March 2021 – September heart-to-hearts

Hello dear reader, wouldn’t you agree that we all are students? setting out to learn something new each day so that we can get closer to our life’s goals and we all procrastinate, some more than others.

Life’s Goals: These are the big-small things that help us in making our dreams come true. They could be as small as going to bed at 10:00 pm and getting up at 5:30 am or as big as getting 90+% in a hard competitive exam such as GATE.

Having life goals is a good thing but they can’t help you when it comes to procrastination. That is something only your dreams can do.

Dream up a good life, no matter how impossible it seems to you right now, don’t abandon it. Write it down somewhere if you want to–in a diary or on your wall–although I believe you won’t need to. Dreams are powerful, you see.

Beautifully put by my favorite author.

Mankind has a troubling and wonderful habit of dreaming the right dreams at the wrong time. Such dreams are difficult because they’re inappropriate, but also wonderful in their promise.
Stephen king

My dream is to make it big by writing stories and poems. Right now, I’m twenty-one, I don’t have anything published in a paying magazine and I am not even close to earning money with my writing. In fact, far from it, I am a mechanical engineering undergrad student in an average Indian college.

I am a competent student, but I can be a good one if only I can stop postponing my tasks. The dilemma of course, like many of us, is that my life’s goals are not helping me getting closer to my dream. Ergo, I am not motivated. WHAT A PICKLE WE’VE GOT OURSELVES INTO? EH…

Before dealing with the Gordian Knot, I’d like to put emphasis on something else, imagine that all your life’s dreams have come true. I’ll imagine with you, my books have sold hundreds-millions of copies around the globe, I’m on cloud nine and now a question arises in my mind, am I happy? Are you? Of course, right? Well my dear reader, there’s no way you can know that for sure.

Beautifully put by my favorite actor and comedian.

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.
JIM CARREY

So what is the answer then?
It’s happiness, of course. It’s just as powerful as dreams, maybe sometimes even more so.

Beautifully put by my favorite Rockstar.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy‘. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.
JOHN LENNON

Now let’s attempt untying that gordian knot, imagine that our dreams are destinations. Now imagine, different modes of transportation: airplanes, buses, bullock carts, hot air balloons, the whole deal. Always remember this, that the method you use or are forced to use under the circumstances, doesn’t matter, but you should always enjoy it. Some of us fly rocket (who doesn’t enjoy flying a rocket!) and reach the destination in no time, others like myself don’t or can’t fly rockets or airplanes but as long as we are happy and enjoying riding our vehicles, we will reach the destination and it doesn’t matter how long it takes or how weird the path is.

This post is not magical, but magic does exist. It exists inside each of us. It is what urges us to wake up and complete our life goals even when they are only indirectly helping us in reaching closer to our dreams, even when they don’t give us any immediate satisfaction.

This magic in scientific terms is actually a dopamine spike in our brains because we anticipate something important is about to happen i.e., we’ll soon get a reward of some kind! But in our case the rewards are not awarded so soon, they’re far away in the future and I know it can be hard, to get up and do the work, but the only way to do it is to do it with a smile on your face and the dream in your heart.

Now I’d like to end my surprisingly long sermon by once again quoting my favourite writer.