Category: Social Upliftment

“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others’ choices make us.”
– Richie Norton

Many years ago, I was with my wife in a mall to buy a wool coat to escape the winter in Columbus, Ohio.
My wife asked me, “Is that wool coat really worth $100?”
“If you decide to buy it, the answer is yes; If you decide not to buy it, the answer is no,” I replied.
“Your decision is based on your feelings about the coat, its price, and the money that you have at the moment. You make the decision by incorporating your feelings and these other factors about the coat,” I added.
Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we compare our precise benefit of anything from owning it with its price.
We always seek a balance of a few factors to make a decision which is beneficial for us.
And we come up with anything’s value to us by posing a simple question.
What’s the most I’d pay for it?
When valuing anything in life, the question turns into: what’s the most I’d pay for it?
We make decisions by being really intentional.

Intention is a precursor for our actions.
It means we only ever take action on things that we believe bring us joy and satisfaction.
Actions means taking risks, there are many types of risks in life.
I have gone through many of these, bigger or smaller, and I’m pretty sure you have also gone through many of these.
Sometimes, we fail, sometimes, we succeed, but always learning and moving.
When we start to live with intention, we start to enjoy our life, at this point, the lines between work and play begin to blur.
We start to do what we love and we start to love what we do.
Everything becomes a learning experience and a part of lifestyle.
This is my experience between work and play.

Strengthening our capacities in life is a continuous process.
It’s a practice, not a one time and done deal.
We can always revisit, refresh and retune, if we have intention, and there will not be a pop quiz next month or next year like what we did in the school.
At the end of the day, it’s not just about learning how to be better at something that we are working on.
It’s all about building our sense of what’s possible and bringing it into our sharp mental focus.
It’s all about changing ourselves from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and understanding that we can always expand our capacity, no matter what.
When we start to live with intention, by doing some internal homework as I told in my wife’s coat purchasing process, it’s about knowing and trusting ourselves better, and valuing things properly.

In most cases our life goals change every five years on average.
Remember, life is the thing that always seeks intention and happens between our goals in different stages.
The specific steps on our predetermined goals might look different, depending on what we’ve been taught primarily on how to see “success”.
But whether the steps are high school, college, grad school, beginning career, better career, settling down, getting engaged, getting married, having kids, getting early retirement, or fishing in Thailand during retirement, there’s always something laid out.
This is all about being proactive and intentional.
Even as we’re working to achieve small things like getting kids ready for school, or cleaning the bathtub, or saving a little bit extra money for house downpayment or taking a course for weight loss program.
We still have to go through an intentional life one moment at a time, these everyday moments which look mundane but are what make memories in life.
These are nothing but the micro moments of positivity with intention.
Small changes with intention are the beauty of life that are sustainable which for most of us does not cost even a penny.

Let’s take one example of how small things accumulate over time.
The average person eats approximately one ton of food in a year.
If we think about sitting down to eat a ton of food, there is no way it’s going to happen all at once.
But bit by bit or piece by piece or meal by meal, by eating food every day for 365 days in a row, we can eat one ton without even imagining the final amount.
This is compounding and compounding is a macro effect.
Compounding happens faster if we start to live a life with intention, not only in money, in everything, the only thing that makes it very special is our awareness that compounding is playing a profound effect in our lives.

As I realized or experienced, life with intention serves three core purposes- joy, stability, and independence.
When we rely on only past life stories without questioning them, we aren’t making our highest and best decisions.
We’re not making decisions at all, not really. We’re living by default.
And default life is not a life actually, it is just an automation without any joy.
And, no one lives their best life by default.
Do you?
I don’t.
We have to live with intention, not by default.
Because we only get one life to live, we have so many aspirations to fulfill.

Then why don’t we go to seek joy, stability, and independence?
Because, we have beliefs and attitudes that have developed over time inside us.
The experiences of growing up with our parents, our friends, our community is rooted with us.
Many things that were taught by parents, teachers, friends, community, and things that we learned through personal experience are with us.
We still have an echo of “you can’t do that from our uncle” when we were 12 years old.
Something happens good or bad, and it becomes incorporated into how we see the world.
It’s all wrapped up together into a mental pattern that influences how we think and act about everything in life.
But the reality is everything can be changed gradually, if we start to live with intention, one step at a time.

Our path to a life with intention is open and out there, it doesn’t have traffic signals, but only we can drive it. No one else can or will drive it for us.
If we want to raise the odds of living with our dreams, then we have to design our life with intention.
And only then will whatever tools we have for us will truly serve us in creating joy and independence.

As I said, life with intention is a pure independent life.
If we don’t live our life with intention then we start to live in excess.
In reality, excess of anything can be a problem, a long lasting problem.
It doesn’t matter if it’s money, or sex, or alcohol, or drugs, or facebook, or parties, or rice, or broccoli, or sugar, or exercise.
Even excess water can kill us.
Even excess exercise can kill us.
Even excess broccoli can kill us.
Everything in life is designed for intention, because everything requires balance and balance is achieved by intention.
Used smartly, as a tool, intention is a vital resource, an essential component for survival.

How far we go in life depends on how soft and tender we are with the young.
How compassionate we are with the old, how sympathetic we are with the suffering, and how tolerant we are of the weak and strong.
Because in life with intention, we have to go through all of these, it’s just a matter of time.

Let’s take one example related to health of how things are interrelated and why we need intention in life.
This is from Dr. Michael P. O’Leary, professor of surgery, Harvard Medical School.
Blood vessel problems are the leading cause of erectile dysfunction.
Erections serve as a barometer for overall health and it can be an early warning sign of trouble in the heart or elsewhere.
Erectile dysfunction affects more than 18 million men.
Over half of men with type 2 diabetes also have erectile dysfunction.
In reality, men with erectile dysfunction have higher risks of having heart disease, memory loss, dementia, or stroke as their arteries are often clogged throughout the body.
So the fundamental question is almost everybody with the problem goes to a doctor to treat only erectile dysfunction.
Why?
Because they are not aware of what’s going on, awareness is a synonym of intention.
In reality, the same biological mechanisms that control blood flow to our brain and to our heart also control blood flow to our sexual organs.
There is a word called “macro”-that means we always have to look for the bigger picture, the truth is we are just a dot of a bigger picture.
The bigger picture at this time is the whole body, the machine, and whole body mechanism.
If we don’t want to be aware of what’s going on in our body in today’s technological age then we are not living with intention.
Remember, most of us aren’t trained to live with intention because it needs a little bit of extra effort.

Let’s take another example which is also related to health and diet.
I learned this late in my life when I started to live with intention.
I learned that we need to be healthy in life, and good health doesn’t come free, we have to be intentional on what we do and what we eat.
But I also learned that we don’t have to go too far to seek a healthy life, it’s again awareness.
It’s about building our sense of what’s true and bringing it into our sharp focus for our benefit.
For example, a lot of people don’t see the benefit and value of our everyday food, rice and beans especially of Asian people.
They always look for something exotic food outside where they see value.
Here is the hidden truth.
There are 22 aminoacids.
Out of 22, 9 amino acids are essential, our body cannot make, we have to eat as diets.
Out of 9, 3 are kind of not available everywhere: they are lysine, tryptophan, and methionine; but rest are found in many different foods that we eat everyday.
Legumes like beans are high in lysine but low in tryptophan and methionine.
Grains like rice are high in tryptophan and methionine but low in lysine.
Look at the meal that we eat everyday of rice and beans- you got the point, it is ideal if we broaden our horizon of understanding at a macro level.
But, of course, we have to eat it in balance.
If anybody says meat is required instead of rice and beans for strength, remind the person with the elephant.
The elephant is vegetarian.
I am bringing these examples just to show you the macro picture of life, if we really want to live with intention.

One final call to remind the importance of intention in life.
What is your understanding of stress in your life?
We have to find the right balance of stress in life.
We, of course, need enough stress but not too much like a guitar string.
If it’s too loose, there is no music, if it’s too tight, it breaks, and there is no music.
When stress becomes chronic, out of balance, it increases inflammation in our brain which exacerbates depression.
Once we’re depressed, our immune system is also depressed.
Keep in mind, chronic stress shortens our telomeres.
Telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes that regulate cellular aging.
When our telomeres get shorter, our lives get shorter.
Chronic stress also adversely affects our gene expression and has a harmful impact on the balance of the trillions of cells in our microbiome.
Again, we have to live with intention but not with over intention, otherwise, our guitar string will break.

Let me remind you the basic truth about a life with intention.
If you go only to other people’s carved path based on their mission then only they will enjoy the ride, not you, so live with intention.
We need intention because it creates macro understanding and that brings balance in life and that ultimately provides happiness, health, and prosperity.
Remember, we only get one life, so live with intention, enjoy the present and look forward to the future.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Few years ago, I was in my home country to visit my family.
I met the CEO of a startup company in the USA on one occasion, as he said, he was there for vacation with his family.
“How long is your vacation?”
He said, “four months.”
“What?” I was shocked.
His plan of scaling the various peaks and embarking on treks within the Himalayas in Nepal was monumental.

