Cherish The In-Between Moments

There was this cartoon episode I watched once as a kid, which began with a villain who entered a village and stole all the colors. The entire episode was played in black and white and then towards the end, after the heroes won, the colors returned to the screen in a very dramatic moment.

For some reason, we’re raised to look at life the same way. To pay attention to the big moments: the day you graduate, the day you get a job, the day you get married, and the day the baby is born.

Meanwhile, life happens now…in the boring in-between moments.
Between the sunrises and the sunsets.
Between the day you graduate and the day you make a living.
Between the pull of one ocean wave and the crash of another.
Between the moment you silence your alarm in the morning and the moment you fall asleep.
Between the day you get married and the day that baby is born.

You think the trajectory of life will be smooth. It will look like a staircase where you’re always climbing up. Nobody really tells you that living life is more like taking one step forward, two steps backwards, and that sometimes you’re going to slide down the handrail and start over.

You are made to believe that by a certain age your life needs to look a certain way, but real life is more grey than it is black and white.

It’s more amorphous than definite.

I guess one thing that my new life has taught me is to appreciate the process rather than the result. More often than not, applying the process each and every single day helps you grow into a better person than you were yesterday. What if you focus on the result only? Chances are, it’ll make you arrogant, complacent, bitter…depending on what it was.

So how does focusing on the process look like?

You can think of your life as a macro-process that consists of micro-processes keeping the engine running so to speak. The micro entails your work, your family and friends, your finances, your health, etc.

Whether it’s in your work, relationships, finances or health, there’s usually one or two things you could do to move things forward. For work there’s building your skills, mastering your craft, and networking. For family and friends, there’s spending time connecting with them. For finances, there’s making money, paying all the bills on time, and saving. For health, there’s eating nutritious food, getting enough sleep, and exercising…

You get the picture…

Always Stay In Motion

Being in motion is the natural state of the universe.

As Neil Degrasse Tyson says in an episode of Cosmos,
I’m moving about ten kilometers per hour relative to the ground.But as I mentioned earlier, the ground is moving.Earth is turning at more than 1,600 kilometers per hour while it orbits the Sun at more than 100,000 kilometers per hour.And the Sun is moving through the galaxy at a half a million miles per hour.And the Milky Way is moving through the universe at nearly one and a half million miles an hour.There is no fixed place in the cosmos.All of nature is in motion.

Being in motion also allows for a lot of serendipity to happen. Every time I think back to my best experiences in life, they happened because of moments of serendipity where all I had to do was say yes and show up.

100-Day Evaluations

I don’t really understand people who make New Year’s Resolutions. Evaluating your life in one year increments is too inefficient. One year is way too long. I personally like making a review every 100 days (learnt it from Medium writer Ben Hardy’s 90-day method). That’s long enough to see if new experiments would stick in your life, and short enough not to get bored. During the evaluation, questions to answer are as follows (also from Ben Hardy) :

What are the personal and professional goals you’ve accomplished?
When you look at everything that’s going on today, which areas of focus and progress are making you the most confident?
Now, looking ahead at the next quarter, what new things are giving you the greatest sense of excitement?
“What are the five new ‘jumps’ you can now achieve that will make your next 90 days a great quarter regardless of what else happens?”

Life has a funny way of bringing you opportunities that will make you step into yourself more fully. However, speaking to many people, I’ve realized that the biggest barriers that stop us exist inside our minds; whether it’s negative self-talk, a lack of self-confidence, low self-esteem, a lack of courage…our minds carry the tools that can build us up or the weapons that can break us.

I’ve quoted JK Rowling on this blog so many times, but this quote fits, “You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.”

Call To Action

So my call to action today is that you cherish the in-between moments, and stop waiting for things to happen. Rather, stay in motion and go live a wonderful story.