and spirituality.
He would spend an ample amount of time practicing and reading books on body, food, and spirituality.
He reduced his intake of animal protein in such a way I was amazed.
In front of my eyes, he changed his lifestyle in a quite different direction.
What I saw in both was a dream, the motivation, and the commitment to grow and evolve their respective profession to meet the changing landscape, survive ups and downs, and create a sustained satisfaction in life.
That was due to adoption of their different respective lifestyles.
Seeing them growing in front of my eyes, I realized that time, not money, is the scarcest resource.
Believe it or not, our time dictates our lifestyle.
Successful civil servants means managing time very carefully and understanding the essence of life, serving people all the time.
I’m sure hiking on weekends and reading books on nutrition is not fun for many, though, he chose the style amazingly.
Successful entrepreneurs sometimes get rich, but they are also deeply motivated by the desire to accomplish worthwhile things: to create, to make a difference in people’s lives, and to leave a legacy for future generations.
I learned that the most successful embrace, that could be civil service or entrepreneurship, both weights are not just as a way of doing business but as a way of lifestyle.
There is a popular saying which fits both of them.
Preparation does not guarantee success, but a lack of proper lifestyle will almost always lead to failure.
My entrepreneur friend became very successful and rich in a short time.
Unfortunately, he died prematurely due to illness.
He died of complications of atherosclerosis.
After his death I knew that the most common diet-related diseases of the cardiovascular system are hypertension and atherosclerosis.
He died not by other reasons but by his poor focus on his body, especially poor nutrition, and overall negligence.
There are many factors of illness in our life, we don’t see it in our journey, but one dominant factor is our everyday fuel.
Yes, everyday fuel, our food.
Food is a fuel in our body that drives our engine.
If we don’t pay attention to it and ignore it then our engine doesn’t go far and doesn’t run longer.
Even if life is busy, we don’t have time, please, create time for our everyday fuel, just don’t go with the flow whatever you find on the way, think twice before putting in our engine.
Yes, yes, and yes.
Today’s world is fast paced, we are busy with our work and schedule, we don’t have time to think about our food, we have to travel, so on and so on.
If we are not serious about it, there is so much confusing information everyday from media reports.
We have social media, we have smartphones, just one click away.
We don’t verify the information, we just go with it.
One day fat becomes good, the next day it’s bad.
One day you get a report that says to avoid carbohydrates in your meal, but the next day you hear that whole grains prevent cancer.
One day you hear that a little wine is good for our hearts, but too much is bad.
And we don’t know what amount is too much or what amount is little?
To be honest, which information is actually correct?
We don’t know and we don’t have time to study and research because we give very little priority on what we eat.
Interestingly, while I was writing this article, my wife said, “I don’t want to seem cynical, baba, but if it’s so easy to focus on what we eat, why isn’t everyone doing it?” she asked.
“Lack of knowledge. You and I talk about this all the time. Our schools don’t teach food skills. Our family members don’t talk about good foods. And just as important, there are very few places that an aspiring learner can turn to,” I added.
A lot of foods are not actually healthy as advertised in the media.
I would give one example.
One diet called the Atkins diet instructs people to consume a lot of fat, animal proteins, and tells people not to eat carbohydrates like rice, bread, pasta, or potatoes.
Yes, avoiding carbohydrates keeps insulin level low, and people indeed lose weight quickly. But large quantities of animal proteins and saturated fats expedite atherosclerosis.
That’s what happened to my dear entrepreneur friend that I explained earlier.
Remember, my friend died earlier, but he died slim.
Another lifestyle change for healthy living is fasting.
Very few people are aware of it.
Fasting is not a secret part of life, it is also a part of a good lifestyle for good health.
During fasting, our body draws upon our body’s “storage “, first glycogen in the liver, then fat in the fat stores, and to a lesser extent protein in the muscles and connective tissues.
Our body produces ketone bodies, which are essential second fuel sources for cells and the brain.
Fasting is a conscious renunciation, a controlled and self -determined experience of deficiency.
That’s why successful fasting increases self-efficacy.
During fasting, we overcome an existential hunger in a way that gives us physical and mental strength.
If we do fasting then we also need a healthy diet when we are not on fasting.
But the biggest question is, what makes our diet healthy?
Few tips are here which I’ve learned, though, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We should eat whole grain products as our main course in our diet which are excellent sources of fiber.
They also contain B vitamins and minerals such as magnesium and zinc, because they still hold the sprout, bran, and the outer husks.
We should eat a lot of vegetables in our meal, a lot more, actually, lower amounts of fruits is ok but not vegetables.
One vegetable I would mention is Beets.
Regular consumption of it protects the vessels in the gastrointestinal tract, beet juice lowers blood pressure, and improves athletic performance, which I experienced when I was running for marathon.
Leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, avocados, pumpkin, bell peppers, tomatoes, legumes, peas,and lentils can not be avoided.
We should eat a lot of healthy fats from olive oil, canola oil, nuts especially walnuts: the queen of nuts; pistachios, peanuts, flax, and, of course, almonds.
Fish is not important in our meals as advertised, meat should be a small part of our diet or even no part at all. It doesn’t matter whether we eat meat or not if we eat a lot of different vegetables.
We should eat a very small amount of dairy products and eggs in our diet.
We must take some species, especially, the queen of spice: turmeric; ginger, saffron, onion, and garlic. No compromise on these spices.
Please avoid at all costs: donuts, pizza, burgers, and potato chips.
Run, run, and run fast.
One thing is certain that some illnesses are inevitable, not everything in our life can be controlled, but we can do a lot to prevent chronic illnesses from developing, and thus enjoying a greater age in good health like what Jacob is having.
For this goal to achieve, in my view, we need two things.
Let’s make a healthy lifestyle a personal responsibility, let’s be the owner of our healthy life.
Let’s make sure that without a healthy diet, excellent health is impossible.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam N Timsina
Is your body-mind really doing a job or just you doing a job?
Up to now I have done many jobs in my life.
I switched many jobs in different stages of my life depending on life circumstances.
Sometimes I got paid a little more money but I didn’t like my work and I gave up.
Sometimes I got less paid but I liked the work a little bit more and continued for a longer period of time.
At one point, I realized that my work is not something that I just do to make a living.
Sometimes I felt like this work is actually for me to make a difference, in my life as well as in the lives of many others.
What I aspire most about my work is how specifically it’s shaped around my experiences, skillset, values, and most importantly, peace of mind.
I believe this is not only my situation, probably, many of you might have been thinking the same way.
Many times, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking that the right job opportunity is mainly based on position, money, and the notion of success by our society.
But only you know what is right for you, nobody else does.
At one point, your body and mind come together and give you a big inner voice, what is the next step you need to take?
At the end of the day, that’s the only thing which matters the most.
What makes your job good, only you know, nobody else does.
It could be a sense of autonomy or authority based on your time, expertise, health, and a sense of fulfillment.
My learned lesson: make the choice that’s right for you, I mean for your body and mind together, and ignore the noise around you by others due to your decision.
Once I realized this, my working life, job, and career all became totally different things.
This could be the same for some of you but not for the majority. In many cases, a job may not necessarily be a career, but still people do.
Most of the time a job might be a short direction with a paycheck as the primary motivation for us, that’s what happened to me.
On the other hand, a career is an occupation developed over time based on life long ambition.
Life long ambition should be a synchronized equipment of body and mind connection.
I guess I learned this too late in my life.
One day I was reading an article and I found a research finding quite amazing.
“A college degree used to slot you into a forty year career. Now it’s just an entry level point to your first job,” an astounding finding from a renowned economist, Guy Berger.
Now the biggest question is why it’s happening.
There could be multiple reasons for it but few of them I experienced directly and indirectly in today’s fast pacing world.
Few months ago, I was in my doctor’s office.
I met one of my friend’s fathers outside waiting for a doctor.
His son was doing fellowship in neurology after completing his medical degree and residency in Richmond, Virginia.
I used to share an apartment building with him, and we used to swim almost everyday together.
I knew him a little bit through his son so we started chatting. He asked me about what I know about naturopathy during our conversation.
I said I had little knowledge about it but I’ve heard about it.
First he explained to me about his many worries that he had in his life, he had been trapped in a years long, expensive divorce battle with his wife.
He talked about stress, loneliness, and existential fear.
He had severe heart problems for a very long time, and no doctor was able to cure it completely.
After adopting naturopathy which he learned from his college teacher, his problems were gone.
“For many years I was under a lot of stress due to the nature of my job. I was constantly making more money but I was compromising with my body and mind constantly,” he said.
Ultimately he decided to switch the job for various reasons especially because he realized that the job was not suitable for him.
I asked him how he knew.
He told me his body and mind finally gave him a big single voice at once about this unfit.
“Naturopathy is natural because our body is also natural.
We need natural support and stimulation to our mind and body, with the aim of enhancing self healing,” he said.
Eventually, “Know thyself ” became his best two words in life as he continued.
He adopted the fasting cure, and changed his diet completely.
He used to eat meat everyday, but now, he only eats meat about once every week.
He has been seeing a therapist regularly for the conflicts in his life, in particular about the question of what job, money, and his standard of living are worth to him.
I learned a quick lesson from him through our conversation.
We can’t solve problems just by talking, but we can certainly learn to examine our priorities in life and reduce the pressure they put on ourselves.
He correlated our body, purpose, health, and natural healing to the life of Nelson Mandela.
He was talking about Nelson Mandela’s unwavering faith and meaningful goal and its connections in his health.
Twenty five years of political imprisonment could not break him.
During that time he completed a law degree by correspondence course and became politically active immediately following his release.
He had meaningful goals, the end of apartheid and the independence of South Africa.
He lived by singing and dancing to the age of ninety five.
He had conviction and connections which had neither planning nor calculations in his life but he had respect, humility, and patience in the face of the unknown.
His body and mind totally knew it and accepted it because he practiced it his whole life.
“Eighty percent of my heart problems I eliminated just by eating right, doing frequent exercise, and most importantly, by avoiding my stressful toxic job,” he concluded.
I remember, one of my coworker’s mom, she was 64 years old. She was a successful dentist by profession.
One day, suddenly, she was admitted to hospital due to a stroke.
Fortunately, she survived because doctors were able to remove the blockage in one of her veins in her brain.
Her higher blood pressure was measured at 230 instead of 120.
Later it became clear that her life was under immense pressure and in complete disorder.
She was dealing with many financial problems for her dental practice.
Not only that she was the sole proprietor of all the household activities, her husband never participated in household activities.
She was dealing with two very demanding people, a daughter who aspired to be a competitive swimmer and a son who wanted to start his own business.
After all, one day she visited a mind-body medicine clinic with the help of her friend.
First she learned how to change basic habits, she couldn’t remove her stress entirely but she became aware of it so she found new ways to deal with it.
She trained herself how to say “no” immediately if she has to, which was a big step for her.
She reduced her workloads in the dental clinic almost half by applying the methods learned in the mind-body clinic.
Most importantly, she trained to develop courage to set boundaries between herself and her family.
Her husband used to say, “unfortunately, my prescription is still at the pharmacy, because nobody picked it up.”
Her daughter used to say, “I can’t make dinner tonight, because I have a one-on-one discussion with my coach.”
But by now, she taught her husband how to collect his medicine himself.
She taught her daughter how to organize her schedule.
Her adult daughter has understood what to say and what not to say to her mom about her competitive swimming ambition.
Her son has understood that his mom needs to put herself first in order to put her life in order.
Most amazingly, she learned to make time for herself, time for body and time for mind.
Now, she makes frequent visits to her family members and old friends.
She talks to her parents every week.
