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Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Endurance and Enjoyment

In my personal life, I see the benefits of endurance and patience on an everyday basis. Sometimes, with many things in my mind, all of them individually capable of messing my mind up completely, I feel like giving up everything and running away. But with growing age, I see that the frequency and intensity of occurrance of those frustrating moments is going down. I see that there's great merit and benefit in not reacting violently to certain conditions. Things often don't need a herculean effort to sort out. They just need us to stay put for a moment. They pass by themselves, giving us that space to think clearly again.

But there's also another lesson I have learned which I wish to share with you. Crises keep coming and going. In between, there are invariably moments when we have the space to think clearly. Let's call them open moments. As crises pass giving place to open moments, it's very necessary for us to switch from endurance mode to enjoyment mode. This means that, while crises are often just to be endured, it's very essential to leverage the open moments to feel life in its beautiful form. As these moments come, we should quickly gather all the positivity in us and start leveraging. Those are moments to enjoy life, work hard, dream, do something creative and charitable, and often to prepare for the next crisis, which may be just round the corner.

I have found that the ability to switch between endurance and enjoyment modes with agility is a great way to make life more valuable.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like that you call them 'open moments'! It is very apt and is going to stay in my head. :)

Pritesh said...

A very beautiful thought! I am glad I read that one! The concept of "open moments" suddenly seems to have opened a whole wide world of possibilities to my eyes :)

Shipra Agrawal said...

There are so many moments that we "close" by giving undue importance to a crisis... in my experience it helps to ask in midst of those closed days, whether they really need to be closed, or can I open these moments? Invariably, later when a significant crisis/problem comes, we invariably feel how open those earlier moments were, which we let pass us by.

Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti said...

Dear Shipra,
In my opinion, you are one of the PhDs in this subject. One thing we all friends collectively realise and have again and again admired you for is this: you have tremendous capacity to make light of heavy moments.
Well, I'm not at your level. For the moment, my attempts are at the level of identifying open moments. Once I see myself doing that with ease, I guess, a natural thing would be to identify the closed moments which can be opened.
Thanks.

Arvinder Kour said...

Very Nice Thought!! I am very glad to read that one!! Your post gives a very clear idea of “Open moments and its utilization for more creative work” but often one find so much entangled in thoughts of either past crises or fear of future that it’s very difficult to get this type of open moments. But yes I do agree ( though bit difficult to practice) that we can create this open moment by controlling our reaction to the crises by keeping patience and endurance!! Your idea of open moments is a guiding star to leverage it to feel life in its beautiful form. Your Idea is really very inspiring !!!!! Keep writing and inspiring us always!!!

Anonymous said...

My comments are in this pdf page.
https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=b744dd0cc4bcdb8d&resid=B744DD0CC4BCDB8D!106