yamtimsina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“I have had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” -Mark Twain

When I visit my parents now, every morning I celebrate daily rituals with my mother.
Rituals are very common for her: celebrate the tulsi puja in the morning, read a few pages of Gita (holy book of hindu), celebrate the sunrise, and in the evening, repeat the same.
When it turns dark, we go inside and talk about her years growing up in Solma Tehrathum, Nepal or her schooling in Solma, or her calling to join a religious community recently.
My mother may say these moments in her life as listening to the voice of God but I say it is the tuning of her life to live in the moment.
She is happy going for long periods of time in complete worship.

When my mother was sixteen years old, she met my father, they got married, and together they created four children.
My mother has studied up to grade six formally but she can read fluently and write in moderation in our native language.
My mother and father had an amazing relationship, but through it all they maintained a deeper connection to their god.
It wasn’t always fun, there were a lot of problems and scarcities in the family, I saw them growing up but my mother was good at living in the moment to cherish what she had.
I learned the lesson: cherish what you have, live in the moment and move forward.

I am sharing my mother’s story with you because her story might be similar to your mother’s story.
Happiness and satisfaction always comes from the connections we build around our family.
Ritual is what binds a family.
Ritual is what makes a family differentiated and unique.
We each nurture an essential creativity that evolves with sharing and listening to the rituals.
When we have rituals in the family, we pass on to our future generations, that help them to live their lives with dignity.

When I was in high school working on the farm, I used to daydream about the things that I didn’t have.
I didn’t know then but I know now, that was my ritual without me knowing.
Even daydreaming during that time inspired me because I didn’t have an electronic gadget then like today’s smartphone in my fingertip.
It doesn’t really matter what we do and what we achieve in life, if we don’t live with our rituals everyday, life becomes complex.
Once we adopt ritual, we don’t worry much about the past, and not much time worrying about the future too.
In other words, staying in the present is the way to live, cultivating the focus on the here and now and avoiding unnecessary concerns about the future.

Ritual is living in the moment that just proliferates us.
When we live in the moment, we broaden our diaspora, we see the world in different eyes.
At least, I view the world this way.
Sometimes, I used to think and still feel that I couldn’t become wealthy by this time, probably, one of my regrets occasionally appears inside me, but after reading Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness” I realized why I should be happy even though I am not wealthy.
Because I am living with my rituals, and in the moment now.
I had won little money in the past which was twice as sweet as the money that I earned.
I thought I could be wealthy.
But I also lost that won money immediately.
After certain times, I felt that money has a way of creating anxiety when there isn’t harmony in the way it flows into and out of my life.
I realized that it doesn’t matter how much I make or how much I spend, I must maintain harmony with money.
If money creates only anxiety and saps my energy, then I must stop worrying about more money, I must live in the moment.

I remember David Rubenstein’s advice to new investors, a renowned author and investor, “find areas outside of investing that can enable you to broaden your scope as a human, and experience things other than the pursuit of money and professional success.”
I still don’t understand how to apply this in real life.

In the moment of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, I encircle the world with my thoughts and gratitude.
I think around one billion people on the planet even today struggle everyday to find clean water, they work all day just to eat a meal at night.
There are another one billion people with an income that provides for most of life’s necessities.
Probably, I am in that category now.
And the remaining 6 billion are struggling to make the transition to access clean water to fulfill all their life’s necessities.

Living in the moment teaches us very different things about why we should enjoy what we have.
Let’s see the picture, how the human mind operates.
First we want to access clean water.
After this, we want to access nearby clean water.
After this, we want to access clean water at home.
After this, we want to access hot water for showers at home.
After this, we want to access hot water for showers attached in our bedroom.
The essence is that the pursuit of a better life will never end.
It keeps moving, this is another reason, living in the moment is so crucial.

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie.
It’s deliberate, contrived, and dishonest but the dissatisfaction, the dissatisfaction inside us.
Generally dissatisfactions are persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
Those dissatisfactions will settle once we start to live in the moment.

One of the ways to live in the moment is to make something a ritual in your life.
For anything you do or want to build, you have to start somewhere, no question.
Make it your one ritual.
Just start and see what happens.
See your internal power setting that runs through your mind.
Make small adjustments in your task as you progress along the way.
When we do adjustments, it inspires us to move ahead further with more refined thinking.

Do it again whatever time interval is convenient for you.
Do it again when you feel.
You may not accomplish anything substantial but you sleep nicely, you feel happy and satisfied. You enjoy each moment of your involvement. You live in the moment.