She regularly participates in blood donation because she knows that it reduces her ferritin, a protein that stores iron in the blood. Increased level of ferritin increases risk of heart attacks and strokes.
She gradually started to take a more plant based diet as she knew that high meat intake elevated ferritin levels.
Nowadays, she makes time once a week for music therapy that she learned from her old friend.
She learned to take a bath with lavender oil after long work in the dental clinic.
She practices hydrotherapy, bathing with hot and cold water became part of her life on weekends and holidays.
She knew that hot stimuli through water relax muscles, stimulate circulation, and raise body temperature. These activities activate defense cells, hormones, and messengers are released.
The truth she knew is that a hot bath causes blood vessels to widen and blood pressure to lower.
When she becomes a little bit tired, she sits for short breathing meditation where she inhales, counts backward from ten, and exhales when she has reached one.
Last time when I met her she shared the news with me: For the last few years, her blood pressure has never crossed 140 / 80.
The truth of life is: it’s tough, always has been, always will be.
Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative.
Don’t burn out.
Listen, honor, and respect what your body and mind is telling you.
Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina
How did I overcome my negativity?
“He who searches for evil, must first look at his own reflection.” -Confucious
Many years ago, my wife, my daughter and I got together with my longtime college mate whom I had not seen for quite some time.
We enjoyed dinner together, at least I enjoyed it until my daughter abruptly uttered something alarming to me as we departed from the dinner.
“You really need a positive hearing aid dad.”
I was stunned by her wording.
After we reached home, I asked my wife about a positive hearing aid that our daughter was talking about.
“The real problem is that you interrupt people when they talk to you and insert your negativity immediately without even completely listening to them,” my wife said.
“Not only that, after your injection of negativity on everything, you change topics without giving a chance to the other people what they were actually thinking.”
Quite stunning for me, not only my daughter, but my wife also proved me very wrong.
“And you not only bring your negativity chapter first when you respond, you always talk at people, not with people”.
“Just forget about whether you talk negatively or positively.”
“My dear, if you talk more than half the time with only exploration of the more negative sides, you have a serious problem, just accept it.”
Ouch!
The wording from my wife was an eye-opener for me.
Fortunately, she also advised me not to get negative first but to accept the reality, accept the present situation, listen to people with open full ears, and speak.
She advised that If I express my negative feelings first, I have a problem with people, especially, I have a listening problem with some sort of dissatisfaction associated with me.
I couldn’t sleep that night, the curtain of my life fell off completely not by some outsiders but by my own people.
Sometimes these kinds of moments appear in everybody’s life, it’s only the matter of realization.
And obviously, when?
Next morning, I determined that I would be my daughter’s and my love of life’s favorite person.
But how?
I started this journey by reading good books.
The first book I read on the topic was, “The Lost Art of Listening ” by Michael Nichols.
The author says, “listening is a skill and like any skill it must be developed. Listening is a natural outgrowth of caring and concern for people.”
I learned that If I am a poor listener, I am more likely to become a negative person.
The most negative person is the most worrying person, who worries all the time internally so that negativity comes out of their mouth first.
I learned some essential lessons eventually from reading good books.
To improve my positive attitude, I must listen well. I have to restrain myself from disagreeing or talking or sharing my own thoughts.
To become positive, I must hold back what I have to say and control the urge to interrupt.
Most people aren’t really interested in our negative point of view until I become convinced that we have heard and appreciated theirs.
If I really want a positive attitude, I have to exercise humility and restraint, I have to learn to change my behavior as I mature by emulating whom I admire and adopting those qualities they possess.
Most of my positive attitude comes from my adaptation.
As we all know, Charles Darwin, “It is not the smart nor the strong that survive, but those who have the ability to adapt.”
Remember, good listening skill is an adaptation.
Adaptation with an open mind and open ears crushes the negativity inside us.
I re-evaluated my lifestyle, my thinking, and my own expectations of it.
I have so much to be thankful for, not only in the creation of my own life, but also with the substance of my existence.
Then why does my negativity always appear first?
Of course, at one point of my life, I was tired of watching my life struggle aimlessly in the dark, missing many opportunities, zero knowledge financially, and growing increasingly unhappy.
I was too worried about things which never happened in my life.
Those moments probably helped me to cultivate my negativity all the way up to a certain point.
The serious challenges for me were overcoming adversity and handling worry and stress.
I was very weak at understanding the value of relationships.
If we don’t understand the value of any relationship then we have no way of knowing any mental and physical profile.
I was very poor at making decisions, and, most importantly, absolutely unknown about the process of letting go in life.
At some point in our lives, we have to decide whether to live to work or work to live.
I completely forgot about it.
I completely forgot these two words “let go”.
I learned the best way to ease my anxiety during times of stress is to recognize the anxiety because it brings negativity.
What is this?
Where is it coming from?
What is its cause?
For me, anxiety was a major contributing factor for my negativity.
We have to be calm by understanding our right paths, of course, there could be many right paths. We have to not only recognize the right path but also follow it so that there is less manic activity that is counterproductive for us.
To be positive, we have to be proactive, we have to be calmed by doing not just the right thing, but the best thing.
Best thing can be different for different people, but it’s up to us what is best for us.
One of the reasons for my negativity I realized was my status quo bias.
It was my irrational tendency to prefer choices that maintain the status quo even when other choices would make me better off.
I was very scared to change a few things in my life.
This tendency had many implications in my life.
I would like to read about Charles Darwin at home more than attending my friend’s casual party but I didn’t want to offend my friend.
I would like an afternoon nap more than roaming around a shopping mall but I didn’t want to tell anybody about this.
Some people think that status quo is a matter of laziness for them. But for me, it became a matter of not knowing where and how to start the change.
I have poor understanding of analysis and comparison of alternatives in my life.
I gave up my best hope too quickly.
So, I always remained negative.
Comparison of anything never becomes straightforward, sometimes, it’s confusing and intimidating.
For me, the mental cost of researching various alternatives of life was very high.
