Category: Social Upliftment

“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

“When life gives you people around you, make relationships with them.” -Unknown

When I was in my mid-twenties, I had a very good friend. Her name was Kara (name changed).
I used to call her to meet in a restaurant.
In our first few meetings we became pretty close and I felt, probably we both, that we were moving in a different direction of our friendship.
Good friendship easily turns into dating if chemistry and life philosophy match each other’s internal calibration.
I remember, it was our 4th or 5th meeting. All of the sudden she questioned me about what we talk about in a restaurant?
How do we share our thoughts and experiences while talking in a restaurant?
She said life is natural, isn’t it a good idea to test it upon our natural flow?
I became speechless, I couldn’t understand what she meant?
I still remember at one point, she proposed to me to meet in a small grocery store.
She said that we can share and exchange a lot of things on the aisle of the grocery store rather than sitting in the corner of the restaurant.
I wondered at that moment what kind of girl she was who preferred to meet in the grocery store instead of a cozy restaurant.
How many of us prefer a grocery store instead of a restaurant for dating?
After that meeting she called me once but I never responded.
Now I’m mature, I laugh at myself remembering that moment.
Even though she was a few years younger than me at that time, she still showed a deeper understanding of the essence of a relationship.
I know now, but I didn’t know then.
I think I was definitely immature and superficial in my thoughts to build a relationship.

I now know perfection, sound judgment, and proper understanding never comes only with age in our lives.
Josh Waitzkin was only 9 years old when he won his first national championship in chess.
How come he became such a good player in such a thoughtful game like chess at such a young age?
Well, I guess, it all depends upon how we train our mind and see things in our lives irrespective of ages.

In today’s technologically driven time, at the highest levels of any kind of relationship, everyone is great no matter the age or maturity.
At this point the decisive factor is rarely who knows more about the relationship, but who dictates the tone of the relationship.

The flow of life, actually, is just a relationship and its understanding how it carries us within it.
Relationship to girlfriend or boyfriend, relationship to spouse, relationship to parents, relationship to siblings, relationship to kids, relationship to neighbors, relationship to boss, and relationship to colleagues in office, and so many others.
How we understand these relationships is very complicated and complex but if we try to understand each one from scratch without any superiority and ego in our mind, each can be very simple too.
Emotions like superiority and ego stopped me from responding to Kara after her offer to meet me in a grocery store.
Any kind of excellent relationship remains sustainable only if there is no judgment for the other party.
I remember, once one of my students told me he grew up all his childhood at daycare center.
From the age 1 to 5, he doesn’t remember anything but he remembers every detail of what happened when their parents dropped off and picked him up.
This clearly indicated to me that his real relationship was only with his parents.
I guess there is a fundamental eternity in how we should enrich our relationship as parents to our kids.

Few days ago I met my friend Nick who works in our department.
I saw that he was very impatient.
He was standing in line at the food buffet with his wife.
He had a project to finish as he said but that tension was not away on the buffet line.
He was in discomfort even though he was with his wife and gathering with other people.
This still counts how we have nourished our relationship, it may be with people or with occupation or with other situations in life.
It’s so interesting to learn about people’s relationships when they are in various moments.
I see people show so many different behaviors when sudden discomfort bombards them.
When people encounter unexpected rain, what do they do?
Many will run with their hands over their heads.
Very few will smile and enjoy the wet clothes.
Some will smile and take deep breaths and walk.
People’s reactions to surprises show their character and their preparation for controlling discomforts.
Our relationship with comfort, with discomfort, and with people around us fall in the same bucket.
I think the understanding of a relationship in life is like existing on a balance beam.
Our relationships grow in the same way as our life builds up from a child to adult stage in our lives.
As a child, there is no fear, no sense for the danger of falling.
The beam feels so wide and stable, and natural flow allows for creative steps and fast learning and adaptation.
Children can run around doing somersaults and flips, always experimenting themselves with a desire for innovation and new challenges.
If they happen to fall off-no problem, they just get back on.
But then, as we get older, we become more aware of the risk of accidents and injury.
We might crack our hands or twist our legs.
The beam becomes so narrow and we have to stay up there.
Sudden plunging off would be humiliating for adults but not for children.
As I said before, as an adult, when she offered to meet me in the grocery store, I simply judged her and stopped any new discoveries and challenges inside me to nurture our budding relationship.
I became totally egoistic.
Do you know why older people don’t learn from young people?
Because of ego.
As a consequence, our growing relationship ended immaturely.
My beam was very narrow, so I couldn’t stay up there.
I didn’t take any test and action for that relationship to grow, I simply ignored it.
What possibly could happen if I would have accepted to meet in the grocery store?
Nothing.
I would definitely learn more of her side and she would learn more of my side.

