choosing between stability and instability

It's a holiday here today in Singapore and I'm battling a sickness that has left me without a voice for one week now. My raspy hoarse voice has gathered many comments from "this is very sexy" to "you sound like a boy breaking into puberty" - all very hilarious and all very welcome by me. I'm not a huge believer of  using strong medicine (steroids and antibiotics) to treat common colds, but this time around, I gave in and decided to seek medical help to treat this stubborn condition. Seems to be working already. So after a 12 hour sleep I woke up feeling beautiful - still without a voice though.

Anyway, I digress. Over the last couple of weeks, or maybe months I have been thinking very hard about life and all aspects of it. If you've read some posts from my other blog, you'd know that Im questioning many of my friendships, I'm questioning the idea of love and I'm even questioning ShahRukh Khan - that is serious stuff. I am at that point in my life, where I can no longer put off what I've been wanting to do for really long. I was watching this TED talk where the speaker points to how at certain points in your life, the cost of inaction is way bigger than any fear you have associated with a particular action you've been considering. And i believe that point in life for me is now. I've had a dream and a passion for really long now and for multiple reasons have not pursued it.

I love my job right now, I love the people I work with, and yes I wake up everyday excited about stepping in through those doors and wanting to spend 8 hour or more with the people I am surrounded with. And I'm grateful for that. I'm healthy, my yoga practice is definitely not where I would want it to be, but I get to get on the mat everyday and share my practice with some amazing teachers. I get to teach once / twice a week and i love it - I wouldn't trade that monday evening class for anything, at all. Being an extreme introvert and a stage -shy person, it's surprising, pleasantly so, how comfortable I am with facing my students from a teacher's mat and guiding them through a practice - that hopefully means as much as them as my practice means to me. So life truly is beautiful, and I was telling someone the other day over dinner how sometimes I stop and smile and want to hug all these aspects of my life and thank them for being there.

But that is not to say, that I fully know I should be someplace else doing something else. In moments of quietude when I can afford to be myself and don't have to talk to anyone or cater to anyone's needs at work, I realise I really truly want to be doing something else. I want to be spending every waking minute trying to fulfill that dream - and yet I am paralysed with fear when I think about doing it.While some understand my fears, others often brush it away as me giving myself excuses for not wanting to do something, for being happy and comfortable in a safety net that I've built for myself, some even go as far as to say, I don't have what it takes to follow through and hence they are truly very disappointed in me.

While that hurts some times, it also serves as good motivation when I recover from the initial shock of having being subjected to such harshness. The point I'm trying to get at is that life throws extremely hard choices your way sometimes, and i watched this another amazing TED talk that spoke about how hard choices are hard because there isn't a very obvious "this is better than that" reasoning behind it. Each of the choices life presents you with in this scenario are all good options - one choice is better in some ways and the other is better in other ways. They aren't equally good, in the sense that if you make one a little better (eg increase my salary in my current job) it doesn't necessarily make it better than the other (pursuing my dream) -  there's no real clear way to choose. So when you're facing hard choices, they are not as good as or better off or worse off than each other - which would actually make it easy for us choose between them! Instead they are all on a par and that they are in the same space of value that they bring to you/your life.

Staying with my current job, doing what i enjoy doing is a great choice, but so is pursuing something I've always wanted. Spending time with a man I have begun to love is gorgeous, so is asking him where he wants to take this, and if he feels what I do. In both these situations - doing nothing is a great option still, I get to do the job I've been doing and in the second scenario, I get to spend time with him and be with him as a 'friend', no questions asked. The flip side and the cost of this inaction on my part, is that I push out my dream further away from a five-year plan to a ten-year plan to a god-knows-when plan - and one day I wake up and say "maybe, if I had had the courage then to give this a go, i would be doing something totally different with my life". And in the other example, I will fall very deeply in love with this man, expect nothing from him and cheat myself and my emotions for a short-term temporary togetherness that maintaining status quo would give me and then take ages to get over all of it.

In both those situations, if I let fear override me, I'll choose status quo - because they are both great options. But at what cost? So after i watched this TED talk about hard choices, I jumped off of my desk at work and began chatting with my friend about the changes I am going to bring about in my life. The talk eventually tells you that to truly know which option to choose and which path to travel on, you need to answer certain fundamental questions for yourself and hence create your own reasons, instead of those that are "rational", because more often than not, there are no rational values you can attach to these choices, they can not be quantified in the same way for you as they can be for someone else.

Some of the questions I asked myself were :

Who are you?
What do you want to be?
What kind of a life do you want to live?
What are you for or against?

What are our reasons for choosing something, instead of going with what we are told are good reasons for choosing something. And that truly blew my mind - the fact that I  had the power to choose my own reasons for choosing my own choice, liberated me. I didn't have to do what traditional rationality and society thinks I should do.

So those two TED talks about the cost of inaction and how to make hard choices - came together for me in some way to alleviate my fears - the fear of missing out in many ways - what if I choose the wrong options - what if when approached for a definitive answer, he stops being my friend altogether- or what if I quit my job and discover i no longer have that much time for yoga as i did with a salaried job? The fear of missing out often hangs over most hard decisions and makes you think that there has to be one option that gives me everything - the best option for me to choose which very obviously stands above all of the other options. And that simply is not true. Because as I've discovered more often than not in my life, hard choices don't have perfectly rational solutions.

For all my fears, my counter question to go to are "so what"? And if that does not result in a satisfactory answer for why I shouldn't pursue my dreams, those fears don't count at all!

I'm terrible when life throws these kind of things at me. My default state is to run and not accept that I need to be making these kinds of decisions anytime soon. My need to be at harmony with everything around me - whether its people, places, situations, overpowers my need to put a foot down and be firm. Except now, because there is too much at stake right now - because my gut tells me this is the right time and this is a ripe time. Because sometimes I feel like shaking things up - as much I as I hate to be in a shaken up state of being - it needs to happen. And through this all what doesn't change is my mat. My practice starts the minute I step on that mat, with the first touch of it, and with the first feel of that energy pulsing through me, with the immense need and impulse to move, breathe, and sigh, I feel alive. It's probably the only place that makes me feel alive right now! And the only other time I have been this acutely aware of every single muscle in my body waking up or where every breath I'm taking is directed, or being this singular in my gaze during asanas; was at my teacher training or the retreats I go to with Routes of Yoga. This need inside of me to bring about some instability in my life is thankfully accompanied by an extreme stability on the mat.

And for that I'm ever grateful.

Namaste