I am sure other people might have the same situation.
One of my father’s friends has 7 kids from two marriages, a big house, and is pretty much financially independent.
When I was a second year PhD student, he told me that he did a 4 years job in total in his lifetime under someone else as an employee.
He told me that the job was not made for him.
During that time he was so negative that he lost all of his hopes.
When I visited his home a few years ago, I saw at least 100 books everywhere in his house.
I saw a book titled “Atomic Habits” by James Clear in his rest room.
I was shocked.
At one point in our conversation he said, “I used my formal academic degree for those 4 years of my life, beside that all of my life I am pretty much dependent on these books.”
“All of my negativity evaporated through these pages not at once but gradually. I knew who I am.”
“I love a big family, many kids, a big house, financial independence, and lots of books everywhere, that’s who I am,” he said.
Remember, being a good positive person can begin with you, it’s your good graces that you have inside you, of course, each one of us have to recognize it.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Do you really practice to be a creative person?
When we move in life, we have to make a lot of sensible decisions to achieve what we want.
When we age we always wish we could be a little bit more creative to make those decisions, we could take a little bit more risks.
Some decisions may not look creative on the surface but give persistent clues on the horizon for long lasting impact for society.
Knowledge only isn’t sufficient for us, experience only isn’t sufficient either.
Wisdom is required to lead success and a creative quality of life.
Wisdom is a counterpart of creativity.
Generally experience combined with knowledge leads to wisdom.
Here is one example applied in scientific work.
I was reading about Dr. Tom Perls and his research.
I came to know that in general women have higher longevity than men due to various reasons.
Therefore, Dr. Tom Perls, a MD doctor and researcher, gives blood every eight weeks to mimic the loss of iron due to menstruation in women, which he believes will increase his longevity.
He not only verbally says that he has been doing research in his lab on the same topic for many years.
Our general perception is a little different.
We think iron is important to our body especially for blood.
One thing is sure that when great minds exhibit wisdom, wherever it might be: politics, science, administration, business; they generally flip the coin and try to see both sides very carefully.
That is where creativity comes into play as Dr. Perls does his research.
“Iron is a critical factor in our cells’ ability to produce nasty molecules called free radicals that play an important role in aging, so less iron is important in our body,” Dr. Tom Perls said.
One way to remove excess iron in our body is blood donation.
By blood donation we not only decrease iron in our body, but also extend our own life.
Let’s say we don’t extend our own life but we might save someone else’s life as we know there are many people out looking for blood.
Our Karma is what our Karma does for others.
After reading about Dr. Tom Perls, I realized how people become so creative and do remarkable things in life.
If successful such as Dr. Tom Perls, then, transformation in human generations occurs.
This creative idea does not only come from his simple logic, it also comes with his knowledge, background, and experience. He understands why women have a menstruation cycle every month but men don’t.
There is another major difference.
Women give birth to babies and lose a lot of blood during this process.
Except for these two natural phenomena, men and women are equal in the context of blood in their body.
My simple curiosity, how is it related to longevity?
Is it simply imagination or wisdom?
How do people think this far?
Because the human mind is creative by design, it’s up to us how we use it.
Amit Goswami, author of “Quantum Creativity”, talks about discontinuous creativity which jumps from one pattern of thinking into a completely new one.
It does not progress through incremental steps in between.
Once the creative leap is made, the world changes forever.
Just take a few examples.
Einstein’s theory of relativity, Alexander Fleming’s antibiotic penicillin, Picasso’s cubism, Beatles’s music.
Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first controlled, sustainable airflight, Newton’s laws of motion.
Just to name a few.
Creativity requires a leap in awareness in very small ordinary things or processes that are around us.
We are only aware that Iron is needed for our blood to be healthy.
To completely understand iron, we need a leap in awareness about our functional body and its mechanism.
A leap in awareness is the consequence of brain power that leads to wisdom.
This is just one example of how people connect dots through a limitless brain.
Remember, if we are improving on existing things then we are innovators not creators.
Creativity brings something into existence that has never been here before like the work of Albert Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton or Stephen King.
Think of Stephen King as a current living person because of his creative writing.
At the moment, he is one of the world’s most successful and prolific writers.
He has published numerous horror, suspense, crime, science fiction, and fantasy novels.
How does one mind create such diversity?
To be creative is normal but to act creatively consistently is abnormal.
As the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire said, “ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd one.”
Creativity doesn’t follow the same trend in all directions.
As we all know, Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus and devised the formula for universal gravitation.
He discovered that light consists of a wide range of wavelengths, with each one representing a constituent color of light.
As an author of the famous book “Principia”, he described the foundation for classical mechanics including his three laws of motion.
This all clearly tells he was a genius, a keen creative mind.
But he lost everything as an investor, which is kind of absurd for us to perceive.
When he was asked about his experience about the South sea bubble regarding stock investing, the renowned physicist and mathematician would say, “ I can calculate the motion of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.”
This clearly indicates the human brain works differently in different disciplines regardless how creative the mind is for a particular activity.
I remember one of my friends’ creative writing journeys.
In his mid-twenties, he wrote the following in his diary when he was in a deep relationship with someone.
He showed me the following letter he wrote during that time.
Dear Mlaka,
Sometimes, I question, am I in love with you?
I questioned myself to my innermost numerous times.
Why do I listen carefully when you speak?
Why do I always say good words and appreciate you?
Why do I like to touch you lovingly with affection?
These questions are coming in my mind constantly, I realize that I am in love with you.
I know love heals and love also renews us so that I generally forget my pain when I see you.
I know love makes us feel very safe whatever the situation would be, it has provided me with strength.
A lot of time I’ve felt that love makes me very close to my God as I visualize your picture in my meditation.
I know love also conquers all of my fears but I don’t know how long I have to fight for it.
Due to this intense love, I am becoming young physically and emotionally everyday.
I see and feel the benefits all the time.
