Words to Live By

26.12.2019

When I was around six, I realized whatever you are told not to do, you must store away in your mind till the time comes when you can actually do it. In other words, when you grow up- this was my only goal of every day, though now that I’m grown up, I wonder what the big hurry was, anyway.

But I’m straying from the original point of discussion. Like the popular saying, strangers are only friends that you haven’t yet met, I thought anything you were not supposed to do, was not dangerous or anything. It was simply the Promised Land, unchartered territory that you could conquer, eventually. But, as of now, you had to simply focus on one thing: growing up.

Of course I thought I could do anything once I grew up! Wasn’t that always the answer?

To questions like, “When can I do that?” and “When can I go there?”

The answer always was, “When you grow up.”

To me, with no proper sense of time, my childhood seemed never ending, and adulthood was too far away to even fathom. And I spent a lot of time trying to find things to do to pass the time. I was never bored, I had enough imagination to escape that sorry state, but I did find myself feeling unhappy from time to time. I knew feeling sad was normal, but sometimes when I felt sad, try as I might, I simply couldn’t pinpoint a reason why.

Of course, now, with conversations about mental health gaining momentum, someone is bound to throw the word ‘depression’ at me, saying that that was what I was experiencing at age six. Well, it wasn’t depression. I was simply not busy enough.  And once I realized that, time seemed to move faster and I had fewer and fewer moments of slight unhappiness.

I remember looking on top of a cabinet in my house, and finding a plaque on top that was engraved with quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson. One of the quotes: “Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy,” struck something in me, and I had to read it multiple times to fully absorb it. And suddenly it all made sense.

I did not understand that keeping busy was a method to avoid being unhappy, but rather that I was unhappy because I wasn’t keeping busy. We don’t know what Stevenson truly intended those words to mean, but I knew that they had a tremendous impact on me.

I became more open, actively searched for things to do. Not things that I could do simply to pass time, but activities I grew to find meaningful. That I could learn from. Reading was one of these. And then, many years later, meditation. It took me some time to realize that if there isn’t an immediate outcome to an activity, that doesn’t mean it is not important or not worth doing. I learnt what patience meant.

Over the years of course, my interpretation of the words, ‘keeping busy’ has changed and broadened to include many new meanings. One of the new meanings was that you don’t necessarily have to keep doing something new. I learnt what persistence meant.

This is advice that I carry even to this day, and it has served me well. Sometimes, it has been hard to follow, knowing that doing nothing and whiling away time can be equally attractive. But, anticipating and avoiding those pitfalls only became part of the challenge. The whole process of discovering myself is ongoing, as is every journey, and I can look forward to the coming years with the knowledge that this sound advice will still be relevant.