Hello, my friends. How are you doing today?
If you remember, a few days back I wrote a blog, or actually transcribed one, while I was driving home for the Diwali celebrations, and I gave you a brief overview of why Diwali is celebrated. Now I’m going back to my work city from my hometown.
In Hindi, there is a concept of Janam Bhoomi and Karam Bhoomi. Bhoomi means land, Janam means birth, and Karam means action. So the land where you are born is your Janam Bhoomi, and the land where you work and make a living is your Karam Bhoomi. With this, I’m going back to my Karam Bhoomi, and I’m expecting to join my office tomorrow.
The Diwali holidays were great, very, very refreshing. I stayed home for four or five days and had a lot of good food made by my mother’s hands. I am so lucky. I thank God every day that both my parents are healthy. May they always remain healthy till their last breath, and may I always get the opportunity to take care of them and love them.
During festivals, a lot of people share their best wishes, mainly over WhatsApp. They tell everybody, “Have a great Diwali. Lots of love, happiness and joy to your family,” et cetera. One of my very dear colleagues also shared a message on my office group. It was a short blog, and I really liked what the author said.
If you remember, in my blog on the way home, I mentioned that in the Hindu scripture, the Ramayana, when Lord Rama came back to his hometown, his birthplace, it was a new moon night, and everybody lit diyas to light up the place. In that blog, the author said that this happened a long, long time ago. He had only heard about it, or read it in the scriptures: that when Lord Rama came back, everybody lit diyas and lit up the whole place. He had never seen it. However, standing on the balcony of his house, looking around and seeing that everybody had decorated their houses with beautiful lights, it occurred to him that Diwali is not just about an event that happened thousands of years ago.
Diwali gives us a reason to celebrate and love our surroundings, just like any other festival. Maybe in your culture, wherever you are reading this, there are different festivals where people celebrate and decorate their houses and the things around them, and everything becomes so lively and so beautiful. It gives us joy, so we can keep going and keep doing the things we need to do.
Because sometimes life becomes mundane. We are just following our schedule, back to back to back, and everybody has their limits of determination, consistency and discipline. All of us feel the same things. People who are more consistent or disciplined still feel everything, just like everybody else. But the way we react to our situations and to the emotions we are feeling largely shapes how things turn out around us.
A lot of that depends on our attitude. This is one of the reasons why the first chapter of the book I have written is “Attitude”. Because life is not just about what happened to us. It is more about what we did and how we reacted when life happened. And a lot of the time, almost all of the time, that depends on our attitude. So it’s very important.
At the same time, festivals and these reasons to meet our family and friends and celebrate give us an anchor, a boost, a flyby, to keep going towards what we want. If you’re wondering what a flyby is: when a spacecraft flies close to a heavy object, like a planet or a moon, at high speed, that object’s gravity slings it forward, and it gets sent very far. Many of our spacecraft heading to Mars or further use this trick around bodies like the Moon and other planets to speed themselves up and keep going.
For me, festivals are like that. They keep us going. And in the end, that is what we need to do. We need to keep going, again and again, every time.
Diwali is almost over, and the next thing to look forward to is New Year. For now, I don’t have many plans for the New Year, but of course, I’m planning something, so we’ll see what I’m going to do. And after the New Year, there is a short stretch where there’s nothing to look forward to. So the cycles come, and the cycle continues. The good thing is that right now we are in the exciting part of the year. It is ending, a lot of festivals are lined up, and there are a lot of reasons to celebrate.
So I wish you all the best. Keep going, man. Keep loving yourself. Keep pushing yourself. I wish you lots of success every day.
Thank you.
~R