If you ask many people how they can increase their results in life, they’ll tell you by working more.
By hearing this new CEO’s vacation plan, I realized that either I’m not understanding something or there is a huge problem with us.
I quickly learned that more work will not necessarily increase more results.
More of the same usually results in more of the same, when what we actually want is better than what we already have.
I learned from this new CEO that effectiveness wins over effort and we eventually lose if we start to do a lot of things instead of the right things.

I said, “I’ve read your book. You say that you want to add value to people’s lives through sustaining innovation, but that’s not easy in my home country.
People don’t trust business people and entrepreneurs.
General public has a good reason for this: they say business people, especially classic business people are corrupt, don’t add value to other people’s lives here.”
Then I added, “I’m sure and hopeful that you can help them in some ways.”
In the meantime, I asked him, “what does your company do?”
He said, “we are developing a drink which can replace the sugary coke type of drinks that people can enjoy without much concern about their health status.”
“Awesome.”
“What inspired you to start this company?” I asked.
“Because my whole family is obese and diabetic. Somewhere somebody has to start because we are 21st generation people now, we can’t just sleep with coke and Mcchicken,” he added.

I said, “Maybe obesity and diabetes are in your family genes.”
He said, “nope.”
“The culprit is our daily food.”
“Remember, only in America and the most developed world, the unhealthiest foods are the tastiest, the cheapest, the large portions, the most available, and the most fun foods.”

He said that he is unconditionally convinced that the quality of any 21st and future company is a direct result of the quality of smart CEOs and the vision they pursue.
As a civilized human being on earth, the general public must focus their attention and analysis on the quality of products and services in any organization that they are using and investing in.
It is the CEO who creates the sustainable business plan that endures for the next generation, who build the processes that work, who create the technology that simplifies our lives, who execute the tasks that deliver the quality healthy products and services to ordinary people, and who determines the success or failure of a business based on the value they provide to the general public as a whole.
It’s the CEO who captures vision and resources to generate other healthier next generation people on the planet.

“People are suffering from wrong foods and wrong lifestyles, people are dying by consuming wrong and unhealthy foods.
Eventually, people will pay for brands and they will pay for quality and health, there is nothing more important than people’s health.
People will pay for their health and quality lifestyles no matter what, only time will tell them when to start.
If you go back to 30 or 40 years ago, Whole Foods was not a place to shop. Today, Whole Foods is the place to shop, it’s picking up.
Sometimes we need a little bit of a kicker and that kicker is a little bit of education,” he continued.

“Many professionals in any field still employ esoteric language to make their job appear more difficult than it is.
For example, take an investment officer, accounting should not be complex, it is the language of business.
It accounts for what a company owns and what it owes, and it helps companies keep track of the money that’s coming in and the money that’s going out.
It should be different for any 21st century CEO, don’t use esoteric language, show everybody what the product or service it provides to the public is, is it making the public more healthier or less healthier.
We need judgment to run a company as a CEO, and judgment is qualitative rather than quantitative and, most importantly, judgment can not be searched in google,” he said.

“Desire is a powerful emotion and many durable and valuable businesses of the past have been built upon it.
Coca-Cola began in 1886 and has a market value of $260 billion.
Coke’s main ingredients are sugar and water, and the company has habituated consumers to believe that “coke is the pause that refreshes” and it is a “real thing”.
But in today’s world, soda and sweetened beverages are one of the main causes of inflammation in our body.
Researchers have found that sugar can also disrupt healthy functioning of the immune system by causing inflammation.
Eliminating soda from our diet is one of the quickest and simplest ways to protect the public’s health.
Not only those, many refined carbohydrates, white bread, pastries, processed meats like hot dogs and sausages, french fries, and any fried foods in general are inflammation booster foods.
So, the question is who will start and who will replace Coke, who has that responsibility for the next generation healthy society?
Mark Twain says beautifully, “it ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Remember, more than 34 million Americans have diabetes, about one in ten, and approximately 90-95 percent of them have type 2 diabetes.
We have to create a desire not to be diabetic in the 21st century and after,” he said.

As we all know, highly processed or refined carbs like white flour, white bread, and pasta are not our friends.
They behave almost like sugar in the body.
According to David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School; “Highly processed carbohydrates are among the lowest quality components of the food supply, accounting for the majority of diet-related diseases in the United States today.”
As the new slogan goes, “sugar is a new poison.”

“To a great degree, we are what we eat and what we do everyday.
Losing weight rejuvenates critical insulin-producing cells in the pancreas known as beta cells. And regenerating those cells can actually put type 2 diabetes into remission.
We have to promote healthy fats instead of coke to actually stabilize our blood sugar.
The fastest way to lower insulin levels is to substitute fat for processed carbohydrates.
But the question is how.
The biggest challenge is not how to develop these healthy food habits but how to replace these old junks which are everywhere with new healthy ones” he added.

