The Element of Understanding that Life is A Journey and Its Hope For Never Being Afraid to Pack Our Bags

Picture Courtesy: Tanita Jha - Trip to England January 2015

Life is a journey.

We should be ready to pack our bags

And go where we need to go.

And go when we need to go.

Accepting there will be surprising twists and turns.

Many twists and turns will be of our own choosing.

Our minds will tell us “turn back” or “take this road, not that one”

Sometimes, our hearts will do the talking.

Sometimes, our minds and our hearts will both say the same thing.

And so we will make our journeys.

Everyone’s journey will be different.

We all know this one:

You go to Reed College only to decide you don’t want your parents to spend money on college, so you hang to learn calligraphy, then you go to India, then you return to America and you start a company with a friend to make computers that will blow everyone’s mind. Your journey takes you away from the beloved company you start, but you continue to make smart investments, and eventually you come back later to the company to create and launch the world’s most popular personal electronics products.

Here’s another one, made famous by a Michael Lewis book….

You pass out of Santa Teresa High School, San Jose, and go to medical school with plans to become a neurologist. Two years later, you decide you are more interested in investments. You drop out and start studying subprime mortgages. You end up being one of the few people to make money during the housing collapse by betting against sub-prime mortgages. You become the principal character in a Michael Lewis book.

And another one….

You spend most of your early adulthood serving time in prison. While serving a 7 year prison sentence, you read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  It has a powerful impact on you and you decide you want to turn your life around. You start making different choices. You complete your MBA in prison. You start writing daily letters to your young son.  When you come out, you look for a job. You are turned down by employers because of your background.  You never lose hope.  Eventually, an employer decides to take a chance on you and hires you as an air-conditioning and heating salesman.  You prove to be a star.  You start your own air-conditioning company. You are featured in Inc Magazine because of your success. You and your son have a great relationship. Encouraged to inspire others with your turnaround story, you write two motivational books and become a motivational speaker.

3 very different journeys.

But they have these things in common:

Where each story starts is not where it ends.

And all are stories of hope.

Our lives are meant to be stories of hope.

It is the greatest legacy we can leave our children.

Hope is about finding a way.

When I left India and moved to America, I had to find a way.

Here’s how my story reads:

You enroll in Jyothi Nivas College for your undergrad, but you skip classes and you are unable to take your finals. Luckily for you, you do some freelance writing for the newspaper which gets noticed, and on the strength of this writing, you are offered a job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency. You make a successful career in copywriting, working for different ad agencies, including the Indian arm of J Walter Thompson. Eventually, you start your creative shop Purple Patch and teach a copywriting class at Loyola College. A personal crisis results in you moving to America. You support yourself and your daughter doing temporary administrative work. A pivotal moment occurs when you get a break as a Commissions Analyst. Though you have no training for this kind of work, you make it work and it becomes your second act.

Our journeys will have pivotal moments.

Both crises and opportunities are pivotal moments.

It is at the intersection of a crisis or opportunity that a new journey begins.

It was a pivotal moment when I got my first copywriting job.

It was an opportunity to blaze a trail in an exciting field.

It was a pivotal moment when I got my first Commissions Analyst job.

It was an opportunity to reinvent myself in a new field.

Pivotal moments give us an opportunity to choose X over Y.

X is what we are used to. X is what we are comfortable with. X is what we can't give up. X is the only thing we have known. X is a false belief that we are stuck and can't change. X is what we identify with.

Y is new and risky.

Y moments take courage.

When I quit my job to start my creative shop Purple Patch, it was a pivotal moment. I chose Y over X.

When I decided to leave India and all the success I had achieved there, it was an X vs Y moment. I chose Y.

When I quit my job as a Commissions Analyst and decided to work for myself as a Commissions Consultant, it was an X vs Y moment. I chose Y.

Life-changing events are also pivotal moments. 

They are called life-changing because we are changed by them.

The depression I suffered in my 30's - that was life changing.

It made me grasp the importance of living a healthy and meaningful life. I have dedicated myself to that ever since.

My daughter's birth was life-changing.

Suddenly I  had to make decisions, not for my benefit, but for my daughter's benefit. It made me choose to be responsible and to live a more wholesome life.

The loss of my mother was life-changing.

I grasped the fact that the world had lost a gentle soul and that the world needed more souls like my mother. I started working on becoming like my mother, to honor her legacy.

What are the things that stand between us and pivotal moments that could change our lives?

Fear is one of the things.

Here are some others:

Preoccupation

Pride

Anger

Greed

Laziness

Stubborness

Looking without seeing

Hearing without listening

Copying without understanding

We tend to copy other people and their choices.

If everyone is buying houses, we want to buy houses.

If everyone is driving expensive cars, we want expensive cars.

If everyone has expensive handbags, we want expensive handbags.

It is a pivotal moment when we understand we don't have to be sheep.

It is a pivotal moment when we understand things don’t have to be the way they are.

It is a pivotal moment when we understand we are free to make any choice we want to make.

We don’t have to copy everyone else, sacrificing our peace and sanity, propping up our self-worth on flimsy grounds.

We don't have to do things for the sake of pleasing people.

Trying to keep up with the copying and the obliging will impact our peace, sanity and self-worth negatively.

In pivotal moments, we understand we have to unpack our existing bags, throw out the junk there, and then repack light.

The junk is everything we are addicted to…

Our success in a particular field, our current lifestyle, our my-way-or-the highway thinking, our never-ending frustration with the people in our lives who don't do as we please.

It was a pivotal moment when I understood I could change anything just by changing my approach and thoughts.

My daughter and I struggled with our relationship in middle school and the first two years of high school.

I changed my approach and thoughts and everything changed.

Problems at work used to get the better of my emotions.

I changed my approach and thoughts and everything changed.

My investments used to cause me to lose sleep.

I changed my approach and thoughts and everything changed.

The cool thing about the epiphany that “our approach and thoughts are the root cause of our suffering or pain” is that we know we can fix it.

It is the one thing that is under our control.

Nothing else is as much under our control as our ability to change our approach and thoughts.

Personal change is a huge victory.

So we should be glad for the pivotal moments in our lives that lead to those victories.

Here’s how my mother's death led to a deep and lasting change in my life:

Ever since anyone could remember, she had a horrible temper.  She could be kind and sweet one moment, fly off the handle the next.  She was extremely unpleasant to be around when she had one of her rages. She would rant and rave and say terrible things.  Then her mother died.  Her mother had been a gentle soul all her life.  She decided to honor her mother’s memory by trying to behave as gently as her mother and to start treating her daughter with the same gentleness her mother did.   This was the beginning of a deep and lasting change. She was able to find the inner strength to do this.

As the Dalai Lama said, “When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.”

I was able to find the inner strength.

I am also grateful for the pivotal events that led me to quit my full-time job as a Commissions Analyst and become a Commissions Consultant.

It was because things were not going well at work that I decided to quit.

It was a bad time for anyone to be quitting a job.

But when we take our first brave step, we will find it easy to take our next brave step. 

This is what happened to me.

In 2010, in the midst of an extremely bad economy, she quit her job.  She went out on a limb and paid to do the Xactly Administrators Course with her own money. She bought catastrophic health insurance and lived off her savings.  They say when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  She read a book called How God Changes Your Brain.  In the book there was a meditation technique.  She bravely ventured into practicing this meditation technique.  She soon entered a new realm spiritually, socially and psychologically. She was hired on as a consultant to an Xactly Implementations team and has been a consultant ever since, helping companies administer commissions on a temporary basis.

How can a pivotal moment benefit us?

If you lose your job, it can be the start of a new career.

If you have a health scare, it can be the start of a healthier lifestyle.

If you suffer a loss, it can be the start of a new chapter of hope, recovery and resilience.

Sometimes when we are in a crisis, hearing or reading a few words can be a pivotal moment for us.

Diogenes, who was covered in my post The Man In The Bath-tub experienced such a pivotal moment.

So did St. Augustine.

We will also experience many small pivotal moments.

My posts Family Advice I am Grateful For and Are You a Mosquito in Someone’s Room? give some examples.

Are you at a pivotal moment?

A new journey beckons. 

Get ready.

All you need is your own inner light and a willingness to pack your bags.

At your journey's end, a new dawn awaits.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week….M…..a Pearl Seeker like you.  Thanks to Ajay and Aarathi for their comments and compliments and thanks to the rest of you for your likes, pins and votes.  Much appreciated.