Category: Social Upliftment

Up to now I’ve 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 the 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 would feel 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 at present 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.

Job is a personalized task

Many times, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking that the right job opportunity is mainly based on position, money, and the rule of success by our society.
But only you know what is right for you, nobody else does. Because each one of us is unique species.

At one point, our body and mind come together and give us a big inner voice, what is the next step we 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 is a sense of fulfillment based on your time, expertise, health, and a sense of belonging. It’s all personal and purely personal.

My learned lesson: make the choice that’s right for you, I mean right for your body and mind together, and ignore the noise around you by others due to your decision.

Once we realize this, our working life, job, and career all become 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 we have to do.
Most of the time our job is 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 goal and direction.
Life long goal should be a synchronized equipment of our body-mind connection.
I guess I learned this too late in my life.

Few days ago 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 run and swim 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, sleeplessness, 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 almost 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 obvious reason 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 and self healing

“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 his continuous progress.
He adopted the fasting cure, and changed his diet gradually.
He used to eat meat everyday, but now, he only eats meat about once every week.

He said, “I strongly recommend to read “The Nature Cure” a book by Andreas Michalsen, MD, PhD, that teaches about the science of natural medicine.”

He has been seeing a therapist regularly for the conflicts in his life, in particular about the question of job, money, health, and relationship.
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 Nelson Mandela.
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 at the age of ninety five.
He had convictions without planning and calculations in his life but he had respect, humility, perseverance, and patience for 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 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 said 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.

Conclusion

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.

She said, “If you want to use mindfulness as the art of living to reduce anxiety, achieve inner peace, and enrich life then hold the book “Wherever You Go, There You Are” by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD. This is classic, read and reread this book whenever you feel, it will change your life.”

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.

There are many truths in life but one truth is: it’s tough, always has been, always will be, no question.
We have to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative.
We must not burn out.
We must listen, honor, and respect what our body and mind is telling us.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

“He who searches for evil, must first look at his own reflection.” -Confucious

Few years ago, my wife, my daughter and I got together with my longtime college mate whom I had not meet 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.

Language of negativity

“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 anything, you change topics without giving a chance to the other person 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 negative side first when you respond, you always talk at people, not with people”.
“Just forget about whether you talk negatively or positively on the topic.”
“My dear, if you talk more than half the time with only exploration of the more negative sides on any topic, you have a serious problem, negativity bias, just accept it,” my wife said.
Ouch!

The wording from my wife was an eye-opener for me.
Fortunately, she also advised me not to bring negative first but to accept the reality, accept the present situation, be more comfortable with surroundings, listen to people with full open ears, and speak.
She advised that If I express my negative sides first, I have a problem with people and whole mindset, 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 positive 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, PhD, professor of psychology.

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.”

Poor listening, habits, and negativity

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 and thinking, I must listen well. I have to restrain myself from disagreeing or talking or sharing my own thoughts.
To understand more positive side, I must hold back what I have to say and control the urge to interrupt.
Most people aren’t really interested in our negative explanation until we become convinced that we have heard and appreciated theirs.

I learned that if I really want a positive attitude, I have to exercise humility and restraint, I have to change my behavior as I mature by thinking process.
Most of our positive attitudes come from our adaptation, surrounding, and the nature of work we do.
As we all know Charles Darwin’s theory, “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 of many things in life.
Adaptation with an open mind and open ears crushes the negativity inside us.

I reevaluated my lifestyle, my thinking, and my own expectations of life.
I have so much to be thankful for, not only with the life I’m living, but also with the contribution I’m making around.
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 horizon, many failures and missing opportunities, zero financial knowledge, and growing increasingly unhappy on everything.
I was too worried about things which never happened before but still thinking about them for future.
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 things 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.

Right work selection, status quo bias, and negativity

I have to be calmed by understanding my right path. Of course, there could be many right paths but I have to not only recognize the right path but also follow it so that there is less stress that is counterproductive for me.
To be positive, I learned that I have to be proactive, I have to be calmed by doing not just the right thing, but the best thing possible.
I must know my best thing because it can be different for different people, but it’s up to me what is best for me.

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 and not being innovative enough. But for me, it became a matter of not knowing where and how to start the change.
I have poor understanding of data, analysis, and comparison of alternatives in life.
I gave up my best hope too quickly and too soon.
So, I always remained negative.
Comparison of anything never becomes straightforward, sometimes, it’s confusing, chaotic, and intimidating.
For me, the mental cost of researching and accepting various life alternatives was very high.
I am sure other people might have the same situation.

Conclusion

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.
He told me that during his time on that job he was so negative that he lost all of his hopes because of people, culture, and surroundings.
When I visited his house a few years ago, I saw at least 20 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 begins with you, it’s your good mindset that you have inside you, of course, each one of us have to recognize it.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

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.

Changes after marriage

I got married many years ago and it was basically an arranged marriage.
Over the years, I’ve noticed something quite interesting about our marriage.
This is 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 choosey with my vegetables 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 tomorrow.
I will talk more time with my old parents starting next Saturday.
I will stop complaining 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. Absolutely different feeling.
Even if sometimes I 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 arrival of our daughter changed the course of our relationship.

Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, authors of “Boundaries in Marriage” say, “You have the power to confess, submit, and repent of your own hurtful ways in your marriage.”

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 daughters and wife talk about themself.
I didn’t train my mind that way but it started to happen automatically.
I love just to listen them.
Again, it didn’t happen at once with intention, but gradually over many years.
I realized now how the love of children changes us enormously.

Three kinds of love

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, courage, acceptance, and help.
They always bolster our confidence and guide us in so many different situations.
They always remain behind us as pillars morally, financially, and emotionally.
Probably, this is why nature taught us to love our parents unconditionally whatsoever. If you really want to know line between unconditional love and unconditional acceptance, watch the TedTalk “Love, no matter what” by writer Andrew Solomon.

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 weaknesses.
In my experience, 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 only 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 and connection for both parental and children love as mentioned above.

From One of my favorite books “Getting the Love You Want” authors Harville Hendrix  and Helen Hunt say “Above all else, we seek the sensation of feeling fully alive that is triggered when we experience connecting.”

Marriage appears as a critical juncture of these three kinds of love.
This is because, up to this point, I remain only as a son or daughter of my parents but once I become parent myself my mind started to work in a completely different way.
Marriage is evolutionary and essential process 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.
When I think back, my marriage happened suddenly but its growth, of course, took a very long gradual process.
Marriage provides the capacity to love and be loved as a core strength in our lives if we compose it one step at a time.
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 all the time.

Marriage is an institution

I also experienced that marriage is also an echo for me and my wife that sends signals to my parents, and our children.
It moves through intimacy, encouragement, and connectedness.
And the happy part is that marriage has the capacity to combine all of them.
Groucho Marx says marriage is not an event, it is the beginning of an institution, and I totally believe in it.
As stated earlier, marriage has evolutionary blessings and it has emotional and material benefits that we all can share with our own experiences.

After more than 15 years of my own experience, I know that marriage is a process that continuously takes love as a formula to simplify the complexity of life.
Marriage, of course, does not bring fulfillment all the time because I’ve seen others’ marriages crumbling.
The best we can do as individuals is to choose to be a small part to institutionalize the process of marriage and simplify life.
This is the biggest door through which the meaning of life transcends on us and goes to our children.
This institution flows love which can enter through ourselves to spouse to parent and children.

Few years ago, one of my very good friends suffered from mild stress and 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 noticed from my eyes.
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 well being.
“Marriage recirculates positive emotion which leads to exploration, mastery, and the discovery of our core strengths”, my friend added.
My eyes saw a depressed friend growing into a very successful school principal after adopting marriage as an institution.

Research on 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, spouse fights, and they also complained a lot.
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 happy life successfully encompasses the positive emotions about present, past, and future.
Positive emotions means bodily pleasures and higher pleasures like comfort and gratification that indicates the activities we like to do again.
There is a difference between a good life and a meaningful life.
Good life uses our core strengths to obtain maximum gratification in the main part of our life. But meaningful life uses our core 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 grown over time.

We humans are more like cars on a freeway.
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 automatic tools to 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.
At the moment, I’ve three kids, so for me, marriage is not just a flow of what I see around: get married, have kids, and move in life.
Marriage is an evolutionary innovation which runs through love.

Conclusion

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 bitterness of the other partner.