Let’s take one simple example, how we become habituated with business.
Shoppers don’t go to Walmart because they love the experience, they go to Walmart because the company acquires everything from wine to broccoli to indoor plants to school supplies more cheaply than competitors and then passes those savings on to the customers.
Walmart sells convenience at a cheaper price so we go to Walmart.

Let’s take another example of a different company.
Google is not selling a status symbol or a fizzy drink, it’s selling a reliable search engine that consumers have become habituated to in their daily lives.
Because Google’s brand has nothing to do with creating just desire, it’s more likely to endure very long because it’s creating value to the general public’s own professions.
Because they need information for their daily work and they do it by sitting on the comfy couch in their living room.

“One of the reasons I am optimistic about next generation CEOs who would be value creators rather than classic CEOs of the past is that they must demonstrate an ability to disrupt themselves before a competitor does.
Google should disrupt itself with driverless cars and artificial intelligence so that we can read in the car while going to the office in the 21st century.
Amazon is a leader in e-commerce and cloud computing now but it must disrupt itself for the whole food business so that we can eat healthy food and snacks at home at the price of Mcdonald’s McChicken.
By the way, McDonald’s does not only sell McChicken, it sells franchises, which is a system not a product,” he added.

Andy Grove, former chairman and CEO of Intel has said at one point in his life, “there is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next performance level. Miss that moment, and you start to decline.”

Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017 but it doesn’t mean that parents are not buying toys for their children. Similarly, it’s not that Brick-and-mortar stores didn’t have the stuff in their store that we needed but the same stuff people started buying from Amazon without leaving their comfy couch at home.
For 21st generations, companies’ CEOs must disrupt themselves to keep obsessing over the public and putting them first for their health, healthspan, longevity, time, and fulfilling healthy lifestyles.

I was about to say goodbye and I asked him, “do you succeed in beating coca-cola?”
He said, “Everything looks like failure in the middle.
We cannot make tasty mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner without getting the kitchen messy.
Halfway through a brain surgery, the operating room looks like a battlefield of murder.
If you plan to send a rocket to space, about 95 percent of the time it becomes off-course and it fails.
But finally, all of these works give results by making mistakes and correcting them.
I’m just trying to be that CEO, that’s it.”

Finally, I noticed that he was still doing the work of creativity which is thinking at the banks of the Himalayas in Nepal, and he innovates once he goes to the USA which is doing the real work.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
-Victor Frankl
In 2021, I was running a half-marathon.
I met a fellow runner, we chatted and introduced each other.
He said he was running a lot of 5ks and 10ks the previous year.
Unfortunately, on half-marathon day, I saw him throw up blood.
I asked him, “do you have liver problems? I’m also seeing your eyes and face yellow.”
He said, “I don’t know.”
In the meantime, one of the volunteers came up and drove him to the local hospital. Doctors found he has high liver enzyme but they couldn’t figure out the reason for it.
Later, I came to know he was moved to the bigger hospital at Chicago, where he was diagnosed with Wilson’s disease associated with hepatitis C.
Wilson disease is a rare autoimmune blood disorder that causes copper to accumulate in the body.
His liver was damaged badly and lungs were filled with a lot of fluid.
Almost two and half years after that incident, we met again in the runner’s club and he recalled and shared some of his past experiences.
He said, “I was only a few moments away from death many times in my past life.”
But fortunately, after his liver transplant, though it wasn’t easy, he got a new life.
Now he has a beautiful family, a loving wife and a healthy daughter around him.
He is doing well, he owns a used car dealership in the suburb of Milwaukee.
He said, “ I’m making great progress in my life.”

I asked him what is progress for you?
He said, “At this stage in my life, my definition of progress is little different, if my daughter is having better quality lives than me and my parents, for me, this is the real meaning of progress, that’s what I’m trying to do.”
He told me that the difference between success and failure means the difference between a life of joy and a life of stress.
In his words, the gap between joy and stress indicates how well we manage the challenge of making meaning in our life.

“I always had linear expectations in my life but I always ended with nonlinear realities,” he said.
He was coming with the expectation to finish the half-marathon that day but ended up in hospital bed after not even finishing two miles.
“I had an unusual life throughout my past days, I always had recurrent health problems, I always suffered, but as Dr. Viktor Frankl, the father of the modern meaning movement has said, “you don’t have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering then your life becomes truly meaningless,” he added.