Tests and actions are needed at any time in our life especially when something is going in the direction of discomfort, crisis, and difficulty.
We can take a lesson from the basketball legend, Michael Jordan.
Michael Jordan, the basketball legend, gave more last minute shots to win the game for his team than any other player in the history of the NBA.
What is also important is that Michael Jordan also missed more last minute shots to lose the game for his team than any other player.
What made him such a vibrant and successful player is not the perfect shots that he delivered but to accept and enjoy the tests, challenges, and actions at times of discomfort.

Remember, depth always beats breadth everywhere in any area.
It applies equally in relationships.
Depth opens a path for the intangible, unconscious, and creative components of our hidden potential.
To look for depth in any relationship is one of the key components of human potential to shine.
If we don’t pick up a friend’s call at 3 am then our friendly relationship with him or her is not deep.
If your children at a time of crisis don’t call you first as a mom or dad then your relationship to your children isn’t deep.
As a parent If we fail to become the most trusted friend for our children then neither we are understanding them nor the relationship.

Over time each relationship loses rigidity, and we become better and better at reading the subtle signs of a quality relationship.
Soon enough, learning becomes unlearning in relationships because each needs space to grow.
The stronger person is often the one who is less attached to a dogmatic interpretation of the relationship principles.
Relationship isn’t a principle, it’s a practice.

Quality relationship requires a lot of intuition within us.
There are a lot of variations of intuition.
Many people used to think that intuition is the hand of God.
Many artists, performers, and scientists often think of intuition as a muse.
Some people, even psychologists and sociologists, believe that intuition has no real existence.
In my opinion, intuition is our personal litmus test which makes us aware about our unconscious and conscious mind.
It is basically the catalyst that makes us stick in a relationship.
If we don’t understand this catalyst then it’s harder to seek a quality in any relationship.

A normal relationship utilizes only the conscious mind but a quality relationship utilizes a lot of the unconscious mind.
The conscious mind, though amazing, can only take in and work with a certain limited amount of information at a time.
If you forget your marriage anniversary due to workload then your relationship with your spouse is not even normal, your relationship works only consciously and occasionally.
But if you never forget your marriage anniversary then your relationship with your spouse is a quality relationship, this relationship utilizes a lot of your unconscious mind.
A relationship isn’t a one time task, it’s a 24/7 task.

Any relationship works the same way as skilled personnel.
Skilled personnels internalize large amounts of data.
Once we reach a certain level of expertise at a given discipline, the critical part is how is all this expansive knowledge navigated and put to use?
Exactly the same way how to put a relationship to work also internalizes a large amount of information.
It’s the tolerance of information inside us and its correlation with other parties for mutual benefit.
Always one step at a time.
I couldn’t tolerate Kara’s offer.
I couldn’t correlate her thinking to my thinking.
I couldn’t see mutual inclusion between us.

Have you ever called your married daughter at 3pm Monday afternoon?
Don’t hesitate that it’s Monday afternoon, she might be busy at work, just call and see what happens.
Ask her favorite strawberry smoothie whether she is drinking nowadays or not which she used to love after coming from school in her teens.
Your relationship with your daughter goes in a whole different direction.
Remember, if your doctor calls you only to give bad news then your relationship as a patient and doctor is not going to survive long.
But if your doctor calls you to give good news also then your patient doctor relationship will be long-lasting.
This is how we humans are designed to grow and evolve.
Humans are good relationship hunters.

Few last words for any relationship, if we can’t listen quietly for a few minutes from our spouse or kids or parents or siblings or boss then our life is distracted.
Distracted life can not nurture any relationship.
We need to work to order our life first to enrich our relationship.
Similarly, if we can’t remain patient for a few minutes in any discomfort then we have to practice walking many miles on discomfort to understand its relationship to us.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“Risk means more things can happen than will happen.”
-Elroy Dimson

I was with my friend, Srinivas, in one of the isolated places of the US earth, hot and humid, in Seymour, Texas.
This trip with Srinivas, was an adventure, a week’s vacation, a search of life through little difficulty in a slightly different way.
My chemistry with Srinivas was pretty solid and exploratory for many reasons over the years.
We have known each other for many years, as we both are scientists in two different companies and very interested in philosophy and psychology.
Mandeep was an overall man of the motel in the isolated place, where we’re staying in Seymore, Texas.
I’d noticed Mandeep back in 2020 on my first night in the same motel as I’d stayed there eating my dinner.
It was my second time there staying in the same motel, and this time I was with Srinivas.
Mandeep, though, hadn’t looked exciting enough even to his job, at least for me. He’d seemed utterly and profoundly pale, a lanky tall man somewhere in his fifties, as quiet as the isolated Seymour motel itself.
He was serving us ice water and some snacks.
I asked him, “how did you end up here?”
He said, “I was a stock trader all in my twenties and thirties.”
“What kind of stocks did you trade?” I asked, expecting to say something about trading stocks.
“I traded financial sectors and real estate,” he replied simply with no excitement. “I was one of the crazy risk takers, I lost my home and all of my balance.”
As he said that, I remembered the lines from a great investor, “greed, fear, envy, ego, and capitulation are our common human characteristics. They compel us to take action when it is shared by the herd.”
Mandeep told us how he’d graduated from Upenn, Philadelphia in the early 2000s.
Here, in the middle of nowhere, serving plates, cleaning and changing bed sheets, was a guy who’d lost everything in his life by trading stocks.
I asked again,”how did you start trading?”
When he was a kid, he said, his father used to skip the sports page of the newspaper and directly go to the finance section.
His father said to him, “if you’d owned a share of this company yesterday, you’d have $1 more today than yesterday. The stock went up automatically. “
I was 14 years old and I asked my dad, ” Can I make money without work?”
My dad said “yes, but you have to know the stock to make money. If you don’t know stock, you won’t make money, you’ll lose money.”
“Well, I wanted to make money without any work but never studied stock, so here I’m now, I couldn’t understand what my dad was teaching me,” he said.
I realized with amusement how unpredictable our life is.
The world really is stranger and unpredictable than we could imagine.
The funniest thing about life is we don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or a week from today.
I asked him again, “So why’re you here in this place?”
Mandeep shrugged.
“After losing everything that I had, God again played another game to me,” he added.
A car accident in New Jersey killed his wife and two children, he said quietly looking over the ceiling.
His own head was injured so badly that he became normal after 3 years, his trading business was over.
“I needed to get out of New Jersey,” he said.
“This motel owner needed a helper and I needed a job in isolation, far away from my own place in New Jersey,” he said without a trace of self-pity. “So here I’m.”
“When I look back on my life, I was one of the crazies. I was an obsessive, addictive, maniacal, masochist risk taker, I wasn’t only a risk taker actually, I was a freak trying to become a millionaire overnight,” he expressed softly.
“I would buy today and sell tomorrow, my risk was heavily concentrated with the time horizon. I always acted in anticipation of market prices rather than market prices after they occurred.”
“But no regret now, the only thing is my wife and my two children’s faces suffocate me sometimes at night during sleep,” he became emotional.
“I cry because I feel good when I cry occasionally, I also feel sorry for myself,” he added.

I couldn’t sleep well that night.
I was awoken, mainly catalyzed by Mandeep’s life. Sorting through his memories also made me see something inside human life.
Getting up from a complete loss personally and professionally is an act of pure faith.
I didn’t really know how Mandeep’s mental crisis would end, but I’d believed he could find an answer.
It was another paradox of life, by getting up from a devastating loss, we find out how to get going. By believing that an unseen source of strength exists, it becomes the new source of survival.
Mandeep is acting as though he is among the losers, and perhaps he will eventually be the winner.

When Mandeep said he was a crazy risk taker, I remember a story, one of my teachers shared with me many years ago about a gambler.
I was an undergrad back then.
One day a gambler heard about a horse race with only one horse in the race competition, so he bet all of his borrowed money on it. Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away.
Think about the mind of the gambler, what he’d thought before betting on the horse and what actually happened.
I’d seen similar experience a few years ago. One of my friends bought a brand new car, paid money, and finished the paper work at the dealer. So he finally drove the car and headed towards his home. Immediately after he made exit from the dealer, he was hit by another reckless driver and got into a crash. Fortunately, he got only minor injuries but his brand new car got damaged completely.
The essence is, there is nothing guaranteed in our life, there is almost nothing without risk in our life because risk is invisible.
Risk is always associated with future events, it’s impossible to know for sure what the future brings.