The most empowering way to transform a marriage is to change the way we view our spouse. Our spouse is our mirror that can show us some parts of ourselves.

Let’s accept our differences with our spouse as a cause of our celebration and enjoy and nurture mutual growth.

Mignon McLaughlin, the author of “The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook” says beautifully, “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

It was a day of August, I was drinking tea on my patio and my three and half year old son was playing around me.
I have to confess that even though I have already raised two daughters, I’m actually not a very good dad in many ways . I’m usually a quiet person when I’m preoccupied with things and especially at times of rest and wondering.
My son, however, was hitting walls with his baby guitar.
Since he was annoying me, I yelled at him, and he started to cry and walked away to his mom.
Within a few minutes he was back, saying, “Baba, I want to talk to you.”
“Sure, Aayam?”
“Baba, why did you become so rude to me?
I’m a good boy. You also better be a good dad, Baba.”
This was a hard ball for me on my head, my son hit the ball right on my head. I was obviously short-tempered and rude.
I realized that I’d spent many years as a short tempered rude dad. At that moment, I also realized I need to change. But how?

Lack of social and emotional intelligence

Most importantly, I realized that raising my son was not about correcting his shortcomings and yelling at him. He could correct himself at some point in the future. I was worried how I would nurture this precocious strength that he displayed at an age under four.
This was an amazing learning experience for my very poor social intelligence.
I asked myself how I could read the desires, needs, and emotions of my son with reasonable accuracy.

Maurice J. Elias, PhD, author of “Emotionally Intelligent Parenting” coined a new Golden Rule: Do unto your children as you would have other people do unto your children. Now I’m realizing that this is a powerful rule to follow.

As I said, I’d raised two daughters already. Raising children, I know now a little bit, is far more than just fixing what is wrong with them.
Kids bring amazing strengths with them which we don’t know.
I’m learning that it is about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive potentials to the fullest.
If we achieve this as a dad, I guess, all dad would be very happy in their lives.

I was wondering what might be the reason that I was unhappy and showing short temper at my three and half year old son. Of course I was lacking social and emotional intelligence but what else?

Not able to turn a job into a calling

I got some answers from Junki.
One day I met a woman in a baby care center because I was looking for a good baby care center for my son.
Her name was Junki.
She was working in a care center for the last 15 years.
I found that Ms Junki’s work is one of the most important parts of her life. She was very happy that she is in the line of work to look after kinder babies.
When she expressed her feelings I realized that what she does for living is a vital part of who she is.

It is one of the first things she tells people that she loves babies, she wants to be around them so she works in the baby care center.
She told me she usually takes her work home with her, she even takes her work on vacation too.
Ms Junki feels very inspired about her work because she loves it everyday.
She told me she thinks her small step helps to make the world a better place.
During our conversation, I knew that Junki doesn’t have any kids of her own as God didn’t permit her to have.
But I didn’t find any pinch of unhappiness in her face.

She encourages everyone to love and nurture children and make children a priority because what kind of world we are envisioning depends on them.
At one point she told me, as a parent we don’t have to do giant things, just control the temper and love them.
It made me speechless.
Ms Junki told me she would be really unhappy if she were forced to stop working, she is not interested in retirement until her body allows her to perform the work.

“The most important thing in my life is not to find the right job, there is no such thing that exists, it is basically finding the job I can make a calling through recrafting. The recrafting process, whatever we do in life, brings the most happiness to us”, Junki said.

Mark Manson, author of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” says “Our problem is not a lack of passion for something. The problem is productivity, the problem is perception and the problem is acceptance. It’s all our priorities in life, nothing else.”

After working so many years with so many high profile educated MBAs, PhDs, and MDs; I realized that human strengths like integrity, kindness, dedication, and love for anything are not the same things as talents.
Human strengths are moral characters but talents are something different.

Differences in a job, a career, and a calling

Junki taught me what the differences are between a job, a career, and a calling.
Many of us do a job for the paycheck at the end of the week or month, we don’t see any other things in it.
Job simply becomes the obligation of life because we have to support the family.
When there is no money coming we simply quit and look for another job and repeat the same process all over again.
I’m pretty sure that this does not bring any happiness at all in our lives
In the end of the day, this simply helps us to grow as a short-tempered and rude person like what I became with my son.
And obviously, a very unhappy dad.

