“You are completely crazy, Dadz”
My elder one Jen, announces on a lazy Sunday evening as we sit together on the floor giving each other facials as we discuss the finer points of farting in public with my equally crazy younger daughter Becky.
As I teach the younger one the tricks of how to accomplish that without making it publicly known, Jenifer the more sensible one sends out a judgment flare while at the same time trying not to crack up in peals of laughter.
She calls out to her mother who refuses to be wrapped in this craziness.
Many years ago, I enrolled in weeklong Phowa meditation training in San Simeon, CA.
I did this with no intention to ever teach or even to be enlightened. I just wanted to take a week off, something that I had never done before…or after.
When I finished this course and got my training I came back home, threw away the books and material, and never heard about it again, but I came home a different man than the one that had left.
Friends often ask why I did all this work if I did not intend to apply it.
I decided that not everywhere I went needed to come with a destination and that the notion of doing things for the sheer joy they brought me made more life-sense to me.
If I approach everything thinking it all must have a purpose, everything I set out to do becomes more intimidating than it needs to be. Life makes it harder for me to experience new things.
I want to study what interests me to understand it better, and it doesn’t matter if what I learn is ever “put to use”. Learning is its own reward, and the same holds true for everything. Even better is not learning, but just being.
Curiosity reveals new paths that are meant to be explored. I read anything and everything. I try to understand different perspectives and come away enriched because of it. Even Fox News has a perspective and so does CNN.
I remained in a job for years because the decision to leave seemed terrifying and final. I didn’t walk away until one day someone told me that if I did, I could return any time.
When we’re all tangled up in one it’s hard to see, but decisions are seldom as big as we make them out to be.
Everything changes anyway.
Years ago, when everyone wanted to go to the USA, I spent time trying to find a job — Just any job. I learned software programming because it seemed fun and it made a lot of money, I heard.
Now here I am sitting in Boston wondering about the trajectory that life took while some of my more eager friends are still around in India still coming up with different schemes to settle down someplace else. Their ambitions are now more realistic — A Malaysia, maybe Dubai.
CFA certification is my new thing these days. I spend time on it because I enjoy it and I think it makes me feel a bit more — Important in some eyes.
So many people ask me where I’m going with it or if I understand the finer points of Portfolio management or Returns Analysis.
Honestly? I don’t, nor do I care to. I have no answers for either of these questions but can tell you my largely senseless zest has so far got me to almost 3/4th the way into a prestigious sounding certification.
If I had set out to do that 3 years ago, I would not have been able to do it.
Reading through CFA sounds like a play. Studying for a certification sounds a bit daunting.
I talk to a young friend at work who is smart, very well regarded, and extremely intelligent. He tells me he is disillusioned, is tired of doing the same work every day that doesn’t present him any challenges, and doesn’t understand where he is going with his career or his life.
He is a serious person and is looking at me for serious answers.
Me — The one who has hour-long discussions with his daughters on the finer art of flatulating in public.
If he knew, he would be disgusted, I would be terribly embarrassed and forget talking about a serious topic, we would never be friends again.
But, regardless of how seriously we take things, the truth is life is more than anything else — The art of going nowhere.
Please, take ballet lessons or feel free to discuss the embarrassing things or do even crazier things. Do that at thirteen, at twenty, at forty, at ninety.
Pee in the shower or heck, pee in the pool secretly, and then laugh about it.
Laugh.
Be light. You don’t have to be so responsible, so heavy, and so serious all the time.
Laughter is so very beautiful and will keep you healthy and feeling slightly younger than you are and connected to something or someone you love.
More importantly, do more senseless things.
Things that you feel will go nowhere,
accomplish nothing.