As we all know, merely understanding our core life problem, whatever it is, even if we can’t do anything about it, gives us a sense of control and sense of satisfaction.
By forcing ourselves to learn what’s happening to our life, we come to accept the reality, the reality of the problem. We become a catalyst in our own thinking and move towards the solution of problems.

He said that he changed seven jobs in his career.
In his last job, he had five reorgs, four bosses, four moves, one failed marriage, and five years later he had his own car dealership.
“One influential thing I learned by my weak health, is I created love for social and cultural overlap in our society, I developed a strong sense of building empathy, kindness, and belonging around me, my desire really sharpened to respect differences in our community; I guess that’s what I was looking as a meaning in my life. The essence of being human is shared emotions, connections and respect,” he said.

One day on his last job, he walked home to his one bedroom apartment and reviewed all credit cards, wondering how he could cut expenses. He reviewed everything, his savings, and all his possessions, and all the holes for expenses.
He figured out he would disconnect cable, phone, netflix, and use free channels and pre-paid phones, stop eating out, and buy no more clothes, shoes, and any other extra things.
He calculated he could survive for fifteen months from his savings.
Next day he walked into his very toxic boss’s office and quit on the spot.
“How did you get the courage to do that?” I asked.
He answered, “The pain of staying with toxicity was greater than the pain of leaving the toxicity, for better or worse, we live in a time when most of our circumstances in life start with I not we. I have to start somewhere.”
A relationship with our boss is toxic if our well-being and dignity is threatened in such a way that we suffer emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.

“Belonging is a feeling which I never experienced in my last job. Belonging emerges from developing and maintaining close relationships either with family members, friends, coworkers, or bosses.”
Harvard study has found that the only thing that really matters in life is your relationship to other people.
If we feel disconnected with other people then it hurts our feelings.
He left the job because he was disconnected and found no value in the working place.

“I’m not saying everyone should quit their job and have their own business, you can be a successful employee but the job you do must match with your personality, vision, and integrity.
You must create the personality of passion and commitment for what you do, you should always enjoy what you perform.
If you think your personality and work environment are out of sync, don’t try to change the system or people. It takes a very long time to change the system and people and there is high chance you’ll be unsuccessful. Instead just quit it and move forward,” he added.
“Of course, we have to accept that a punctuation mark happens in everybody’s life, the only thing we have to do is step back and take a different path,” he continued.

The life experiences provide a period of self-reflection and personal re-evaluation for every one of us.
These moments remain in motion with a series of reverberations that allows us to revisit our very identity.
This forces in our mind to ask what we don’t ask often enough: what is it that gives us meaning and how does that influence my life?
Self-reflection is power.
It is a mental strength, the power to do good. Blessed are the people whose self-reflection do a lot of good things in the society .
Greater self-reflection means greater power.
Self-reflection helps us to provide a path so that we can think properly in both personal and professional life.

There is a saying of Aristotle and his student Thomas Jefferson, ‘the pursuit of happiness’ has to do with an internal journey of learning to know ourselves and an external journey of service to others.
In reality, this journey is nothing but self-reflection.

Most importantly, self-reflection habit comes only after painful life experiences.
But whatever is the source, it helps us to pinpoint where and how to invest our time, money, and effort for the rest of our life.
In this life, there are not many places we can invest.
Of course, the first place to invest is education.
We can invest in our own education or in the education of our children or grandchildren or in the education of children whose family cannot afford.
Choice depends on us based on in which stage we are in life.
My friend studied a lot and became educated from his many jobs for how to be a small business owner and became an owner of a car dealership.
From his childhood, as he said, he was a fan of different cars.
He enjoyed cars from different perspectives, that’s what he chose to do in his later part of his life and opened a car dealership business.
Experience and life lessons taught him what he wants to do for the rest of his life.
He is expanding his car business in different locations outside Milwaukee.

“Education could be formal or informal. Both have the potential to increase one’s earning power over many years and lead to richer fulfilling lives with freedom of choice” he said.

He was always worried his whole life due to his poor health condition.
Therefore, for him, the second best investment in life is staying in good health by adopting healthy habits, especially food and exercise habits.
There is only one life, and the most priceless thing in life is good health.
As my friend said, the value for good health and education can not be measured, these two investments in life can affect our life in a lot of different ways.
Sadly, oftentimes, the value of these two investments we come to know late in life once time passes and we have either little or no time at all to restart.

In Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy theory what is above “self-actualization” is transcendence.
We can only realize this once we move beyond ourselves to see a greater fulfillment to serve the need and hope of others.
Greater fulfillment and service to others is possible only if we become educated and healthy.
“Life is a cause, a calling, a mission, a direction, a purpose, and most importantly, a transcendent commitment beyond ourself that makes our life worthwhile, ” he added.
Stay educated and stay healthy everyone.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“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

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

“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

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

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

I praise you because I am clearly and wonderfully learning; your works are wonderful, I have not fully understood them well yet, but I am making progress.
Dedicated to my father

I live in the US, and our current president is Joe Biden, who happens to be the 46th president, the most powerful man on the planet.
Many people may not agree with the last words of my previous sentence, but I said those ‘most powerful man’ words on the basis of other people’s view. Still the majority of the world population believes that the USA president is the most powerful man on the planet.
But if anybody has any disagreements, I wholeheartedly respect those views because there are thousands of reasons not to agree.
But, anyway, my intention is not to go in that direction.
At the time of each USA president’s victory, each of them and the whole country generally think they achieved something incredible and something amazing.
The hard reality is, if you ask any US citizen, it’s almost impossible to find anybody who can name all of the former presidents.
Most of them are already dead, we all forgot them except a few whom we always remember like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

The reason I’m bringing this up is if we forget US presidents after they are gone then what about ordinary people like us?

My genuine thinking, one year after we are gone, most of us will be forgotten.
Don’t you think so?
The only people who remember us are our family and close friends.
We will only live on in our family and close friend’s memories.
In my view, this is the ultimate achievement, all of us will ever get, at least in this life on this earth.

So what we can do, my advice is, always make sure, always make sure, you love your family and your close friends.
The real happiness is hidden behind your family and close friends, nowhere else.

Do you know, why are you happy when you buy a nice, warm and comfy sweater for your father that he wears occasionally?
Try to find the answer, don’t ask him, you will find it if you try.
Why do you travel 400 miles to such a hot place where your elder sister lives?
It’s the same question, if you ask your inner self genuinely, you will find the answer.
In both cases, the answer inherently is the same, both are your family members, you have shared many things with them including happiness, comfort, pain, and suffering.
If something happened to you, only they care and remember you, nobody else.
Even though you live far from them now, you still have many memories with them alive and will remain alive until you are gone from this world.

If we were to stop 500 people in the street and ask them “what is your greatest happiness in life?” how many would say, “anything not related to the family or close friends?”
My guess is nobody.

Many times, we make decisions in our lives but they never become really good decisions in reality.
We made decisions based on what it does for me right now, what it says about me immediately, and how it makes me feel for the moment.
If our answers are not congruent with our inner self for at least a certain time from now, we will never become happy with our decision, we remain vindictive and unhappy.

Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs has “self-actualization” at the top, which basically means self-motivation or intrinsic motivation.
Similarly, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous theory of “flow” also states the total absorption in an activity that also indicates self-motivation or intrinsic motivation.
These both theories work pretty well if we are connected through our family and close friends because our intrinsic happiness is connected in both states of mind through them.

At one point in our life, we are destined for financial security but once we feel kind of financially secure, we come to know ourselves better and we learn what we find most fulfilling in life.
One of the most fulfilling aspects in life is our relationship with family and close friends.
Meeting with them, talking to them, sharing and spending time with them become the most fulfilling life experience.

Everybody has problems, every house has problems, we have issues in relationships. When a problem exists, whether at home or in relationships, the time to act is now.
You don’t regret it if you act now but the same regret kills you if you become late.
Remember each person in our family has strengths to lean into and weaknesses to overcome.
Just think of this, if you are not talking to your father for a long time for whatever reason, how do you live if by some reason your father is gone from this world?
You will die by regret, just by regret even though you are alive.
When we talk about anything openly, even if it’s in an uncomfortable way, change can happen.
Healthy open disagreement gives room for willingness to communicate.
This is extremely powerful because we can’t fix a problem we don’t know about.

From birth to death, very few things remain as it is. Family and friends are one of them. Many things will change in our lives but they don’t.
We must learn how to keep our family intact, because family is the center of our happiness.
If we properly know what family is then we will know how to handle pain, happiness, frustration, sorrow, dissatisfaction, success, and failures.

There happens to be many mentors in life, but your father and mother as a mentor is someone who’s brought you up along with your siblings, experiencing life when you’re growing up, looking up at the neighborhood while holding your hand and thinking about you and the whole world.

Remember the value of humbling in life, that mostly comes from our family, especially from our father and mother.
Thomas Jefferson is one of America’s Founding Fathers.
Of course, he wrote The Declaration of Independence but he always said, “I’m entirely a farmer, soul and body, never scarcely admitting a sentiment on any other subject.”
For him, agriculture was the most precious of arts.
What a humbling person!

When you know your bond with your family, you can become great at what you do.
One simple example is Henry Ford.
A lot of people have the misconception that Henry Ford invented the automobile.
The credit for the automobile invention goes to Karl Benz.
At least you are familiar with Mercedes Benz to remember him.
As the finest innovator of all time, Henry Ford used assembly line technology and made the automobile affordable to the masses.
He kept family bonds together, many families were unable to afford a family car back then, he made it possible.
He not only changed the world of transportation but also the strength of family bond forever.
Karl Benz was a great inventor and Henry Ford was a great innovator.
Both men were kind family men and their successes were motivated from the essence of family values.

You don’t have to be a genius to be successful. Everyone is smart in certain spots, just stay around those spots and love your family.
Try to bring small cheer in the face of your father or mother or spouse.
Just delight them if you can.
Actively engage to delight your family, your neighborhood, your community, and your country in some way from your side.
That’s the secret of happiness you ever get in this life on this earth.

Few last departing words.
We always think that our possessions are our lasting values, but often we get greater happiness when we spend our money and time on family, close friends, and experiences.
Naturally what happens is when we have more possessions, they end up possessing us.
The more stuff we have, the more things we have to take care of and there remains almost no time for our fulfilling activities.
Forget the brand new Mercedes Benz if we already have another vehicle.
Don’t get me wrong I love to drive brand new Mercedes but I wouldn’t trade my fulfilling activity time with the care of Mercedes Benz. I would not trade my time to substitute to see my parents, to eat with them, and create special time with them.
Nothing beats flying across the country to see them.
Please, always know the difference between a lucrative life and a fulfilling life.

You might be thinking where is the answer to the title question of this piece of content, I hope by this time you already know the answer but if you don’t know, then here it is.

We will forget the USA president after he/she is gone from this world but we will never be forgotten in the memories of our family and close friends after we are gone from this world.
I wish you and your family all the very best.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“The only thing that is constant in this world is love.” -Unknown

I was a new member in a book dating club, I didn’t know what exactly it was.
I was a bit early in my first meeting but a girl appeared maybe after 5 minutes of my arrival.
I was sitting on a very comfortable dining chair and she sat beside me.
We introduced each other, I knew her name Sammi.
I couldn’t resist my inquisitive mind, but anyway, I broke the silence, I said to myself, never mind Yam, let your mind do the work.
I stopped my internal chatter box.
I asked Sammi, “what do you love the most?”
Think about this for a second, how nerd I am, unknown person, first meeting, and first question in the book dating club.
She replied so quickly that I was amazed, ” I love books of great experiences and great thinking, and as a person, of course, my boyfriend Megda.”
I spoke the name, “Megda.”
Without asking anything Sammi continued, “I don’t know but my body knows immediately that I’m with Megda and I am happy.”
How long have you been in love?
“We have been in a relationship for the last three years and we are planning to get married next year,” Sammi replied.

By the way, Sammi, “how did you meet Megda?”

“Many years ago my dad started this meeting, a book dating club. It was basically three families, 6 adults, me and Megda. We would meet once every three weeks at the dinner table. We would discuss one hour about the book that could transform our lives and eat dinner together,” she added.

“One day, we were discussing the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, we got attracted to each other and fell in love with our common spirit and connection. This was the beginning of our relationship,” she explained.

As Sammi’s words, she was eating, her parents were there, her eyes were occasionally stopping on Megda’s face.
She realized the words that Dr. Frankl said in his book: love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his/her personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless you love the person.

Sammi and Megda’s interests were very similar. They would spend time on similar activities, they would go fishing and grocery together, they go running and walking together, they go to movies together, and they also cook together, as Sammi said.
Among some differences, Megda would eat fish a lot but she likes to add vegetables to any kind of meat.
The last time Sammi had the best was broccoli and tuna mixed.

“For me love is to be in a happy state mentally and physically.
My and Megda’s life philosophy is same – we both believe that this one time life is our amazing gift that nature has given us, so why not to explore it and enjoy it to the fullest?” she added.
As she said, she remembers a day, Megda and she were on the patio, they were the same thinkers, they were scanning the evening sky and trying to find pleasure in identifying their favorite constellations even though there were no constellations.
This was pure love, they both felt deep connection, they both felt deep love.
they both felt pure love for nothing.
Amazing.
In our conversation Sammi gave me the crux of their love life.
She told me that the reason she fell in love with Megda so much is because he’s made love and non-judgemental forgiveness as his lifestyle.
She said that she’s seen Megda’s unconditional kindness to all persons, things, and events without exception.
He believes a lot of money itself doesn’t make us happy, but if that money buys our time, autonomy, and life experiences, then we become happy.