There is another thing I saw in some people: a career, which is a deeper personal investment in their work. This looks better than a job for them.
In their career, they measure each achievement through money, progress, and reputation.
We obviously all seek promotion, prestige, power, and , of course, more money.
We become assistant lawyers or assistant professors or assistant managers in the beginning, and then become full lawyers or full professor or director after a few years of working.
When there is no more promotion, we start to look for something else, because this is required for our progress.
There is no doubt, if there is no promotion and no more money coming, we look for other options.

We remain still unhappy because inherently we remain unsatisfied with our own life so we come home in the evening and yell at our own kids.
Just think for a second, what kind of parents yell at their own kids?
Of course, those who are short tempered, rude, and unhappy in their own life.

As Ms Junki taught me, there is one more important thing in life, a calling, which is a vocation, it’s not a job or career.
As we all know very few people have this vocation in life.
This is a passionate commitment to work for our own satisfaction which brings fulfillment.
If we have a calling, we see our work for a greater reason, work becomes something larger than ourselves. Just think about Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Steve Jobs.
Work becomes fulfilling in its own way irrespective of money, progress, and reputation.
There is no money, no promotion, no prestige, but work continues in life for joy and self satisfaction.
Any job can become a calling, and any career can become a calling.

Bryan Dik, PhD, author of “Make Your Job a Calling” says, “The wonderful truth, though, is that almost any kind of occupation can offer any one of us a sense of calling. Regardless of where we are in our careers, we can all find joy and meaning in the work we do.”

A teacher who views the work only as a job cannot have a calling but a baby carer who sees the work as a contributor to make the world a nicer place can have a calling.
If we have a calling in our life, we mostly remain happy in our life, we don’t yell at our own kids at home, we don’t lose our temper on them.

Remember, Gregor Mendel didn’t have a job or career in genetics, he ran his famous genetic experiments as a hobby and later turned his hobby into a calling.
Benjamin Franklin didn’t make his work either job or career, he ran many lightning rod experiments due to his own interest, which later turned into a calling.
Emily Dickinson’s job or career was not to write poetry, she started to write poetry to create an order in her own life that later turned into a calling.

Unable to figure out my own calling

I thought to myself how do I rank myself as a dad? A normal or good or a rude dad.
Can I measure my value like a piece of diamond that keeps shining all the time?
If my core understanding was this clear to me, I would not write these words and I would not yell at my own son.
This isn’t simple to measure our self worth so I am eager to make a few lines about this and realize what’s wrong with me.

My son, who is looking at me at this very moment, is very happy now because he already forgot my yelling.
He is having the purest mind at age 3 and half.
I believe he is the most genuine and pure-of-heart at the moment.
When complete strangers see him, he runs towards me as his dearest person.
Each time he sees the animal, he begins crying and runs towards me for protection.
I provide him comfort in a time of fear.
But why do I yell at him?
Probably, because I am not happy inherently with my own life and transferring my venom to my son at home.
To be honest, I have not figured out my own calling yet in my life.

As a dad, this confused me initially, but I realize now that it is simply my son’s genuine heart and mind reaching out to me in a time of need.
There is nothing but only joy in my heart as I write about my wonderful son.
I can only dream of becoming the best dad I believe I could be.

I know my real and authentic happiness appears when I identify and cultivate my most fundamental individual strengths and use them all the time as much as I can in my work, love, and parenting life.

Conclusion

There is a Chinese proverb I always recite, “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit fortune. If you want happiness lifetime, help somebody.”
How can I help others and be happy as I can not help and understand my own little son at home?

Remember, the cure of anything is uncertain in our life, but prevention is always there. Imagine just getting midwives to wash their hands ended childbed fever in the past.
Imagine how immunizations ended polio in the past.
I’m sure ending a short temper and rudeness isn’t a cure but a prevention of becoming an unhappy dad or unhappy employee.

Happy life is something beyond a pleasant life, and a meaningful life is something beyond a happy life.
As Ms Junki said, one step closer to a meaningful life is controlling a short temper and not yelling at our own kids at home.
One step closer to a meaningful life is turning our job or career into a calling and connecting the world with what we do everyday consistently.
These are the secret sauces of happiness.

Good things obviously come to those who have patience, foresight, and love so, please, don’t lose your temper with your own kids at home.

I borrow Ira Byock’s words here. Ira Byock, MD, author of “The Four Things That Matter Most” said beautifully “Four simple phrases: “Please forgive me,” “I forgive you,” “Thank you,” and “I love you” carry enormous power to mend and nurture our relationships and inner lives.”

It applies to anybody on earth including our own kids, colleagues, friends, and parents.  

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

“The harder I work, the emptier I feel.”  – 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.

Here 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.”
If I compare these three expert’s statements together, it’s hard to make a judgement now which direction the hard work is moving.
How many people do you think work hard if they are already financially independent?

Definition of hard work

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 on 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?

The truth is 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, difficulties, and challenges, the tortoise ends up winning.
The morale is, never give up and distracted by noises, be the tortoise.

No problem if we’re slow but the goal is always to be steady. Enjoy the process without much end results.
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 because I’m a marathon runner.
I’m not just preaching, I’ve done it.
At least I try.
At least, nowadays, I always try as much as I can whatever I say as an experimental scientist. I want to try, if I like the idea, process, and destination considering the available resources.
For example, I never thought I’d run a marathon in my life, 26.2 miles.
But I did it, one step at a time, few miles in a day practice for six month for first marathon.
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 both.
I learned that if we fix our eyes on our dream, it happens.
It might take some time but eventually it happens.
So, I like to be the tortoise in life, not the hare.
For me being a tortoise is hard work.
Not much expectation, be relaxed, patient, and keep going, keep moving.

This story of tortoise and hare has not only the symbolic meaning but also the long term strategy.

Seth Godin, author of 20 best selling books including the latest “This Is Strategy” says “strategy is a broader framework, it’s about your long term vision and how you plan to achieve it.”

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 in a relaxed, easy, and patient way.

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 can’t run or I’m not a runner even though I run everyday.
In my view, there is a huge difference between  “I failed running” and “I’m not a runner.”
Former is the consequence of weak preparation and poor decision making but the latter is our own personal characteristic.
So we have to treat them very carefully.
We don’t grow at once, we grow as mature and professional humans over time.
For example, where I was five years ago is completely different from where I’m today, and eventually where I’ll be five years from now. 

My special need of where I belong and the need of what matters to me are the two most powerful needs a human being has, and that determines the definition of hard work.

Personalization of success

My hard work must align with both my need of belonging and need to matter.
I’m either going to belong and matter here or I’m 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. I can relate this to one of my two years postdoctoral work where I spent my days and nights compromising with my family and kids but got nothing. 
We have to make sure we are living the life we want, not what other people prescribe for us or think we need.
Even if we are working hard but only on others’ prescription we 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, here are 8 secrets among many in this TedTalk.
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. This is one of my regrets in life but I let go of my regret now. I’m happy. I practiced it over and over.

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. One of my postdoctoral work was hurry.
Hurry is simply going fast and done, but being busy is something deeper, being more engaged and attentive. My second postdoctoral work was busy.
The lesson I learned is 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 will miss to build something long-lasting, permanent, and worthy in life.

For example, for society, one of the parameters of success is money, and money comes only from hard work. Money also comes from hurry but doesn’t last long. My personal experience, I made some money by stock trading but I completely lost it in three weeks and gave up stock trading.
I didn’t study money carefully, it made me paralyzed even if I made some money by stock trading.
Money is a magnifying glass. It makes us more of who we are from inside.

If I’m generous, growth minded, and hard working, I’ll be even more, generous, growth minded, and hard working with more money.
If I’m self centered, fixed minded, and corrupted, I’ll be even more self centered, fixed minded, and corrupted with more money.
I’m trying to use money as my tool to broaden my identity.
Who I’m and who I’m becoming has very little to do with what I’m achieving with money.

Hard work and love

Another misconception our society feeds us is the poor understanding of love in our lives.
Can hard work buy love?
One of my former girlfriends before marriage always used to ask me, “do you really love me?” I was very annoyed with this question because it used to come repeatedly in her mind.
This is the wrong question our society taught us to ask.
If we ask this question, the answer always comes with ‘if’.
You get what I mean.
We 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 or…”
“Our boss loves us if we 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 in this one life.
We appear to be in love in the eyes of society but actually not really.