I believe I am reversing my aging process.
I believe I am also reversing my creativity process.
For me falling in love with you is an altered state of consciousness in which my perceptions, interpretations, and choices in life are being transformed.
I am in love so I am carefree and open to new experiences all the time.
At the same time, I am vulnerable and invincible too.
Sometimes I also worry about things, people, and situations.
But, anyway, I am very renewed, exhilarated, and joyful at every moment that I’ve shared with you.
My love has detached me from my usual mundane and opened my awareness to the magic of life.
And then, I felt I am alive, and will remain alive forever.
So I want to let you know Mlaka, I just want to be alive forever with you.
Yours, PFV
After this letter, for almost 10 years, he didn’t write anything as he told me.
His creative awareness about writing was completely gone.
“Now I’m pretty much sure that creativity is a skill.
Not only creativity is a skill, but it can be learned quickly too. Practice doesn’t make us perfect, it makes us permanent,” he added.
“Once we absorb our task by just observing what’s happening in our mind, we all become super creative one day,” he further added.
After resuming his writing again after a long gap, my friend is the author of two very successful books.
From my friend’s experience and my understanding,
If we want to be creative, we need two kinds of control in our life, we need restful awareness which can be achieved mainly through meditation.
We also need restful deep sleep which can be achieved mainly through physical exercises.
These are required because science has shown that the body needs 4-6 weeks to reset and regain its physiological and meditative bearings, which has a connection to our brain that evolves our creativity.
Reset and regain happens during sleep.
Restful awareness and restful sleep maintains the hypothalamus gland that controls body weight, body temperature, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and circadian cycles.
The interim phase through meditation and sleep allows the hypothalamus gland to recalibrate and readjust.
Wisdom doesn’t appear suddenly, it appears with good physiology and proper habits.
Remember, only to do creative work is not wisdom, understanding its continuous resources through rest and sleep is wisdom.
When we try to understand our work and its impact on our identity, we all start to become creative.
We all start to connect dots whatever we do in our life.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Are you happy with the love of your marriage?
Leo Tolstoy said, “Unhappy families are interesting because each member is unhappy in a different way. On the other hand, happy families are uninteresting because they are all happy in the same way.”
As we all know, sudden changes in our lives are interesting and gradual changes are uninteresting and boring.
In a broader context, as Tolstoy said, this is equally applicable in families.
Changes in unhappy families are often sudden and those in happy families are often gradual.
The experience of sudden and gradual changes in terms of love, family, and marriage is quite interesting.
I’ve experienced some of them through my single life and married life with a lot of ups and downs.
I got married many years ago.
Over the years, I noticed something quite stilted about our marriage.
This was a learning experience in my life.
All the patterns about our marriage were consistently about correcting our shortcomings, these were pretty much what we should not do in the years to come rather than any other things.
We were always focussed in changes and a lot of them were sudden changes rather than gradual. In reality we were more excited for sudden changes than any other things after our marriage.
We’re quite excited even to make plans for sudden changes without thinking a pinch about the implementation part.
Here are some examples.
I will not be so pokey with my friends from tomorrow.
I will listen more carefully when my wife talks starting today.
I will limit myself to two cups of sugary tea in a day from next saturday.
I will spend more time with my old parents starting next year.
I will stop whining immediately.
I will not send a confrontational email whatsoever starting immediately.
Once our first daughter came into our world, everything changed in our married life.
First time in my life, I realized that I have someone other than me as the most important person.
Even if sometimes me and my wife would fight in different ways, I would stop immediately just by thinking I shouldn’t do this.
I have a daughter at home now.
In other words, the love of our daughter changed the course of our relationship.
Not only the responsibility but also my humility grew unknowingly after my marriage.
I don’t know how.
It didn’t happen immediately though, it happened very gradually.
When I was single, I used to talk about myself a lot.
After marriage, it decreased significantly, little by little at a time, and, of course, unknowingly.
Nowadays, rather than just talking about myself, I prefer to let my daughter talk about herself.
I didn’t train my mind that way but it started to happen automatically.
I love just to listen.
Again, it didn’t happen at once with intention, but gradually over the many years.
I realized now how the love of children changes us enormously.
After more than 15 years of my marriage, I experienced mainly three kinds of love.
All this experience came gradually, naturally, and most importantly, with mental maturity.
First is the love of the people who gave us security, comfort, acceptance, and help.
They always bolster our confidence and guide us in so many different situations.
They remain behind us as pillars morally and emotionally.
Probably, this is why nature taught us to love our parents unconditionally whatsoever.
Second is the love of people who depend on us for all the same reasons that I mentioned above.
These are the people for whom we want to live, we want to lose, we want to sacrifice, and we want to push them ahead rather than go ourselves ahead.
This is why we as parents always love our children.
Third is romantic love between husband and wife.
This love is nothing but the idealization of the next person as a husband and wife in terms of their strengths and virtues.
This idealization is a very long process to bear fruits in our lives.
Idealization as a husband and wife is the downplaying of each other’s limitations.
This is the reason we celebrate marriage anniversaries; 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, and so on.
I believe romantic love between husband and wife helps to accumulate strength for both parental and children love that I mentioned above.
Marriage appears as an evolving point of these three kinds of love.
This is because, up to this point, we remain only as a son or daughter of our parents but once we become parents ourselves our mind works in a completely different way.
Marriage is evolutionary and essential for the understanding of love because it is such a holy combination of all three kinds of love (parental, children, and romantic) under the same umbrella.
Marriage can happen suddenly but its growth, of course, is a very long gradual process.
Marriage provides the capacity to love and be loved as a signature strength in our lives if we compose it manually and carefully.
One fact is that love through marriage flows out of parents, children and romantic partners like a river and they soak it up like sponges.
I also experienced that marriage is also a vibrational process for me and my wife that sends signals to my parents, and our children.
It moves through intimacy, passion, and connectedness.
And the happy note is that marriage has the capacity to combine all of them.
Many people think marriage is not an event, it is the beginning of an institution, and I totally believe in it.
As I stated already, marriage has evolutionary blessings and it has emotional and material benefits that I shared with my own experience above.
After more than 15 years of my own experience, I know that marriage is a process that continuously selects love to simplify the complexity of life.
Marriage, of course, does not bring fulfillment all the time in our lifetimes.
I have seen others’ marriages crumbling.
The best we can do as individuals is to choose to be a small part of furthering the process of marriage and simplify life.
This is the biggest door through which the meaning of life transcends on us.
The meaning of life is the flow of love which can enter through ourselves or spouse or parent or children.
Few years ago, one of my very good friends suffered from mild depression.
He was quite unhappy with his life, he would love loneliness more than anything else, he decided to get married and changed his lifestyle after some minor counseling.
I don’t know what caused it but after some years his depression disappeared as he stated himself and I also experienced from my side.
I have read in books that good marriage helps to remove depression which readily spirals downward in our married life.
As my friend told me, “a depressed mood is like a demon that makes negative memories come to mind more easily and these negative thoughts create even a more depressed mood, which in turn makes even more negative thoughts accessible, and so on.
The solution for this is to increase positive emotions to start an upward spiral of more positive emotion”.
Marriage, of course, became the source of positive emotion for him.
It may not be the same for others but for him marriage became a medicine.
From my friend’s experience, I can say that positive emotion broadens and builds the intellectual, social, and physical resources.
“Marriage invigorates positive emotion which leads to exploration, which leads to mastery, and mastery leads not only to more positive emotion but to the discovery of our signature strengths”, my friend added.
My eyes saw a depressed friend growing into a very successful police officer after a successful marriage.
In one of the studies, researchers asked widows to talk about their late spouses.
Some of the widows told happy stories, some told sad stories and they also complained.
Few years later, researchers found that the women who had told happy stories were much more likely to be engaged in life and dating again.
This is just one example of positive emotion, how it works in our lives.
The pleasant life successfully encompasses the positive emotions about present, past, and future.
Positive emotions means bodily pleasures and higher pleasures like comfort.
Gratification is also a positive emotion that indicates the activity we like to do.
Good marriage helps to strengthen both positive emotion and gratification which are keys for our signature strength.
There is a difference between a good life and a meaningful life.
Good life uses our signature strengths to obtain maximum gratification in the main part of our life. But meaningful life uses our signature strengths in the service of something much larger than we are.
Successful marriage helps to reinforce a meaningful life because it is a cumulative force.
We humans are more like cars on a highway.
We see most cars are going a little higher over the speed limit. In that situation what we generally do is go with the flow with the traffic.
We know we shouldn’t do this but we still do.
So please, don’t make your marriage just like the flow of the traffic on the highway.
In this situation what we need is automotive designers to focus on how new technology can help us better manage vehicular traffic and an improved cruise control.
Exactly the same way, the best marriage needs more flow of love around the marriage umbrella: love of children, love of parents, and love of conjugal partners.
Marriage is not just a flow of what we see around us: get married, have kids, and move in life.
Let’s innovate new technology in the engine of marriage through love.
My ending note is slightly different.
If marriage is such a nice thing then why do half of all marriages now end in divorce?
From my personal experience, nowadays, divorce is a very good psychological option in our lives.
When things go wrong in marriage, blaming the whole marriage and finding a new alternative arrangement becomes an attractive option rather than understanding the gradual process of good marriage.
Of course, the gradual process is uninteresting, time consuming, and boring.
It’s up to us what we prefer, a gradual process or alternative process.
Remember, the day we get married, it begins with love, joy, and optimism.
But if we don’t respect the process of its gradual mutual growth, it falls apart into pieces because each partner sees only the weakness and vices of the other partner.
The most empowering way to transform a marriage is to change the way you view your spouse. Your spouse is your mirror that can show you some aspects of yourself.
Accept your differences with your spouse as a cause of your celebration.
So, enjoy and nurture mutual growth, as marriage, everyone.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Am I rude, short-tempered and unhappy dad?
“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
It was a day of August, I was drinking tea on my patio and my 3 and half year old son was playing around me.
I have to confess that even though I have already raised two daughters, I’m actually not a very good dad in many ways . I’m usually a quiet person when I’m preoccupied with things and especially at times of rest and wondering.
My son, however, was hitting walls with his baby guitar.
Since he was annoying me, I yelled at him, and he started to cry and walked away to his mom.
Within a few minutes he was back, saying, “Daddy, I want to talk to you.”
“Sure, Aayam?”
“Daddy, why do you become so rude to me?
I’m a good boy. You also better be a good boy, Daddy.”
This was a hard ball for me on my head, my son hit the ball right on my head. I was short-tempered and rude.
I realized that I’d spent many years as a short tempered rude dad. At that moment, I also realized I need to change. But how?
Most importantly, I realized that raising my son was not about correcting his shortcomings and yelling at him. He could correct himself at some point in the future. I was worried how I would nurture this precocious strength that he displayed at an age under 4.
This was an amazing learning experience for my social intelligence.
I asked myself how I could read the desires, needs, and emotions of my son with reasonable accuracy.
As I said, I’d raised two daughters already. Raising children, I know now little bit, is far more than just fixing what was wrong with them.
Kids bring amazing strengths with them which we don’t know.
It is about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.
If we achieve this as a dad, I guess, all dad would be very happy in their lives.
I was wondering what might be the reason that I was unhappy and showing short temper at my 3 and half year old son.
I got some answers from Junki.
One day I met a woman in a baby care center because I was looking for a good baby care center for my son.
Her name was Junki, as she said, in our conversation.
She was working in a care center for the last 15 years.
I found that Ms Junki’s work is one of the most important parts of her life. She was very happy that she is in the line of work to look after kinder babies.
When she expressed her feelings I realized that what she does for living is a vital part of who she is.
It is one of the first things she tells people that she loves babies, she wants to be around them so she works in the baby care center.
She told me she usually takes her work home with her, she even takes her work on vacation too.
Ms Junki feels very inspired about her work because she loves it everyday.
She told me she thinks her small step helps to make the world a better place.
During our conversation, I knew that Junki doesn’t have any kids of her own as God didn’t permit her to have.
But I didn’t find any pinch of unhappiness in her face.
She encourages everyone to love and nurture children and make children a priority because what kind of world we are creating depends on them.
At one point she told me, as a parent we don’t have to do giant things, just control the temper and love them.
It made me speechless.
Ms Junki told me she would be really unhappy if she were forced to stop working, she is not interested in retirement until her body allows her to perform the work.
“The most important thing in my life is not to find the right job, there is no such thing that exists, it is basically finding the job I can make a Calling through recrafting. The recrafting process, whatever we do in life, brings the most happiness to us”, Junki said.
After working so many years with so many high profile educated MBAs, PhDs, and MDs; I realized that human strengths like integrity, kindness, dedication, and love for anything are not the same things as talents.
Human strengths are moral traits but talents are non-moral.
Junki taught me what the differences are between a job, a career, and a Calling.
Many of us do a job for the paycheck at the end of the week or month, we don’t see any other interests in it.
Job simply becomes the obligation of life for example to support the family.
When there is no wage we simply quit and look for another job and repeat the same process.
This does not bring any happiness at all in our lives.
In the end of the day, this simply helps us to grow as a short-tempered and rude person.
And obviously, an unhappy creature!
There is another thing in life: a career, which is a deeper personal investment in our work than a job.
In career, we measure each achievement through money, advancement, and prestige.
We obviously seek promotion, prestige, power, and , of course, more money.
We become assistant lawyers or assistant professors or assistant managers in the beginning, and then become full lawyers or full professor or senior manager after a few years of working.
When there is no more promotion, we start to look for something else, because this is required for gratification and meaning in life.
There is no doubt, if there is no promotion and no more money coming, we look for other options.
We remain still unhappy because inherently we remain unsatisfied with our own life so we come home and yell at our own kids.
Just think for a second, what kind of parents yell at their own kids?
Of course, those who are short tempered, rude, and unhappy in their own life.
As Ms Junki taught me, there is one more important thing in life, a Calling, which is a vocation rather than a job or career.
As we all know very few people have this vocation in life.
This is a passionate commitment to work for our own satisfaction.
This is also called fulfillment.
If we have a Calling, we see our work for a greater reason, work becomes something larger than ourselves.
Work becomes fulfilling in its own way irrespective of money, advancement, and prestige.
There is no money, no promotion, no prestige, but work continues in life for joy and self satisfaction.
Any job can become a Calling, and any career can become a Calling.
A teacher who views the work only as a job cannot have a Calling but a baby carer who sees the work as a contributor to make the world a nicer and responsible place can have a Calling.
If we have a Calling in our life, we mostly remain happy in our life, we don’t yell at our own kids at home, we don’t lose our temper on them.
Remember, Gregor Mendel didn’t have a job or career in genetics, he ran his famous genetic experiments as a hobby and later turned his hobby into a Calling.
Benjamin Franklin didn’t make his work either job or career, he ran many lightning rod experiments due to his own interest, which later turned into a Calling.
Emily Dickinson’s job or career was not to write poetry, she started to write poetry to create an order in her own life that later turned into a Calling.
I thought to myself how do I value myself as a dad? A good dad or a rude dad.
Can I measure my worth like a piece of diamond that keeps shining all the time?
If my inner worth was this clear to me, I would not make these words and I would not yell at my own son.
This isn’t simple to measure our self worth so I am keen to make a few words about this and realize what’s wrong with me.
My son, I know looking at me at this very moment is very happy now because he already forgot my yelling.
He is having the purest mind at age 3 and half.
I believe he is the most genuine and pure-of-heart at the moment.
When complete strangers see him, he runs towards me as his dearest person.
Each time he sees the animal, he begins crying and runs towards me for protection.
I provide him comfort in a time of fear.
But why do I yell at him?
Probably, because I am not happy inherently with my own life and transferring my venom to my son at home.
I have not figured out my own Calling yet in my life.
As a dad, this confused me initially, but I realize now that it is simply my son’s genuine heart and mind reaching out to me in a time of need.
There is nothing but joy in my heart as I write about the wonderful son I know.
I can only dream of becoming the best dad I believe I could be.
I know my real and authentic happiness appears when I identify and cultivate my most fundamental individual strengths and use them all the time as much as I can in my work, love, and parenting life.
There is a Chinese proverb I always recite, “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit fortune. If you want happiness lifetime, help somebody.”
How can I help others and be happy as I can not help and understand my own little son at home?
Remember, the cure of anything is uncertain in our life, but prevention is amazingly effective. Just think of how getting midwives to wash their hands ended childbed fever.
Just think of how immunizations ended polio.
Likewise, ending a short temper and rudeness isn’t a cure but a prevention of becoming an unhappy person.
Good life is something beyond a pleasant life, and a meaningful life is something beyond a good life.
As Ms Junki said, one step closer to a meaningful life is controlling a short temper and not yelling at our own kids at home.
One step closer to a meaningful life is turning our job or career into a Calling and connecting the world with what we do everyday consistently.
These are the secret sauces of happiness.
Remember everyone, good things obviously come to those who have patience, foresight, and love so don’t lose your temper with your own kids at home.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
You work hard but still unsatisfied, why?
Until you become conscious you will never work hard, and until after you have worked hard you cannot become conscious. – Unknown
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors.
In his words from his best selling book “Outliers”, “we need at least 10,000 hours to become an expert in a certain field, this is equivalent to 40 hours a week for 5 years.”
Now my only concern is that a large portion of the human population work 40 hours in a week in their working life.
Are they all experts in their field?
I don’t think so, probably you also think the same way.
My other favorite author is Angela Duckworth.
Her words in her best selling book “Grit”, “hard work is grit, a combination of passion and perseverance, which is bigger than IQ and socioeconomic status. When things get tough, get gritty, since this may eventually lead to success.”
How many people actually appear gritty in real life?
I guess a lot less.
This is one of my heroes in my life.
I don’t know what to say before his name. There are so many adjectives, Warren Buffett, his words, “hard work only comes if you take the job that you would take if you were independently wealthy.”
It’s hard to guess now which direction the hard work is moving.
How many people do you think work hard if they are already financially independent?
My whole purpose here is to know what makes our work hard?
Why do we always say we need to work hard but still we get lost what exactly is hard work?
Is our life designed to work hard until we die?
If not then what do we do the rest of our life?
Remember, we have one body and one mind for the rest of our life, we have to take care of them for a very long time.
Does only hard work support this or is there something else?
We all know the race of a tortoise and a hare.
The hare goes fast and quickly gets distracted because it knows it’s going to win.
The tortoise just keeps going continuously, even though its chances to win are almost impossible.
And despite all the odds and difficulties, the tortoise ends up winning.
The morale is, never give up, be the tortoise.
No problem if you’re slow but be always steady. Enjoy the process without much expectation.
Either crawl slowly or walk step by step, or run, but don’t stress out and give up.
Life is absolutely not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
I’m not just preaching, what I preach I try to practice.
At least I try.
I always try, if I like the idea.
For example, I never thought I’d run a marathon in my life – 40 km or 26.2 miles.
But I did it, one step at a time, one mile in a day practice.
When I started running regularly, I knew what dopamine does in our body. After a certain time of running, I became addicted to dopamine. It gave me feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.
I learned that if we fix our eyes on our dream, it happens.
It might take some time but eventually happens.
Be the tortoise in life, not the hare.
For me being a tortoise is hard work.
Not much expectation, be relaxed and keep going.
This story of tortoise and hare has not only the symbolic meaning but also the long term strategy.
The most meaningful things often take many years or decades to appear in our lives.
Refusing to accept this reality only hinders our progress.
Therefore, hard work is a simple process of life to reach somewhere.
I always appreciate one quote from Bill Gates, “most of us overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years.”
We can’t do anything all at once, but we can select what’s most important and do one thing at a time.
We will be amazed by how much we can accomplish over time with steady focus.
I’ve heard many times people saying I failed or I’m a failure even though I worked very hard.
Remember there is a huge difference between “I’ve failed ” and “I’m a failure.”
Former is the consequence of ill preparation and poor decision making but the latter is our own personal characteristic.
So please treat them very carefully.
We don’t grow at once, we grow as humans over time.
So where we were 4 years ago is likely different from where we are today, and eventually where we’ll be 4 years from now.
Our need to belong and the need to matter are the two most powerful needs a human being has, and that determines the final destination of hard work.
Our hard work must align with both our need of belonging and need to matter.
We are either going to belong and matter here, as some power created us, or we’re going to be controlled by other people’s opinions.
If we are not careful, we can spend years working hard on something that eventually ends up with nothing.
Make sure you are living the life you want, not what other people prescribe for you or think you need.
Even if you are working hard but only on others’ prescription then you reach nowhere.
Don’t just absorb success what others think, choose intentionally what success looks like for you and do the hard work on that.
Success for each person is completely different.
Remember society always feeds us the prescribed diet of what it believes is important and successful.
But many of us are unable to personalize it.
The story of tortoise and hare reminds me of another thing in life, the difference between hurry and busy.
Hare works in a hurry and tortoise remains busy.
If we are always in a hurry, we completely forget the meaning of real living.
Hurry is simply going fast and done, but being busy is something deeper, being more engaged and attentive.
Our hard work must be busy, not hurry.
Nowadays we’re so caught up in just surviving the day, running and rushing from one urgent thing to the next.
We are completely forgetting to build something sweet, memorable, and meaningful in life.
For example, for society, one of the parameters of success is money, and money comes only from hard work.
If we don’t study money carefully then it makes us paralyzed even if we make money by hard work.
Money is a magnifying glass. It makes us more of who we are.
If we’re kind, generous, and growth minded, we’ll be even more kind, generous, and growth minded with more money.
If we’re rude, self centered, and fixed minded we’ll be even more rude, self centered, and fixed minded with more money.
Remember money is just a tool not a master and has nothing to do with our identity.
Who we are and who we’re becoming has very little to do with what we’re achieving in life.
Another misconception our society feeds us is the poor understanding of love in our lives.
Can hard work buy love?
We always ask, “do you really love me?”
This is the wrong question our society taught us to ask.
If we ask this question, the answer always comes with ‘if’.
You get the point.
You always get the answer and that is always, “yes, I love you if you are…..”
“Yes, I love you if you are handsome or beautiful or intelligent or wealthy or with an MBA or PhD or MD or a corporate job.”
“Your boss loves you if you give the best results or best sales.”
Our love is always associated with ‘if’, our love is always conditional.
These many ‘ifs’ in our lives take us nowhere even if we replace many “ifs” with hard work.
We end up being exhausted, lost, depressed, and always unsatisfied because there are so many extra “ifs” to finish.
We appear to be in love in the eyes of society but actually not really.
One thing that can remove ‘ifs” in our love is by practicing gratitude.
Gratitude is the mechanism that helps us learn where hard work comes from.
We live in a culture that’s all about me, me, me.
We live in a society that always says more work, more work, more work.
If we practice gratitude, hard work does not seem hard. Me, no more remains only me, more work only becomes work with joy.
Once we become habituated with gratitude, it develops into humility, and over time humility grows into contentment.
Love without ‘ifs” is nothing but a result of the habit of gratitude.
Gratitude strengthens no ‘ifs’ in love, the love for you as you are.
I wish you all to be fulfilled hard workers.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina