I wonder if it is a feature of modern life in general. At times I feel a sense of overriding ambition, a desire to do great things, achieve great things, find recognition, move ahead of the pack, maximise my potential etc… and at other times, I want to escape, give up everything, disappear into the quiet, become invisible, accept that life is meaningless and everything that comes with it. This mood yo-yos from this to that in a single day depending on what I choose to focus attention on or what event is prominent in my mind. Perhaps everyone feels this because we can’t help but get sucked into the world we live in and we can’t help but wish we didn’t have to. Sometimes I think about the peaceful folk back in my native place of Mangalore—perhaps they too aren’t that peaceful anymore—but when I think about how things used to be in my childhood, the daily rhythm of simply existing and doing the few things that kept existence going with small enjoyments in between. Those folks never really bothered with the big questions of what their life is all about and if they are really meeting its purpose but in living simply they were defining it in their own way. This simplicity of living is perhaps lost in our modern worlds. We are not satisfied by just the day-to-day motions which admittedly do not have that same comforting rhythm… even our routines are hurried, gathering momentum, catering to the future rather than the present. The goals we have for the year, what we did, what we could have done, what we plan to do… we think of everything in terms of performance, productivity, accomplishment, achievement, not so much about the satisfaction, the pleasure, the joy in the doing itself. Sometimes I wonder if it’s even possible to centre our lives around the latter in a world that is constantly thrusting the former way of being onto you?

I keep thinking about how to attain more balance, how to be more tranquil in who and where I am, about how to be at peace with myself and all around me, how to just 'be' perhaps than to 'become'.