Mark Twain expressed it best, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

There is a very diplomatic word the legal system uses all the time.
Rebuttable presumption, that clearly indicates something that should be presumed to be true until someone proves otherwise.
So, risk in our life is exactly the rebuttable presumption.

Up until now I’d generally agreed with the modern view of the world that faster is better and faster comes only with risk. If we need anything faster it means it is riskier. It’s the basic premise of the twenty-first century: Risk is exciting and futuristic, we should take more risks. Secureness is stodgy and archaic.

Risk is like Zen, which teaches that all enlightenment comes through stillness of the mind and the body. This lack of motion is not a measure of idleness but strength, discipline, focus, and character.
After reading “Zen in the Art of Archery,” I clearly understood what the target means in our lives. Target is only the perfect release of the arrow, and then we must stop thinking. When we perfect the release without conscious thought and expectation, we achieve an archer’s place of perfect calm and that perfect calm, of course, leads to perfect accuracy.
Risk is another name of perfect calm in our lives but calmness is required to evaluate the risk in advance.
Calmness leads to deeper thinking, a secondary thinking, which is different from many others.
Deeper thinking doesn’t count emotions, it only counts reality.

Risk takers are among the last great champions. The success and failure in risk taking is a measure of our moral fiber. Recreational risk taking does equalize everyone out. A rich man’s wallet only weighs him down when he becomes a reckless risk taker, and a poor man can beat him by accepting calmness on risk. The real task doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take risks but to give many second thoughts on them properly through slow thinking.

Life is unpredictable, we have to accept the inevitability of change, we have to accept the rise and fall of things in life. Our life will run in phases, many things will come and go, things will appear and disappear.
Our environment will change in many ways beyond our control.
We must recognize, accept, cope, and respond to the change.
I learned the same lesson from Mandeep’s life.
Life is easier than we think but harder than it looks.
But, still, the greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it, I still think Mandeep is on the same path.
He had two kinds of risks, one he could control or minimize in some ways, but the other probably not.
Therefore, our life juggles around various kinds of risks, always, everyday, and every moment.

We always overestimate what we’re capable of knowing and doing, this is very dangerous to pursue.
What happens if the surgeon is overestimating the heart surgery and the runner is overestimating the marathon?
We have to accept our limitations of what we know and working within those limits provide us with a different leverage rather than going beyond our limits.
Although we feel many emotions, we must not succumb. We must recognize emotions and stand tall against them.
Our reasons are always greater than emotions, that’s how we pause and study risks.
By studying risks, we don’t stop them but we become more aware of their consequences.
Again, there is a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
Knowing is a method booklet but walking is a thinking booklet.
Risk in our lives is the composite mixture of both.
Risk is really a question of common sense and balance. Finding the right balance between educating about risk involved and then knowing when to take action is, in fact, a key element of human survival.

Howard Mark’s said beautifully, “we never know where we’re going, we ought to know where we are.”

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“You don’t stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running.”
-Jack Kirk

Few years ago, I was driving in the rural areas of Ohio. I made a stop at McDonald’s to get a snack and drink. I’d ordered chicken nuggets and coffee.
I was wearing a T-shirt with a big number 26.2 on my chest.
A cashier at McDonald, a lady, told me, “I never heard about the 26.2 radio station.”
I said, “what.”
She replied, “the big number on your T-shirt.”
I know I’m a polite guy, didn’t laugh externally, and told her, “this number is about a marathon.”
She quickly interjected without a second thought, “I’ve never heard of a marathon radio station.”
I told her again, “this is about running a marathon, not a radio station.”
And then she said, “oh yeah, my niece used to run that.”
I quietly paid money and left saying “thank you”.
In the car I told myself, “why am I laughing now?”
I remembered one incident from a few years ago.
I’d finished my 10K run and I was eating hot dogs under the shade of a tree.
Another race participant joined me in the shade because the day was pretty sunny.
He inquired with me and asked, “do you know the recent Badwater sad news?”
I replied, “what?”
“Badwater, what’s this?” I asked.
He said, “never mind.”
To ease my situation, he deviated the conversation to that day’s running experience.
He said that he ran a half marathon.
I could see from his bib number that he ran a half marathon.
When he left I did google search on my phone, what the heck Badwater is.
I saw it as one of the most intense hard running experiences of human life.
Badwater is the world’s toughest foot race, a 135-mile course starting at 86 m below sea level and ending at an elevation of 2548 m high.
I told myself, are you kidding me?
I regretted laughing quietly at the woman at McDonald.
I told myself, head down man, and don’t laugh at people, there are people who might laugh at you too.
I started driving and headed towards my destination.
Making people fun on anything which they don’t know, whatever simple it is, indicates our lack of emotional intelligence.
I guess I’m more mature now, at least a little bit, both mentally and emotionally.

The reason I shared the above story is related to my running experience and its impact in my life.
Nowadays I feel I’ve improved my emotional intelligence over the years due to running incorporation in my life.
Don’t ask me how.
I don’t know but it’s working. When I accumulate more mileage in a week, I feel different.

Me and my wife would argue about anything, and don’t get me wrong, we still do occasionally.
This is how a husband and wife relationship grows bringing and seeing our differences wearing different lenses, but together.
When the argument would become hot and intense, she would leave the spot with an irritating voice.
I’d get out of the house to run without making any sound at the front door.
I’d run for at least one hour.
I’d be back home, enter in her room and said, ” I’m stupid, I’m sorry, I hurt your feelings.”
I’d not hug because I’d be sweating.
I’d bend down to untie my shoelaces.
My wife would tell me, “if you’re becoming this kind of person by running everyday, I’ll untie your shoelaces everyday for you “
I’d simply smile, no words, and say “thank you.”
I’m pretty sure not only running, any athletic activity improves our emotional intelligence.

There are many other reasons they hypnotized me to run.
First of all, I enjoy it.
I feel happy and relaxed when I’m sweating on the road.
I feel free and independent from my deadlines, reports, writings, power points, presentations, experiments, and meetings from my professional scientist life.
Even though I feel tired after running, it’s not the mind, only the body that tires.

I run to avoid my personal pain, discomfort, and many others.
Few years ago I lost my maternal grandma. I grew up with her. Truly speaking, she raised me in so many different ways which is almost impossible to express here.
The last time I spent time with her before her death, her memory was very thin, many times she couldn’t recognize me so I had to describe myself to her as who I am.
I would tell myself, “am I going to be the same with no memory when I become old?”
“Am I going to be a child again?”
These questions would come to my mind after spending time with my grandma, after seeing her activities, after listening to her quietly when she was in her mid nineties.
She would behave like a 10 years old child, pure thoughts, no regrets, no shame, no opinion, no judgements, nothing hidden, emotionless, and truth.
I remember, at one time, while we’re sitting in her bed, she told me, “grandson, I don’t like white bed sheets, can you buy yellow colored bed sheets for me?”
I became teary and told her, “of course, grandma, I will.”
After 5 minutes, I told her, “ I’m going to get a yellow bed sheet for you.”
She replied, “why, I like this white color so much.”
I’ve read that about 3.4 million people in the USA aged 71 and older, have some form of dementia.
I couldn’t be there with my grandma in the final days of her life.
There are multiple unavoidable reasons for that because we’re separated by more than 7600 miles away from each other.
This was a very complicated grieving period for me.
She was the center of our whole family, she was the reason for our family gathering, and now we have to make up some reason for those kinds of family gatherings.
To be honest, the spirit of our family cohesion has ended.
Whatever I told about my maternal grandma also applies to my maternal uncle, who is my first teacher in this world. I’ve so many memories with him.
Unlike my grandma’s situation, I was there with my uncle in his final days of life. His death was untimely due to chronic disease.
When I get out of my home and run, I bring those lost loved ones close to me, close to my heart, so many of my memories about them come to mind and become vivid.
I absorb those memories that strengthen me with different vibrations.

I don’t want to explain who our parents are in our life.
I remember them a lot when I run.
I bring a lot of activities that me and my dad did when I was in middle school.
Sometimes, immediately after coming home from a run, I make a call to my parents, otherwise, I more likely forget to call them due to another set of busy life that intrudes us.
So, I simply run to comprehend my relationship to my parents, to my wife, to my kids, to my brothers, and to my sisters.

I also run to experiment my personal limits.
I just don’t love running, it is my keen desire to see and explore the bravery and beauty of my body, my endurance, and my nutrition.
Physical enabling is a part of the process of spiritual growth, and endurance is a demonstration of our faith.
When we become tired, we want to stop but if we ignore the stop and get going, amazing things start to appear.
Running itself is a meditation for me. Truly speaking, anybody can do meditation in the activity of their choice, it only depends on that person how to see things around that activity.
When I reach a flat surface in my running, my breathing becomes normal and smooth but when I reach a hilly surface breathing becomes quick and shallow. I don’t do anything, I keep running, my body goes into automation.
The beauty is to observe what’s going on.
For me, breathing in and breathing out is the same, normal or quick breathing is the same.
The whole universe is the same, me, my inhale and exhale of oxygen and carbon dioxide is just a natural phenomenon, we all human beings are sharing to each other.
Not only that, when that oxygen and carbon dioxide flows in the air, it’s touching every one.
It’s amazing to feel and practice to see the things as they are inside and outside of our body.

After making running a part of my life I’ve improved my cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is to have conflicting beliefs, to have discomfort so that we go to ease our feelings.
In the past, I used to think “money is bad” but at the same time I also used to think “I need more money.”
I knew from the core of my heart that it could take many years of hard work and sacrifice to make more money.
So the simplest way I would take was an easier and safer path-”money is bad”; “rich people are corrupt”; “aiming to have more money never ends.”
This was my pure cognitive dissonance.
When I knew and read about rich people, their studies, habits, struggles, and their contributions to society, I gradually moved away from my unexplored and vague beliefs.
During my running, my cognitive dissonance started to fade away. Many times I accepted my strengths and weaknesses as they are.
For me running not only helps me to lose my body weight and make me healthy, but also cleans my overactive mind.

Remember, what we accomplish in life is not the only important thing, it is equally important how we accomplish it. I’ve received the answer of what to accomplish at home when I’m relaxing but I’ve received the answer of how to do it while running.
When we dissociate our body from normal state and associate it with excited state, something unusual happens in our mind. For me, one of the excited states of my body is running.

I cannot become a great scientist just by spending more time in the laboratory, I have to detach myself from the laboratory, I have to go in an excited state so that my mind can think, create ideas, and strategize them accordingly. When I’m running, I’m quiet but I’m in mental flow, me and my pure thoughts.
I’ve gathered many ideas regarding my professional scientist life not in the laboratory or at home or reading literature somewhere in the quiet room, they came from seemingly unrelated dots connections during my early morning runs.
I filter a lot of randomness in my mind. These random thoughts come into my mind during running.
When we filter random thoughts based on already known information, we create so called new knowledge.
Just think like this.
If I ask you showing a pregnant woman about the sex of her baby in her belly, your probability of saying correct sex would be only 50 percent because you are purely guessing.
But if I ask the same question to her doctor, his or her probability number would be different because he or she has done many tests and many observations even if that particular test to determine sex hasn’t been done. This clearly indicates that her doctor has much more information which you don’t have.
Doctor can filter the random thoughts more easily than us to guess the newborn’s sex.
For me running has become pivotal to filter my random thoughts to improve my personal and professional life.

Remember, nature has given our body to run.
Look at our two legs, hand motions, torsos, sweat glands, and hairless skin. What all of these tell us is we can run and we have to run.
Another special characteristic that we have is a vertical body that helps us to retain a very small amount of direct sunlight. This simply means we can run longer.

Why do we run when we see any danger or any threat to us?
Because our body is designed to run to protect us. This is natural.
Nature says you become happy and healthy when you run. When we are far from danger or threat, we obviously become happy. This is only possible because we can run.
Think of our children.
They always run, they smile when they run, they never feel tired if you let them run, just watch unsupervised children, how happy they become.
Our children chase their friend or dog or cat and they run.
Bottom line, nature says we should run.
That’s it.
Running is a natural and basic activity, instinctive to our being.

I read about Abraham Lincoln, he was a very smart footracer.
I also read about Nelson Mandela, he used to run 7 miles a day when he was imprisoned.

If we run, the number of deaths from degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, obesity, hypertension, blocked arteries, and diabetes would be significantly lower.
There is one more advantage of a longer run.
It helps to increase the number of mitochondria as well as capillaries in our active muscles.
It improves our muscle’s ability to remove and utilize available oxygen.
Running also recruits our muscle fibers that would otherwise go unused.
Running removes our fatigue in our central nervous system.

This is the statement from Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, “if there is any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.”

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina