Can we spend 1000 days and nights in the field, as soon as possible, in our personal, professional lives? And can we continue to spend 25 days-nights every year thereafter? Also, sabbatical in the field after every five years can be a good way forward.
2024 is the warmest year on record. Storms are stronger and are intensifying more rapidly across all ocean basins. Bigger and hotter wildfires. Coral reefs bleached on a mass scale. Worst and widespread droughts, even in amazon. Carbon absorption by the forest dwindled. Oceans slowed down.
Ramana Maharshi became self-initiated sanyasin at 16, and remained as such for the rest of his life. He recommends – who am I – self-enquiry with bhakti, or surrender – complete and desireless. Ramana felt that he had to be accessible to all who came. Till the end of his life. Main instruction: silently sitting together, using words sparingly. Teaching through silence. Silence is the true upadesa. Perfect upadesa. Truth is beyond words; it does not warrant explanation. All that is possible is to indicate It.
Ernest Hemingway wrote his famous ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ in eight weeks to give him a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, followed by the Nobel Prize in literature next year. His written acceptance speech said: ‘Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.’
‘If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.’
Hemingway gets the most from the least; knows how to prune language, how to multiply intensities and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allows for telling more than the truth. Hemingway’s style is the iceberg theory of omission – facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight. He avoids complicated syntax. Simple sentences. Without subordinating conjunctions.
‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.’
We spend essentially the best part of each day working. The effects of this last longer than we think, maybe years. Work hygiene can make or mar our abilities, our feelings whether we are valued or undervalued. Leadership and work amrt or work toxicity go hand-in-hand. We excel or try surviving, hypervigilant. We have it in us to be genius with our intelligence, diligence, curiosity, creativity, perseverance, relentlessness, and being strategic. Can we be fit, healthy? Can we have stamina to show tenacity? Can we be yogis, doing yoga, meditation, reflection, planning, supporting, and tracking?
Yes, we can. If we coexist, keep flowing, self-surrendered naa naa iti. In N? swastiyoga for 7L.
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