Defragmenting your self
Back in the good old days, whenever my windows desktop used to get slow, I used to do disk defragmentation - analyzing the hard drive and merging fragmented files into one contiguous block.
As I reflect on my life journey, I realise that my life folders have been in a continuous state of defragmentation.
For the first twenty-plus years of my life, growing up in a conveyor belt industrial schooling system, I grew up with hermetically sealed life folders called "Play" "Work" and "Religion" and often wondered why they never acknowledged, let alone talk with each other. Little did I know then that for "Play" and "Work" to defragment totally, I had to rediscover "Religion" through "Spirituality".
It took me a while to realise that for the first twenty-five years of my life, I was unconsciously converting every form of education into self-discovery (swadhyaya). This process of defragmentation ensured that I quit my pay-cheque jobs, discovered work as a self-liberation project, got my hands dirty literally and metaphorically, and fully owned my appetites and invocations.
Over the last few months, I have discovered that I have to work doubly hard to defragment the life folders that separate the worldly from the spiritual. Even though wise mentors advise you to keep business and spirituality separate, you discover that this advice is only applicable to the previous generation and not my generation.
In my parents' generation, work was worship.
Quite literally actually. St. Anthony stands tall in my parents’ bedroom, the patron saint of the convent school where my mother taught mathematics and English for almost three decades. During my Chennai childhood days, the Tuesday setting sun radiated grace and joy when they were spent at St. Anthony church in Parrys.
And now when I look at my generation, work is a self-discovery project. Or to be more precise, a self-liberation project.
Nothing that I'm doing now to make a living could have been planned. Including the tremendous amount of micro shocks you encounter at work, when you discover that your cash flow is a 'triveni sangam' of different streams ebbing and flowing into your bank account to assuage the anxious mind that once got addicted to a prompt SMS notification that alerted at the end of every month when salary got credited.
When your working life is replete with micro shocks, somewhere along the way you realize that you are relatively immune from macro shocks that jolt the economy once in a while.
As I get in touch with the fact two-thirds of 2023 is already over, I'm reminding myself to hitchhike to places where I seldom go.
As Johnny Walker (never) said: Keep Hitchhiking.
Which life folders rule your life? Have you defragmented any folders in the past? Which folder do you find hard to defragment?
P.S.1 The self-paced edition of my course, “Yoga of LinkedIn” went live a few days ago. The course is a distillation of my learnings from 2014 ever since I started playing with the LinkedIn platform as a lab of self-discovery. If you are game to explore a radical way of using LinkedIn to do self-discovery experiments, you might enjoy this course.