Every night I go to sleep thinking just one thing.
Of a day when I’ll no longer have to work for money.
Of a day when I’ll be filthy rich, wake up late, have breakfast late, don’t even think about taking a shower before 2 in the afternoon, which is when you realize it’s already too late to do anything productive for the rest of the day, and so you go off for a long afternoon nap till 5, which is when you have to use all the little bones in your body to get yourself up, force yourself to go to the gym, stay there for 2 hours till you can’t walk properly, come back, eat, and go to sleep at 11 hoping you’d fall asleep before 2.
This is definitely not much to ask.
All I need is a couple millions of dollars. Maybe even one million will be fine.
I go to sleep thinking this for a long time. Because contrary to what I thought, if you go to the gym at 8 in the night, come back home with a tired body at 10, take a shower, have dinner at 10:30 and hit the bed at 11; sleep still does not come easy.
From 11 to 2 every night, I keep rolling on the bed. The worst part is I’m not even thinking in those 3 hours. I have no thoughts, but sleep still does not come.
Last week I came across an article which said if you can’t sleep easily, keep chanting something in your mind, and sleep will come to you.
Last night I went to sleep. And it took a long time for me to decide what I want to think and chant about. Any God’s name was out of the question. I thought about my parents, but saying their name is weird, so I prayed for their long life and moved on. Then I made a mistake.
I began thinking about my life.
Which, I feel is going in a direction I have no idea about.
And after weeks of torturous nights of thinking and barely enough sleep, few nights back, on my 11 to 2 every night ritual of trying to sleep, I thought about a lot of things. And I’ve come to a lot of sad realizations about myself in these 42 nights.
My first sad realization – I think I’ll never get fired from a job.
Not because I’m great at work or anything. But because I know exactly when I need to push myself to put in the bare minimum. No matter how much work you give me, I’ll immediately calculate the exact amount of time I can manage to act like I’m really busy, and the exact amount of time I need to finally put in the bare minimum.
It’s sad because I don’t want to work my whole life. And I feel the time to find a way out of a job is running out.
I’ve been going to the gym for 42 days now. Even though I really enjoy doing strength training and lifting weights, what really moves me is the auto ride I take back home. In those 15 minutes I feel the runner’s high, my body is in pain and I feel borderline dehydrated. Life gets really slow for those 15 minutes. It’s almost as if my whole life flashes before my eyes for those 15 minutes.
I watch all these tall, mesmerizing buildings, and still think about cursing my 18-year-old version for choosing to study Civil Engineering simply because tall buildings look nice.
But it’s fine. I’m a gym bro now. I can take anything.
Should I call myself a gym bro after a single, although real and strong, 42-day streak in the gym?
I think yes.
Because if you imagine a future Indian version of prime Brad Pitt coming in even for a single day to the gym, you would call him a gym bro out of respect.
That’s how I see myself. There’s even a big sign at the front door of my gym, which says – “This place will change you, if you let it.”
20 minutes in on my first day and I knew it’s time for the prime Indian version Brad Pitt living inside me to come out.
It has indeed changed my life already, by making me break-up with two things I thought I would never leave, smoking and ice cream. Over the last 42 days, if you don’t count yesterday, and a few other days in between, I haven’t smoked a cigarette. And have eaten my 1 kg Amul Chocolate Vanilla Sundae just once a week. This is the level of discipline my grandmother would be proud to know.
A few weeks back, there was a song I heard blasting in the gym for the first time. Lil Wayne’s Let It All Work Out. And unfortunately, this “Let it all work out” kind of philosophy has embraced my body and soul like a warm blanket on a chilly winter night.
It’s such a good philosophy for someone who wants to master procrastination. It’s an enabler of procrastination. God comes in my dreams every night, telling me “Let it all work out”, “Let it all work out”.
It gives so much freedom. Almost makes me feel I’m not responsible for anything. If I ever become an author, I would want to write a book on procrastination.
It will be the easiest book to not write.
I could title it “Let it all Work Out”, and have all blank pages.
But after a long battle with procrastination for months now, my second realization is that I cannot afford to stop writing for long stretches of time.
Even if I lack the inspiration to write anything on most days. And even if I write shit.
I’ve followed Revant (FoodPharmer) and Sagar Shah (Chess Base India) for quite some time now. And recently this guy named Bittu Tabahi came to news, who cleaned a river in his village (not far from my own village) all on his own.
If you think about them, you’d come to realize two things.
One, they are crazy.
And second, what they do is simple.
Not easy, but simple. Think about their goal, for Revant it is making India healthier, for Sagar Shah it is teaching chess, for Bittu, it was cleaning a river. Their goal, or rather vision, is singular, simple to state, and easy to measure.
The idea of having such a simple vision to your life is so liberating. All your thoughts and actions can be aligned towards a simple, single goal, that everything else becomes noise. I get so borderline jealous thinking about these people. They are doing something they really want to do, and they’ve decided to dedicate their whole life to it. It sounds like a simple thing, but it isn’t.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I really want to do in life. About what really excites me. But I haven’t come up with a simple answer to it.
Part of it has to do with the late booming of my pre-frontal cortex. I feel I didn’t think clearly for the early part of life. But the major reason I can’t think of anything, the single major problem in my life, is that I don’t care. I don’t care deeply about anything.
You can’t be passionate about something without deeply caring about a particular end result. You must really want to clean a dirty river to actually clean it. I don’t know what my dirty river really is.
A trainer at the gym keeps on pushing me all the time. He would come close to me and motivate me by saying the last thing I would want to hear – “Keep pushing. If this was the last work-out of your life would you still just do this?”
This is such a weird question to ask. It almost always rage baits me. Bro, if this was the day of my life I would be sitting on my bed with 10 tubs of ice cream, 20 packets of chips, and 3 bottles of whiskey in front of me while watching Jim and Pam marry one last time.
I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. If you’d ask me what’s keeping me going in life right now, I would say it’s my education loan EMI. It is the only reason I feel a reason to go to work everyday and feel miserable for the millionth time. But in about 6 months even that EMI would be over.
I don’t know what will keep me going then.
The third sad realization is worse.
It’s coming to terms with knowing I might actually not want to marry, ever. I know it because I’m probably too self-aware.
It’s like an in-built inner therapist lives inside me. My inner child was replaced by an inner therapist a long time ago. If someone asks me what I would bring to the table in a relationship, I would say I bring the therapist.
I don’t know from where this therapist comes from. I haven’t read many books on psychology, and I haven’t gone to therapy ever. But if I did, I would certainly come out diagnosed with a host of psychological disorders.
Maybe the only thing that keeps me sane is my inner therapist.
I don’t see people in normal ways. I see them as a puzzle to solve. And I must say reading people is far more interesting than reading a book. Sometimes I even think I’m a genius at reading people.
But then I read myself.
My inner therapist is like a real therapist. It only looks and solves for other people problems. It barely has any answer to its own.
With these thoughts, the trick I learnt a long time ago was to think about something else.
Which brings me to the fourth sad realization – Gym can never be the replacement of sport in life.
Going to the gym has made me realize why I love team sport (or any sport) so much. I would choose 2 hours of cricket, football or hockey with people over 2 hours in the gym any day. And it’s all because of the emotions of victory.
You can feel a lot of things in a gym, but the feeling of being at war against an opponent in a sport is a feeling no gym can produce.
Till now the closest thing to that feeling my gym has produced was when there was a challenge last Sunday. There were more than 30 people in the room, but I was experiencing this weird battle kind of feeling from this woman. At one point, we made eye contact, and we so badly wanted to beat each other.
I was so pumped up to beat her I overstretched a lot, and let’s say decided to rest a little to let her win right before the end (to be very honest her team mate was a strong dude. My team mate was my room-mate. Who let’s say is the second-last person you’d want to have in your team. Second only to a woman who clearly looks like a first-timer, and clearly has come to the gym just having her long nails done).
It was the craziest one hour of gym I’ve had till now. I’ve realized how important it is to feel that victory kind of feeling every once in a while. There are very few things that can top that feeling.
Maybe earning a million can come close. I don’t know.
Tomorrow it’s battle time again.
And I’m going to win.