One day we’re taking an evening walk, I asked him, ” Megda, if you don’t like where you live right now but you can’t afford to move, what do you do?”
He said, “I’ll adapt to my current place.”
“Sammi, happiness doesn’t lie in the choice but in making a decision in choices and removing the unnecessary choices,” he further added.
“To be honest, I fell in love with this man in every word and deed,” she smiled.

Sammi believes that we should not suffer and hold any pain in life, this is the real experience of love above anything else.

I do believe that all pain and suffering arises solely from ego and ego arises when we don’t love ourselves.
The best medicine for pain, suffering, and ego is love.
Just love the other person, love people, love animals, love plants, love nature whatever your mind desires to love.
Just love, express love.

Loving is a state of being.
It’s a forgiving, nurturing, and supportive way of relating to this wonderful world.
It’s not that only educated people or some specific category or rich people or happy or smiling people can love well and others can’t.
Love is equal for all no matter what.
Love is neither intellectual nor philosophical, and doesn’t proceed from either mind, real love always emanates from our heart.
If you love someone or something selflessly then your heart works not mind, but if your love is selfish then only your mind works.
Real love, love from the heart has the capacity to lift others and accomplish great feats because of its purity of motive.

“Pure love takes no position, it is global and universal, it is above separation of any kind,” Sammi added.
“Me and Megda both have understood this for a long time,” she further added.

I do believe that love is inclusive and expands the sense of self progression.
Love focuses on the goodness of life in all its expressions.
It augments positivity and dissolves negativity by reorganizing its significance, rather than by attacking it.
When we reach this stage, this is the level of true happiness in our lives.
True happiness is mental calm and a broader sense of responsibility.

Remember this, your love from the mind is often associated with force but your love from the heart is spiritual.
When your heart feels love, any kind of loyalty, freedom, and peace don’t create conflicts inside you.
Spirituality in the form of love is always associated with non-violence and cooperation.
The crusade of love is a negative thought in our mind.
Keep in mind the word “mind”.
If we hold the negative thought in mind, a very specific muscle in our body becomes weak.
If we replace negative thought with positive thought, the same muscle instantly becomes strong.
The connection between mind and body is always immediate based on our thoughts and associated emotions.
So, always love from heart, not from mind.
One example of love from the heart is love towards your children.
Love towards your children never comes from mind, it comes from heart.
No matter what, you love your children, you burn yourself but still you want to give light to your children.

We can’t see electricity, x-rays, microwaves, or radio waves but we experience their intrinsic power by their effects.
Exactly the same way we don’t see love, we definitely observe their effects.
The power of love is unseen and only the manifestation of effects is observable.

“As a book dating club active member for so many years, I experience a high state of consciousness frequently. As a deep reader of deep thinkers and authors, I frequently attain sublime states of peace and joy,” Sammi added.

Truly speaking, the very elevation of love inspires the prolonged transcendence of humanity and peace.
Once we break the understanding barrier in life, our thought process for love becomes effortless, our body seems to move with grace and ease.
This state of joy is quite distinct from the thrill of success.
We can achieve this state of love by any activity that we enjoy.
It never happens from any forced activity.
Love never comes from force or forced activity.

Love teaches us to become legendary.
If you are great, you can become legendary when you teach anyone with love by example.
It isn’t what you have, nor what you do, but what you have become through a loving state that inspires all of mankind, and that’s what we honor all the time.

People have confusion that love means only high respect and care. This is a complete misunderstanding.
High respect and care is a very small part of love.
Love is simply an extraordinarily high degree of insight in a human body and mind.
Respect and care occupies a simple measure of mere human emotions.
Love is perseverance, courage, concentration, and enormous drive.
Love is absolute integrity and power that I always experience when Megda talks to me, as in Sammi’s words.
Similarly, an unusual degree of dedication towards love of any activity leads to mastery.

Keep in mind, out of hatred comes love, out of defeat comes victory, out of failure comes success, and out of humbling comes true self esteem.
These are the characters we need to nurture love.

Love is very transformational in human lives.
When we love someone or something intrinsically, a miracle happens.
Take a small example from Jesus Christ, as we all know who he is.
Jesus Christ taught for only three short years but his love of teachings transformed all of western society for generations.
This is nothing but transformational love.
The teachings from Christ lie at the center of western history for the last 2000 years.

Let me end here with one recommendation from my heart, please accept this as a genuine experiment to test from a scientist.
Throw yourself wholeheartedly into the love of someone or something, whatever or whoever appeals to you, whether you believe in it or not and just experience a miracle in your life.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina