Here for writing

Why we do what we do is a very important question. And I had been struggling to answer this for the five years I was working in commercial banking. Why am I doing this job? Apart from salary, there was absolutely no other answer that I could give myself. Good pay, yes. In fact, a very good pay. Work life balance, yes. It was a five day week work. Work profile, yes. I had to interact with and manage the commercial accounts. Which means, low volume and high value. So yes, it was a good profile with amazing exposure and learning. But, I hated going to work. Every morning, it was a struggle for me to go to office. Often, I just had to switch off my mind and completely ignore its protests. Because, fairly speaking, I had no reason to complain. It was a good job with good pay with a very comfortable work environment -in both the banks that I was working. But still, it didn't make me happy. I used to go through the five days of the week, looking forward for the weekend. And I use

Being mindful is a term that is done to death. I first came across this term during my PG, where one of my faculties was discussing about Thich Nhat Hanh, when he was just becoming popular in India. She expounded the monk's theory of mindfulness and said how we should be mindful of everything that we do. At the age of 22, I didn't understand this concept. You just do things, right? So what is the difference between doing things and doing things "mindfully"? Out of all the things that she said that day, one example is still stuck to my mind. I remember her saying something to the effect of, "even if you are doing something as simple as, say having an orange, be mindful of its flavours, think about how the earth has produced this wonderful fruit, absorb the wonderful smell that the fruit emantes when you peel it...savour the burst of tangy juice when the fruit is bitten". And I was thinking, "Heh, how boring? who would do all this? Then all that I

A quiet mind is a happy mind. But the fleeting happiness that I experience every now and then does not mean that my mind is quiet. It just means that I am experiencing a fleeting glimpse of bliss, that will soon be replaced by the hum drum of everyday existence. However, a mind that is truly quiet, is a source of infinite and abiding bliss. It is truly fascinating to observe this mind. And the biggest paradox is, when I start observing the mind, like a shy child, it slinks away and curls up into a quiet corner. And when that happens, the bliss becomes infinite. Just think, wave after wave of ceaseless thoughts is what constitutes the mind. And all these thoughts are purely based on experiences of my past or the expectations of the future. To rephrase, the mind always moves in the space that I create for it, ie -it roams about in the realms of past or in the unexplored kingdoms of the future. My minds chews on a family outing that happened when I was 12, or it invokes ang