Conclusion

One thing that can remove ‘ifs” in our love is by practicing gratitude, humility, and empathy. These are significant not only in personal life but also in business life.
These are mechanisms that help us learn where hard work doesn’t become hard anymore.
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, humility, and empathy, hard work does not seem hard. Me, no more remains only me, more work only becomes work with joy.
Once we become habituated with these human mechanisms, we develop contentment.
Love without ‘ifs” is nothing but a result of the habit of gratitude, humility, and empathy.
These habits strengthen no ‘ifs’ in love, the love for you as you are, and the love for hard work.

When it comes to hard work, I remind myself with Banksy’s quote “If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.”

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”

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

I live in the US, and our current president is Donald Trump, who happens to be the 47th president, the most powerful man on the planet.
Many people may not agree with the last words of my previous sentence, but I said ‘most powerful man’ 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. I found Forbes ranking only from 2018 that puts Donald Trump in 3rd position after Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin.
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 many former presidents.
Most of them are deceased now, we all forgot them except a few whom we always remember like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

Why do Americans always remember Abraham Lincoln? There are many reasons for it as noted by his biographer Michael Burlingame in Abraham Lincoln: A Life. Despite his difficult childhood, contentious political career, a fratricidal war, and tragic personal losses, Abraham Lincoln preserved a keen humor and intellectual maturity that proved to be his most valuable asset to win the Civil War.

We will be forgotten

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 point is, one to two years after we are gone, most of us will be forgotten.
Do you realize this?
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 learning lesson is, always make sure, always make sure, we love our family and our close friends.
The real happiness is hidden behind our 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.

Bruce Feiler, author of “The Secrets of Happy Families” elaborates scientifically how we can create stronger parent child relationships, manage the chaos of our lives, and still bring happiness together in a family.

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 at the moment, 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. It applies to everywhere inside the family and workplace.

Happiness, state of mind and family

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.
We don’t regret it if we act now but the same regret kills us if we become late.
What I learnt over the years is that 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?
I’m sure 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, I’ve seen it happening.
Healthy open disagreement gives room for willingness to communicate.
If we don’t communicate then 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.

Oprah Winfrey, media proprietor and author of “Build the Life You Want” said, “Family is where life begins and love never ends.”

If we properly know what family is then we will know how to handle pain, happiness, frustration, sorrow, dissatisfaction, success, and failures.

We happen to have many mentors in life, but our father and mother as a mentor is someone who’s brought us up along with our siblings, experiencing life when we’re growing up. Our parents showed us looking up at the neighborhood while holding our hand and thinking about us, the whole world, and it’s aspirations.

Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ford, and family values

We learnt the value of humbling in life which mostly comes from our family and especially from our father and mother.
Thomas Jefferson is one of America’s Founding Fathers and 3rd president of the USA.
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 character as a symbol of unity and value of the nation!

When we know our bond with our family, we can become great at what we do.
One simple example is Henry Ford.
Many people have the misconception that Henry Ford invented the automobile but the credit for the automobile invention goes to Karl Benz.
At least we 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 mass population.
He kept family bonds together as 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 elevated the strength of family bond forever.

“The People’s Tycoon” is a detailed book about Henry Ford by Steven Watts, a historian and writer who discusses about his humble beginnings, his business philosophy, his revolutionary approach to manufacturing through the implementation of assembly line techniques, and his views on entrepreneurship and innovation.

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.

We don’t have to be a genius to be successful. Everyone is smart in certain areas, we just have to stay around these areas and get support and love from our family.
Try to bring small cheer in the face of your father and mother, spouse and kids.
Just delight them everyday if you can.
Actively engage to uplift your family, your neighborhood, your community, and your country in some way from your side.
That’s the secret of happiness we ever get in this life.

Conclusion

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, we have to take care of them and they end up possessing us.
The more stuff we have, the more time they take from us and there remains almost no time for our fulfilling important activities. As we all know time is a limited resource.

Brand new Mercedes Benz doesn’t bring more happiness if we already have another vehicle at home.
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 dad and mom.
Please, always know the difference between finding happiness and creating happiness. Katarina Blom, a psychologist’s TedTalk could be an inspiring resource for it.

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, here it is.

We will forget the USA president after he or 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.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”

“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, her name was 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 kind of book do you love the most?”
I was thinking myself 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, great thinking, and great innovations, and as a writing style, of course, my boyfriend Megda’s romantic style.”
I said, “Megda.”
Without stopping Sammi continued, “I don’t know but my mind knows immediately that I’m with Megda when I read romantic love story.”
How long have you been in love?
“We have been in a relationship for the last five years and we are planning to get married next year,” Sammi replied.

By the way, Sammi, “how did your love story evolve with Megda?”

“Many years ago my dad started this meeting, a book dating club. It was basically three families, 6 adults, myself 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, MD, PhD, 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.

Love is unconditional kindness

“For me love is to be in a happy state mentally and physically.
I 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.
She said that 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 as nonjudgemental forgiveness in his life.
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 and explore love.

Love from heart and love from mind

Eckhart Tolle, author of “The Power of Now” said “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 rich people or happy 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 comes 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.
“I and Megda both have understood this for a long time,” she further added.

I do believe that love is inclusive, it expands the sense of self progress and the goodness of life.
It increases positivity and dissolves negativity by reorganizing our priorities.
When we reach this stage, this is the level of true happiness which is mental calm and a broader sense of responsibility.

When we become more patient we realize that our love from the mind is often associated with quick decision, a kind of force but our love from the heart is calm and spiritual.
When our heart feels love, there remains no conflict inside us, we lean towards non-violence and cooperation.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher and poet, said “The crusade of love is a negative thought in our 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, the best form of love comes from heart, not from mind.

One example of love from the heart is love towards our children.
Love towards our children never comes from mind, it comes from heart.
No matter what, we love our children, we burn yourself but still we want to give light to our children.

We can’t see electricity, x-rays, microwaves, or radio waves but we experience their intrinsic power by their work.
Love is the same, we don’t see it, but we definitely observe its effects.

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

In my experience when we love somebody or something from heart, we inspire humanity and peace, our thought process for love becomes effortless, our body seems to move with grace and ease.
We experience joy which is different from success.
We can achieve this state of love by any activity that we enjoy doing.
It never happens from any forced work.
Love never comes from force or any forced work.

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

We have confusion that love means high respect and care. In reality, high respect and care is a very small part of love, it is a small measure of our emotions.

bell hooks, the author of “All about love” explains this confusion of respect , care and emotions in love. bell says that the word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb.

It is a very high degree of insight in our body and mind.
Love is perseverance, courage, concentration, and enormous drive. An unusual degree of dedication towards love of any work leads to mastery.
Love is absolute integrity and power that Sammi always feels when Megda talks to her.

Conclusion

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.
We can take 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.

I read recently a new book about love “It Begins with You” by Jillian Turecki, there are nine truths about love. I pick one, my favorite, “You cannot convince someone to love you.”

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

“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.
I used to call her to meet in a restaurant.
In our first few meetings we became pretty close and I, probably we both, felt 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 when we talk 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 a bit mature in all directions, 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 back then.
I think I was definitely immature and superficial in my thoughts to build a relationship.

Ego is a killer of relationship

Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, author of “Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People” teaches us to see the “important” people in our life, and how and why they are the way they are. She also teaches how these people can really impact how we live and who we are. I can totally correlate my thoughts now with Kara’s thoughts. I was pretty immature back then. 

I know now that perfection, sound judgment, and proper understanding never comes only with age in our lives.
Josh Waitzkin was only nine years old when he won his first national championship in chess. His book “The Art of Learning“, tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top.
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 world, at the highest levels of any kind of relationship, everyone is great no matter the age or maturity.
Nowadays, the decisive factor is rarely who knows more about the relationship, but who applies the essence of the relationship.

The flow of life, actually, is just a relationship and its movement how it passes us within it.
There are so many relationships, 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, and so many others.
How we understand these relationships is very 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 person next to you.
I remember that one of my students told me he grew up all his childhood at his aunt’s house.
From the age one to five, he doesn’t remember anything but he remembers every detail of his aunt house, and what time their parents dropped off and picked him up from aunt’s house.
This clearly indicated to me that his real relationship was only with his aunt and her house.
I guess there is a fundamental truth in how we should grow our relationship as parents to our kids.

Accepting discomfort deepens relationship

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 other people’s gathering.
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 as an observer when they are in various moments.

We see people’s different behaviors when sudden discomfort bombards them.
When people encounter unexpected rain in the street, what do they do?
Many will run with their hands over their heads to avoid wet.
Very few will smile and enjoy the wet clothes.
Some will smile and take deep breaths and continue their normal walk.
People’s reactions to any surprises show their understanding and their preparation for controlling any incoming discomforts.
Our relationship with comfort, with discomfort, and with surrounding people make us who we are.

I think the understanding of a relationship in life is like floating on a swimming pool.
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 drowning.
The water feels amazing and fluid, and natural flow allows for creative steps and fast learning and adaptation.
Children can swim very soon, always experimenting themselves with a desire for innovation and new challenges.
If they happen to fail in any case-no problem, they just get back on with no hesitation.
But then, as we get older, we become more aware of the risk of drowning and injury.
The pool becomes dangerous if we don’t know how to swim.
Sudden efforts would be humiliating for adults but not for children.

As I said before, as an adult, when Kara 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 hesitate to learn from young people?
Because of ego.
As a result, my growing relationship with Kara ended immaturely.
My inner pool wasn’t fluid, so I couldn’t stay up on water longer.
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.

What I learnt over the time is that tests and actions are needed at any time in our life especially when something is going in the direction of discomfort, crisis, and challenges.
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.

Roland Lazenby, author of “Michael Jordan: The Life” says “For all Michael Jordan’s greatness, there is a mixture of complex family with a darker side, a ruthless competitor attitude, and a love of high stakes.”

Remember, depth always beats breadth everywhere in any area.
It applies equally in life and 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 flourish.
If we don’t pick up a friend’s call at 4 am in the morning then our friendly relationship with him or her is not deep.
If my daughter at a time of crisis don’t call me first as a mom or dad then my relationship to my daughter isn’t deep.
As a parent If we fail to become the most deep friend for our son and daughter then neither we are understanding them nor the relationship.

Deep relationship is a full time task

When I was undergrad, I thought I have many trusted friends but over time each relationship lost our flow, and we became worse and worse at reading the subtle signs of a quality relationship.
Soon enough, learning becomes unlearning in relationship because each one of us needs space to grow, by some reason I didn’t grow that space and lost it.
The stronger friend, I found, is often the one who doesn’t interpret the relationship but only practice.

Healthy relationship requires a lot of intuition within us and there are a lot of variations of it.
Many people used to think that intuition is a natural gift.
Many artists, performers, and scientists often think of intuition as a catalyst to act.
In my view as a scientist, intuition is our personal litmus test which makes us aware about our unconscious and conscious mind.
It is basically the glue that makes us stick in a relationship.
If we don’t understand this glue then it’s harder to find a depth in any relationship.

Sigmund Freud, a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis said “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 we forget our marriage anniversary due to workload then our relationship with our spouse is not even normal, our relationship works only consciously and occasionally.
But if we never forget our marriage anniversary and spouse’s birthday then our relationship with our spouse is a deep relationship, this relationship utilizes a lot of our unconscious mind.
After going through fifteen plus years marriage with three kids, I learnt that a relationship isn’t a one time task, it’s a 24/7 full time task.

When we practice a relationship regularly, it works the same way as skilled scientist.
Skilled scientist internalizes a large amount of data.
Once we reach a certain level of scientific expertise, the challenge is how all this expansive dataset to navigate 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 acceptance of information inside us and its correlation with the person next to us 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.

Conclusion

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 even if she is married now with two kids and long gone from your home many years ago.

Remember, if your financial advisor calls you only to give bad news about market then your relationship as a client and financial advisor is not going to survive long.
But if your financial advisor also calls you to give good news about market then your client advisor relationship will be long lasting.
This is how we humans are designed to grow and evolve.

Robin Dunbar, PhD, author of “Friends” says “Humans are good relationship hunters.” This book “Friends” is a eye opener to understand the number and quality of our friendships, their influences on our happiness, health and mortality.

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 must work to order our life first to enrich our relationship.
If I can’t remain patient for a few minutes in any discomfort then I have to practice walking many miles on discomfort to understand its relationship to me. Lesson learned from Kara.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”

“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