Living in the moment teaches us one more thing that nobody makes a perfect thing, and you will never create a perfect thing, because it doesn’t exist.
However, the thing you create or the work you do, whatever it is, will reflect the life you want to live, that is what we all want.

What matters most is living in the moment, creating harmony with our desires, embracing the life of abundance, and making small progress every day in this world.
You, your family, your mundane work, your ritual. Just think.
We have to slow down our life to live in the moment.
We must celebrate our daily mundane work, the more we celebrate these works throughout the day, the more we live in the moment.

Over the last few years, one ritual I have developed is reading the books that interest me beyond books of my profession.
Sometimes I read one page or few pages in a day, sometimes I don’t.
But I always keep the book of my interest in the house in my access, maybe in the living room or bed room or dining table.
This ritual helped me learn a lot about life and purposes.
Recently, I have been reading a book that explains about food as a medicine, and various research labs across the globe are working on it, where I found out about prostate cancer.
I found that tomatoes decrease the risk of prostate cancer by 30 percent.
I am amazed that I am a chemical scientist by training but I had no clue what tomatoes do in my body.
I knew that tomatoes contain a bioactive lycopene that inhibits angiogenesis (blood supply to cancer cells).
Tomato skin contains 3 to 5 times more lycopene than the flesh.
Eating the cooked tomato is the best because naturally lycopene remains a trans-isomer which is poorly absorbed by the body.
But by cooking, lycopene turns into cis-isomer which is readily absorbed by the body.
Moreover, lycopene is fat-soluble so that if you eat tomatoes cooked in olive oil, the amount of lycopene goes up by threefold in our body.
This is just one example of how we transform our and other people’s lives just by cherishing our mundane ritual.
One question that should continue to come up is how can the global community continue to move to the next level by our own mundane ritual.

I am relating one example of my family friend who is suffering from cancer now.
I knew this when I was involved in running a campaign for awareness of cancer.
I can feel how painful this disease is.
If you have cancer, or have ever had it, what would be your ritual in life?
Of course, your number one focus would be to kill those cancer stem cells.
But how?
I know there’s no medicine that can kill cancer stem cells yet, but there are a growing number of foods, and their bioactives’ roles in our body.
Many of those bioactives of foods are being studied for their suppressive effects on cancer stem cells.
Fortunately, foods that target cancer stem cells don’t harm beneficial stem cells.
My friend’s current ritual is to read about those foods and their bioactives that might suppress the cancer stem cells.

Once we cherish our ritual, we have to learn to get in touch with the silence within ourselves, and we must know that everything in life has purpose.
One thing I learned growing up in a farming family is that there are no mistakes, coincidences, and regrets, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Just cherish those moments and move forward.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

Up to now I have done many jobs in my life.
I switched many jobs in different stages of my life depending on life circumstances.
Sometimes I got paid a little more money but I didn’t like my work and I gave up.
Sometimes I got less paid but I liked the work a little bit more and continued for a longer period of time.
At one point, I realized that my work is not something that I just do to make a living.
Sometimes I felt like this work is actually for me to make a difference, in my life as well as in the lives of many others.
What I aspire most about my work is how specifically it’s shaped around my experiences, skillset, values, and most importantly, peace of mind.
I believe this is not only my situation, probably, many of you might have been thinking the same way.

Many times, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking that the right job opportunity is mainly based on position, money, and the notion of success by our society.
But only you know what is right for you, nobody else does.
At one point, your body and mind come together and give you a big inner voice, what is the next step you need to take?
At the end of the day, that’s the only thing which matters the most.
What makes your job good, only you know, nobody else does.
It could be a sense of autonomy or authority based on your time, expertise, health, and a sense of fulfillment.
My learned lesson: make the choice that’s right for you, I mean for your body and mind together, and ignore the noise around you by others due to your decision.

Once I realized this, my working life, job, and career all became totally different things.
This could be the same for some of you but not for the majority. In many cases, a job may not necessarily be a career, but still people do.
Most of the time a job might be a short direction with a paycheck as the primary motivation for us, that’s what happened to me.
On the other hand, a career is an occupation developed over time based on life long ambition.
Life long ambition should be a synchronized equipment of body and mind connection.
I guess I learned this too late in my life.

One day I was reading an article and I found a research finding quite amazing.
“A college degree used to slot you into a forty year career. Now it’s just an entry level point to your first job,” an astounding finding from a renowned economist, Guy Berger.
Now the biggest question is why it’s happening.
There could be multiple reasons for it but few of them I experienced directly and indirectly in today’s fast pacing world.

Few months ago, I was in my doctor’s office.
I met one of my friend’s fathers outside waiting for a doctor.
His son was doing fellowship in neurology after completing his medical degree and residency in Richmond, Virginia.
I used to share an apartment building with him, and we used to swim almost everyday together.
I knew him a little bit through his son so we started chatting. He asked me about what I know about naturopathy during our conversation.
I said I had little knowledge about it but I’ve heard about it.
First he explained to me about his many worries that he had in his life, he had been trapped in a years long, expensive divorce battle with his wife.
He talked about stress, loneliness, and existential fear.
He had severe heart problems for a very long time, and no doctor was able to cure it completely.
After adopting naturopathy which he learned from his college teacher, his problems were gone.
“For many years I was under a lot of stress due to the nature of my job. I was constantly making more money but I was compromising with my body and mind constantly,” he said.
Ultimately he decided to switch the job for various reasons especially because he realized that the job was not suitable for him.
I asked him how he knew.
He told me his body and mind finally gave him a big single voice at once about this unfit.

“Naturopathy is natural because our body is also natural.
We need natural support and stimulation to our mind and body, with the aim of enhancing self healing,” he said.
Eventually, “Know thyself ” became his best two words in life as he continued.
He adopted the fasting cure, and changed his diet completely.
He used to eat meat everyday, but now, he only eats meat about once every week.
He has been seeing a therapist regularly for the conflicts in his life, in particular about the question of what job, money, and his standard of living are worth to him.
I learned a quick lesson from him through our conversation.
We can’t solve problems just by talking, but we can certainly learn to examine our priorities in life and reduce the pressure they put on ourselves.

He correlated our body, purpose, health, and natural healing to the life of Nelson Mandela.
He was talking about Nelson Mandela’s unwavering faith and meaningful goal and its connections in his health.
Twenty five years of political imprisonment could not break him.
During that time he completed a law degree by correspondence course and became politically active immediately following his release.
He had meaningful goals, the end of apartheid and the independence of South Africa.
He lived by singing and dancing to the age of ninety five.
He had conviction and connections which had neither planning nor calculations in his life but he had respect, humility, and patience in the face of the unknown.
His body and mind totally knew it and accepted it because he practiced it his whole life.

“Eighty percent of my heart problems I eliminated just by eating right, doing frequent exercise, and most importantly, by avoiding my stressful toxic job,” he concluded.

I remember, one of my coworker’s mom, she was 64 years old. She was a successful dentist by profession.
One day, suddenly, she was admitted to hospital due to a stroke.
Fortunately, she survived because doctors were able to remove the blockage in one of her veins in her brain.
Her higher blood pressure was measured at 230 instead of 120.
Later it became clear that her life was under immense pressure and in complete disorder.
She was dealing with many financial problems for her dental practice.
Not only that she was the sole proprietor of all the household activities, her husband never participated in household activities.
She was dealing with two very demanding people, a daughter who aspired to be a competitive swimmer and a son who wanted to start his own business.

After all, one day she visited a mind-body medicine clinic with the help of her friend.
First she learned how to change basic habits, she couldn’t remove her stress entirely but she became aware of it so she found new ways to deal with it.
She trained herself how to say “no” immediately if she has to, which was a big step for her.
She reduced her workloads in the dental clinic almost half by applying the methods learned in the mind-body clinic.

Most importantly, she trained to develop courage to set boundaries between herself and her family.
Her husband used to say, “unfortunately, my prescription is still at the pharmacy, because nobody picked it up.”
Her daughter used to say, “I can’t make dinner tonight, because I have a one-on-one discussion with my coach.”
But by now, she taught her husband how to collect his medicine himself.
She taught her daughter how to organize her schedule.
Her adult daughter has understood what to say and what not to say to her mom about her competitive swimming ambition.
Her son has understood that his mom needs to put herself first in order to put her life in order.
Most amazingly, she learned to make time for herself, time for body and time for mind.
Now, she makes frequent visits to her family members and old friends.
She talks to her parents every week.
She regularly participates in blood donation because she knows that it reduces her ferritin, a protein that stores iron in the blood. Increased level of ferritin increases risk of heart attacks and strokes.
She gradually started to take a more plant based diet as she knew that high meat intake elevated ferritin levels.
Nowadays, she makes time once a week for music therapy that she learned from her old friend.
She learned to take a bath with lavender oil after long work in the dental clinic.

She practices hydrotherapy, bathing with hot and cold water became part of her life on weekends and holidays.
She knew that hot stimuli through water relax muscles, stimulate circulation, and raise body temperature. These activities activate defense cells, hormones, and messengers are released.
The truth she knew is that a hot bath causes blood vessels to widen and blood pressure to lower.

When she becomes a little bit tired, she sits for short breathing meditation where she inhales, counts backward from ten, and exhales when she has reached one.

Last time when I met her she shared the news with me: For the last few years, her blood pressure has never crossed 140 / 80.

The truth of life is: it’s tough, always has been, always will be.
Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative.
Don’t burn out.
Listen, honor, and respect what your body and mind is telling you.


Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina

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

Many years ago, my wife, my daughter and I got together with my longtime college mate whom I had not seen for quite some time.
We enjoyed dinner together, at least I enjoyed it until my daughter abruptly uttered something alarming to me as we departed from the dinner.
“You really need a positive hearing aid dad.”
I was stunned by her wording.
After we reached home, I asked my wife about a positive hearing aid that our daughter was talking about.
“The real problem is that you interrupt people when they talk to you and insert your negativity immediately without even completely listening to them,” my wife said.
“Not only that, after your injection of negativity on everything, you change topics without giving a chance to the other people what they were actually thinking.”
Quite stunning for me, not only my daughter, but my wife also proved me very wrong.
“And you not only bring your negativity chapter first when you respond, you always talk at people, not with people”.
“Just forget about whether you talk negatively or positively.”
“My dear, if you talk more than half the time with only exploration of the more negative sides, you have a serious problem, just accept it.”
Ouch!
The wording from my wife was an eye-opener for me.
Fortunately, she also advised me not to get negative first but to accept the reality, accept the present situation, listen to people with open full ears, and speak.
She advised that If I express my negative feelings first, I have a problem with people, especially, I have a listening problem with some sort of dissatisfaction associated with me.

I couldn’t sleep that night, the curtain of my life fell off completely not by some outsiders but by my own people.
Sometimes these kinds of moments appear in everybody’s life, it’s only the matter of realization.
And obviously, when?
Next morning, I determined that I would be my daughter’s and my love of life’s favorite person.
But how?
I started this journey by reading good books.
The first book I read on the topic was, “The Lost Art of Listening ” by Michael Nichols.
The author says, “listening is a skill and like any skill it must be developed. Listening is a natural outgrowth of caring and concern for people.”

I learned that If I am a poor listener, I am more likely to become a negative person.
The most negative person is the most worrying person, who worries all the time internally so that negativity comes out of their mouth first.

I learned some essential lessons eventually from reading good books.
To improve my positive attitude, I must listen well. I have to restrain myself from disagreeing or talking or sharing my own thoughts.
To become positive, I must hold back what I have to say and control the urge to interrupt.
Most people aren’t really interested in our negative point of view until I become convinced that we have heard and appreciated theirs.
If I really want a positive attitude, I have to exercise humility and restraint, I have to learn to change my behavior as I mature by emulating whom I admire and adopting those qualities they possess.
Most of my positive attitude comes from my adaptation.
As we all know, Charles Darwin, “It is not the smart nor the strong that survive, but those who have the ability to adapt.”
Remember, good listening skill is an adaptation.
Adaptation with an open mind and open ears crushes the negativity inside us.

I re-evaluated my lifestyle, my thinking, and my own expectations of it.
I have so much to be thankful for, not only in the creation of my own life, but also with the substance of my existence.
Then why does my negativity always appear first?
Of course, at one point of my life, I was tired of watching my life struggle aimlessly in the dark, missing many opportunities, zero knowledge financially, and growing increasingly unhappy.
I was too worried about things which never happened in my life.
Those moments probably helped me to cultivate my negativity all the way up to a certain point.

The serious challenges for me were overcoming adversity and handling worry and stress.
I was very weak at understanding the value of relationships.
If we don’t understand the value of any relationship then we have no way of knowing any mental and physical profile.
I was very poor at making decisions, and, most importantly, absolutely unknown about the process of letting go in life.

At some point in our lives, we have to decide whether to live to work or work to live.
I completely forgot about it.
I completely forgot these two words “let go”.

I learned the best way to ease my anxiety during times of stress is to recognize the anxiety because it brings negativity.
What is this?
Where is it coming from?
What is its cause?
For me, anxiety was a major contributing factor for my negativity.

