One Hundred January 1, 2010

This morning, I woke up with the number 100 in my head and I wondered, how many things can I do a hundred of this year? This is what I have so far:

- One hundred workouts at the gym this year (at least)

- One hundred books (no fluff allowed)

- One hundred movies no more, no less (does that seem a waste of my Netflix subscription?)

- One hundred new recipes to cook

- One hundred posts on my blog

- Visit one hundred places of culture – museums, parks, art galleries, theatre, you get the idea…

- One hundred new songs to sing (with skill)

- Add one hundred more friends on Facebook (I’m sure there are a hundred people I know who aren’t on my friends list yet – school friends, college friends, grad school friends, work friends and so on)

- One hundred conversations with friends I never seem to call

- Hold back one hundred nasty comments, say one hundred nice things I mean instead

- One hundred hours working for a cause

- One hundred hours spent learning a new language

- One hundred times of being nice to myself

Happy New Year!

2009 December 31, 2009

The weirdest year of my life has finally come to an end. This year I

- Celebrated our first Anniversary

- Got a Masters degree

- Lived in 6 apartments spread over 4 cities

- Made some great new friends

- Earned enough money to support myself for… a semster…

- Voluntarily chose unemployment!

- Weighed more than I will next year

- Succumbed to Facebook

- Shifted from fiction to non-fiction

- Did not visit India

- Drove thousands of miles

- Became more serious than ever before

- Acquired the weirdest accent I have ever heard

- Will stay up past midnight!

You Can’t Have It All… At Once… July 9, 2009

Today, I heard some of the most powerful words I have in a long time.

You can’t have it all, at the same time.

We spend so much of our time and energy chasing it all. The best grades I can get, the best our marriage can ever be, the best I’ve ever looked, the most time I’ve ever spent with God, the best friendships I can ever imagine. And of course, there’s money, there’s clothes, there’s diamonds, there’s so much!

So much time goes by trying to balance it all. Yearning for what we cannot have, wishing for more hours in the day, missing the friends we cannot find the time to talk to, feeling guilty for not working on something that makes a difference… So much of life goes by because we not only spend the energy we have on things that need to be done, we also spend it worrying about other things we wish we could do. And at the end, we seem to be left with nothing.

Where does the time go? Do we not know how to prioritize? Are we selfish? Lazy? Stupid? Unable to run our own lives? The supermoms and the Oprah’s would definitely want us to believe that.

Over the last few months, I’ve started to believe that. I’ve started to worry that I’m not as “balanced” as I should be. That maybe, just maybe, I’m doing something wrong. There’s the flab around my tummy I haven’t been able to get rid of. There’s the dull skin and the unopened tubes of face pack. There’s the unused chapati dough in the fridge because I’ve been too lazy to make rotis. The clothes lay unironed and scattered int he closet. There are movies that lie unwatched. Books that lie unread. I haven’t sung, really sung, in years. I haven’t learned to play the keyboard yet despite owning one for a year… The list is endless…

But today, for the first time, I felt free.

For the first time in months, I’ve allowed myself to listen to the voice inside me that has been saying the same thing. The friends who have been telling me I don’t give myself enough credit. At last! I don’t get the feeling I should be doing something else. I’m just happy to be in the moment I’m in.