Reflections #10

Hi folks, this has been one of the tumultous times in my life and every inch of my body wants to give up on writing this newsletter. But I’m soldiering through every week. Hopefully it continues.

Last week has been particularly worse with just the bad news mountain getting higher and higher. Being in a job hunt phase currently, the daily cycle of self-doubt, motivating yourself, feeling down, picking yourself up is just too emotionally draining not just for me but for the people around me too.

At this point, I thought being able to continuously meditate will have a better effect in my life. Perhaps this is one more testimony to the saying that ‘you can not meditate with a use case in mind’. You have to meditate for the sake of it.

I also have been trying to understand the concept of sitting with discomfort and staying with it rather than trying to comfort myself in life’s pleasures.

Enough of my pity-party. So for this week, I thought I’ll talk about 3 things which helped me feeling a little happy last week.

1. An episode of ‘Ted Lasso’
2. A good ginger chai in Chai Point
3. My closest friends who demanded nothing for me and understood me when I went awol so many times. Being able to spend time with them has been genuinely one of the happiest times in the past week

This past week has taught me the importance of seeing little pockets of joy interspersed in this hard hard life like with morning coffee, the evening walk etc. And I want to do more of it going forward!

So for the content I enjoyed last week

This podcast episode which offers a critique of the famous Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers’. In full disclosure, I haven’t read the book but I thoroughly enjoyed the podcast.

Since this episode talks about the ethnic theory of plane crashes, my recent interest in aviation led me to this interesting paper too

Culture and Plane Crashes : A cross-country test of the Gladwell Hypothesis - Link

Here is the 2 line summary of the conclusion in the paper

High power distance nations (indicating collectivistic societies) have more plane accidents, while nations ranking high in individualism tend to have fewer plane accidents. Culture remains important even when aviation infrastructure and weather are accounted for in regression models.

Thats it for this week folks! Have a happy week ahead 🙂 

I’m looking forward to improving my writing more. So would love your suggestions and any recommended resources on this.