self-improvement | On My Canvas

How to Turn a Bad Day Around

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Experiential and Practical Tips on Making a Bad Day Better

Some days are harder than others. Everything seems to fall apart on these days.

I could not sleep last night. At 2:50 am, the hour of deepest sleep, I woke up when an intruding mosquito buzzed in my ear. I went to the bathroom, came back, drank some water, and lied down. I was drowsy and it hurt to keep my eyes open. But the first step to sleep was killing the mosquito. After many desperate attempts, I took its life away.

Meanwhile, the brain kept at its activity. The ideas of my mother about me (unmarried, jobless, etc) encroached me from all directions. If I think about me the way she does, I feel that my life is doomed. Then I judged the nooks and corners of my relationships.

After an hour or two of the daily evening walk, I tell myself I should go home and read. But sometimes, I want to keep walking with my friend. I want to sleep at 4 am after Netflixing zombie movies back to back. I want to wake up late and then write and let the day design its schedule.

But during those zombie movies, I keep looking at the watch. The MacBook throws the low-battery warning, but I don’t plug in the charger as I want the computer to sleep its natural course. And then we can sleep too. But then we stay awake some more and talk about our lives.

As every hour passes by, I realize that my waking up time is getting shifted by one hour and that I had to sleep early and start the next day with a fresh run in the morning. But I continue the conversation as that was what I wanted to do at that moment.

And the next day, when I start writing at 11, I brood over the valuable time that I lost by getting up late.

Also Read: How to Make a Schedule – To Live and Work Better

Why can’t we do what we want to do when we want to do it?

Why do we think about the future — the most uncertain and unpredictable — and not about now? Why do we follow so many small daily habits?

What do we want out of life?

Why do we wait for Sundays for lunch with our family?

Why do we make a house and live in it and go to the office and come back to do the same all over again?

How do we choose between ambition and happiness?

In today’s noisy world, learning how not to care is indispensable.

But tell this to the neurons in our brain. They don’t rest even when we want to stop thinking. Sometimes, we cannot control our mind which runs around like a cat chasing its tail.

To pause our thoughts, we hang out with friends on Saturday evenings. We dance to rhythmic music or Netflix and drink — all to take our minds off things.

Imagine — if we could be in that thoughtless state most of the time. If we could block the redundant noise to focus on the important matter at hand. Or if we could just sit down quietly with a cup of tea on Sunday evening.

Practice being mindful (by doing meditation) helps. But we have to pull out some of our deep-rooted agonies otherwise even after a one-hour Vipassana we will be nourishing the same soul-sucking creepers that never bloom.

But what worries fill our minds?

Mostly we think about two kinds of things:

The important ones
And the ones that are not important

Unimportant things cloud our minds like the winter fog. Except that we rarely have a change of weather. Clear days with the sun shining bright outside our window are forever elusive.

Let us look at some of the fog that can be lifted to make way for sunlight.

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What Can We Learn From Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin needs no introduction.

We all have heard about him, but I am not sure how much we really know about his life and activities.

A thinker, inventor, scientist, publisher, writer, diplomat, advisory, soldier, founder of hospitals and libraries, designer of bills, member of the assembly, and more.

You might have skimmed through these words without actually reading them.

I do the same when I read about someone great on Wikipedia — they always seem to have accomplished so much in different areas.

But when you read about their personal life, sometimes their autobiography, you understand that they were also humans like us. You start relating to them.

Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography was one such read.

His disciplines and manners — if practiced — can shake up the current world and our restless generations.

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I went to Chile in July 2016, and going to South America was the best decision of my life. That vibrant continent added an additional layer to my personality. It was like discovering rosemary suddenly.

I learned so much in those nine months that I would not have in many years in my home country India.

I started speaking a new language — Spanish, made friends from all over the world, taught English, lived with strangers from different continents, ended up loving those people, experienced the Latin American culture closely, traveled to places that I had no idea existed, and made life-long friends.

The Spanish accent in Orange is the New Black was the initial pull but there is a difference between the fictional world and the real one. In fiction, everything looks glamorous. Reality is not that glossy.

Except that it was.

South America gave me a new energy and a new outlook.

I did not know all of this when I left. Then why did I leave?

Purposeful, Healthy, and Mindful Living.

About Looking Inwards crumb trails on the road again, break the routine, travel resources, sacred place and years of hard work, travel books, and recent adventures Dear Reader, Thank you for joining me. I hope the weeks have been good to you. Apologies for being away again! But that giant project is off my hands, …

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What is Mindfulness? What can we learn from Buddha’s mindfulness to live a better modern day, practical life?

The meditation, Yoga, and spirituality guru Osho said that when you are not thinking about the past or future or now contains all the time and there is no then — when a cuckoo calling, a train passing, a dog barking, is all you hear — when this is all and there is no that — when the world here is your whole reality and there is no there — you are in the state of sammasati or mindfulness.

You are absolutely present. Then you reflect and engage in reality without any distraction or expectation.

Mindfulness or awareness is to know what you are doing and why you are doing it.

I thought this day would never come, but I am six days away from turning 30. I would have to change both the digits of my age in all the pre-filled internet forms.

A twenty-something me was working for software and finance giants, partying with friends, upset with family, trying to hold onto people that I should have let go, roaming around the world on my own, falling in love knowing that the relationship wouldn’t go anywhere and feeling shattered when the obvious happened, cooking in restaurants, almost leaving for Italy to attend a culinary course, stranded at South American borders, and saying things that should have been kept private; I was unsure of what I wanted.

Also Read: Why should you let your life flow – Lessons inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke.