What Are You At 3 AM?
20th-century Telugu cinema thespian NT Rama Rao was notorious for giving appointments at 3 AM. He was known for hitting the bed at 6 PM, and after finishing his morning ablutions in the wee hours of the morning, which included gobbling up a chicken at 2:30 AM, NT Rama Rao used to get ready to receive the long serpentine queue of visitors - more often, directors pregnant with stories- waiting at his house entrance.
When he sat down with his visitors, his first question was simple, yet nerve-wracking: “Tell Me” (చెప్పు in Telugu).
When you are asked “Tell Me About Yourself” at 3 AM, what will you respond?
There was a time when I took such questions seriously. Including ridiculous ones that were famous among the HR community -“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
When your stomach cells (lining) replace themselves every 4 days; when the skin replaces itself every 35 days; when the liver regenerates every 6 weeks; when the skeletal frame regenerates every 3 months and the brain every two months, what exactly are you and what exactly can you say about yourself, whether now or in the future?
Few days back, in my Patanjali Yoga Sutra Class with Raghu Ananthanarayanan, we were exploring this most underrated sutra: "Dhyanaheyah-Tadvrttayah" and the whole universe of implications it carries in this densely packed sutra.
In order to discover your highest potential, you are better placed to observe yourself as a living "phenomenon", rather than any current structure you've built of "Your Self" and the equivalent projected "Future Self". One of the powerful questions that we explored is this: What happens when ‘I’ don’t have to keep “Me” alive?
Can you watch this "phenomenon" with as much aliveness as you would bring if there were a snake in the room? Observing yourself with that intensity from the outside IS the challenge. And that's the joy of practicing Yoga. You discover potent reserves of fire within to watch yourself as this live cocktail of emotions, biases, beauty, thoughts, and patterns without identifying yourself with any of these. Can you watch this live cocktail of life brewing right in front of you and discover yourself?
In Indic thought, there is a concept of Shesha prashna. If you are from the land of Bengal, you might remember a popular novel of the same name written by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay.
In simple terms, it points to those questions which remain unanswered.
“Who Am I?”, “Where Am I?”, and “In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?” will remain questions that will remain unanswered. And when you ask these questions long and consistently enough, you end up practicing Yoga.
***
July Cohort for “Yoga of LinkedIn” is now open for registrations. The course is an exploration of using LinkedIn as a laboratory to play with yourself and ask the questions:1) Who am I? 2) Where am I? 3) In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?