We have to be calm by understanding our right paths, of course, there could be many right paths. We have to not only recognize the right path but also follow it so that there is less manic activity that is counterproductive for us.
To be positive, we have to be proactive, we have to be calmed by doing not just the right thing, but the best thing.
Best thing can be different for different people, but it’s up to us what is best for us.

One of the reasons for my negativity I realized was my status quo bias.
It was my irrational tendency to prefer choices that maintain the status quo even when other choices would make me better off.
I was very scared to change a few things in my life.
This tendency had many implications in my life.
I would like to read about Charles Darwin at home more than attending my friend’s casual party but I didn’t want to offend my friend.
I would like an afternoon nap more than roaming around a shopping mall but I didn’t want to tell anybody about this.

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

One of my father’s friends has 7 kids from two marriages, a big house, and is pretty much financially independent.
When I was a second year PhD student, he told me that he did a 4 years job in total in his lifetime under someone else as an employee.
He told me that the job was not made for him.
During that time he was so negative that he lost all of his hopes.
When I visited his home a few years ago, I saw at least 100 books everywhere in his house.
I saw a book titled “Atomic Habits” by James Clear in his rest room.
I was shocked.
At one point in our conversation he said, “I used my formal academic degree for those 4 years of my life, beside that all of my life I am pretty much dependent on these books.”
“All of my negativity evaporated through these pages not at once but gradually. I knew who I am.”

“I love a big family, many kids, a big house, financial independence, and lots of books everywhere, that’s who I am,” he said.

Remember, being a good positive person can begin with you, it’s your good graces that you have inside you, of course, each one of us have to recognize it.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

Leo Tolstoy said, “Unhappy families are interesting because each member is unhappy in a different way. On the other hand, happy families are uninteresting because they are all happy in the same way.”
As we all know, sudden changes in our lives are interesting and gradual changes are uninteresting and boring.
In a broader context, as Tolstoy said, this is equally applicable in families.
Changes in unhappy families are often sudden and those in happy families are often gradual.
The experience of sudden and gradual changes in terms of love, family, and marriage is quite interesting.
I’ve experienced some of them through my single life and married life with a lot of ups and downs.

I got married many years ago.
Over the years, I noticed something quite stilted about our marriage.
This was a learning experience in my life.
All the patterns about our marriage were consistently about correcting our shortcomings, these were pretty much what we should not do in the years to come rather than any other things.
We were always focussed in changes and a lot of them were sudden changes rather than gradual. In reality we were more excited for sudden changes than any other things after our marriage.
We’re quite excited even to make plans for sudden changes without thinking a pinch about the implementation part.

Here are some examples.
I will not be so pokey with my friends from tomorrow.
I will listen more carefully when my wife talks starting today.
I will limit myself to two cups of sugary tea in a day from next saturday.
I will spend more time with my old parents starting next year.
I will stop whining immediately.
I will not send a confrontational email whatsoever starting immediately.

Once our first daughter came into our world, everything changed in our married life.
First time in my life, I realized that I have someone other than me as the most important person.
Even if sometimes me and my wife would fight in different ways, I would stop immediately just by thinking I shouldn’t do this.
I have a daughter at home now.
In other words, the love of our daughter changed the course of our relationship.

Not only the responsibility but also my humility grew unknowingly after my marriage.
I don’t know how.
It didn’t happen immediately though, it happened very gradually.
When I was single, I used to talk about myself a lot.
After marriage, it decreased significantly, little by little at a time, and, of course, unknowingly.
Nowadays, rather than just talking about myself, I prefer to let my daughter talk about herself.
I didn’t train my mind that way but it started to happen automatically.
I love just to listen.
Again, it didn’t happen at once with intention, but gradually over the many years.
I realized now how the love of children changes us enormously.

After more than 15 years of my marriage, I experienced mainly three kinds of love.
All this experience came gradually, naturally, and most importantly, with mental maturity.

First is the love of the people who gave us security, comfort, acceptance, and help.
They always bolster our confidence and guide us in so many different situations.
They remain behind us as pillars morally and emotionally.
Probably, this is why nature taught us to love our parents unconditionally whatsoever.

Second is the love of people who depend on us for all the same reasons that I mentioned above.
These are the people for whom we want to live, we want to lose, we want to sacrifice, and we want to push them ahead rather than go ourselves ahead.
This is why we as parents always love our children.

Third is romantic love between husband and wife.
This love is nothing but the idealization of the next person as a husband and wife in terms of their strengths and virtues.
This idealization is a very long process to bear fruits in our lives.
Idealization as a husband and wife is the downplaying of each other’s limitations.
This is the reason we celebrate marriage anniversaries; 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, and so on.
I believe romantic love between husband and wife helps to accumulate strength for both parental and children love that I mentioned above.

Marriage appears as an evolving point of these three kinds of love.
This is because, up to this point, we remain only as a son or daughter of our parents but once we become parents ourselves our mind works in a completely different way.
Marriage is evolutionary and essential for the understanding of love because it is such a holy combination of all three kinds of love (parental, children, and romantic) under the same umbrella.
Marriage can happen suddenly but its growth, of course, is a very long gradual process.
Marriage provides the capacity to love and be loved as a signature strength in our lives if we compose it manually and carefully.
One fact is that love through marriage flows out of parents, children and romantic partners like a river and they soak it up like sponges.

I also experienced that marriage is also a vibrational process for me and my wife that sends signals to my parents, and our children.
It moves through intimacy, passion, and connectedness.
And the happy note is that marriage has the capacity to combine all of them.
Many people think marriage is not an event, it is the beginning of an institution, and I totally believe in it.
As I stated already, marriage has evolutionary blessings and it has emotional and material benefits that I shared with my own experience above.

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

Few years ago, one of my very good friends suffered from mild depression.
He was quite unhappy with his life, he would love loneliness more than anything else, he decided to get married and changed his lifestyle after some minor counseling.
I don’t know what caused it but after some years his depression disappeared as he stated himself and I also experienced from my side.
I have read in books that good marriage helps to remove depression which readily spirals downward in our married life.

As my friend told me, “a depressed mood is like a demon that makes negative memories come to mind more easily and these negative thoughts create even a more depressed mood, which in turn makes even more negative thoughts accessible, and so on.
The solution for this is to increase positive emotions to start an upward spiral of more positive emotion”.
Marriage, of course, became the source of positive emotion for him.
It may not be the same for others but for him marriage became a medicine.

From my friend’s experience, I can say that positive emotion broadens and builds the intellectual, social, and physical resources.
“Marriage invigorates positive emotion which leads to exploration, which leads to mastery, and mastery leads not only to more positive emotion but to the discovery of our signature strengths”, my friend added.
My eyes saw a depressed friend growing into a very successful police officer after a successful marriage.

In one of the studies, researchers asked widows to talk about their late spouses.
Some of the widows told happy stories, some told sad stories and they also complained.
Few years later, researchers found that the women who had told happy stories were much more likely to be engaged in life and dating again.
This is just one example of positive emotion, how it works in our lives.

The pleasant life successfully encompasses the positive emotions about present, past, and future.
Positive emotions means bodily pleasures and higher pleasures like comfort.
Gratification is also a positive emotion that indicates the activity we like to do.
Good marriage helps to strengthen both positive emotion and gratification which are keys for our signature strength.
There is a difference between a good life and a meaningful life.
Good life uses our signature strengths to obtain maximum gratification in the main part of our life. But meaningful life uses our signature strengths in the service of something much larger than we are.
Successful marriage helps to reinforce a meaningful life because it is a cumulative force.

We humans are more like cars on a highway.
We see most cars are going a little higher over the speed limit. In that situation what we generally do is go with the flow with the traffic.
We know we shouldn’t do this but we still do.
So please, don’t make your marriage just like the flow of the traffic on the highway.
In this situation what we need is automotive designers to focus on how new technology can help us better manage vehicular traffic and an improved cruise control.
Exactly the same way, the best marriage needs more flow of love around the marriage umbrella: love of children, love of parents, and love of conjugal partners.
Marriage is not just a flow of what we see around us: get married, have kids, and move in life.
Let’s innovate new technology in the engine of marriage through love.

My ending note is slightly different.
If marriage is such a nice thing then why do half of all marriages now end in divorce?
From my personal experience, nowadays, divorce is a very good psychological option in our lives.
When things go wrong in marriage, blaming the whole marriage and finding a new alternative arrangement becomes an attractive option rather than understanding the gradual process of good marriage.
Of course, the gradual process is uninteresting, time consuming, and boring.
It’s up to us what we prefer, a gradual process or alternative process.

Remember, the day we get married, it begins with love, joy, and optimism.
But if we don’t respect the process of its gradual mutual growth, it falls apart into pieces because each partner sees only the weakness and vices of the other partner.

The most empowering way to transform a marriage is to change the way you view your spouse. Your spouse is your mirror that can show you some aspects of yourself.

Accept your differences with your spouse as a cause of your celebration.

So, enjoy and nurture mutual growth, as marriage, everyone.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina