Back to Square 1
August 19, 2009The Pattern
You wake up one fine day to realize you are not happy with what you are doing with your life. You are unable to pin point one single aspect of your life because we do tend to get lost in intermingled issues. Maybe your work is not fulfilling, maybe you miss being with your friends, maybe you just yearn from freedom..Yet it is not possible to see an obvious solution for this in one single stroke. Your day goes from bad to worse when you start comparing with others and by the end of the day you have decided that you need a new lease of life. How often do we see this happening to us ?
The Rationale
There is mathematics at the root of everything. Every thing has to to add up to get the big picture. I always look back and wonder how we are taught integral calculus starting from the same basic operations. There are two basic operations Addition & Inverse. So a basic operation is addition and a basic operation giving wrong results is a Inverse operation.Everything else can be derived from this. Situations we encounter in life, work and otherwise take shades of complexity over a period of time and over multiple basic operations gone wrong.
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”
We as humans have a limiting factor, we learn from experience and do not repeat mistakes or at least aware not to. Success and Failures are seen as events rather than processes and we typically tend to identify the one thing we did right / wrong to succeed / fail. There is hardly an emphasis on the process. There is seldom a thought given to the environment variables. What did not work last time around may not necessarily be the reason not to try it this time without considering the changes in the eco system. To explain this simply we are not comfortable looking at equations with large number of variables. We like a black box approach where we can say “Press This” and “this happens”. How many times do we try changing multiple parameters in a situation simultaneously ? Answer is we struggle with uncertainty. We go by the algebraic approach of solving one variable at a time.
The Square 1 Philosophy
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
~Confucius
I have been hungrily after the idea of keeping it simple, breaking it down and doing things right. First and foremost we all have our basic happy place. One needs to find it. Any amount of time spent in doing this is not waste. The happy place is one where you are happy irrespective of your past or future paths . It is your place where you are happy in the present. It might be a moment of awesomeness, it might be the moment where you feel love, it might be a moment of great clarity or it just might be a moment where you pause.
Secondly make a commitment to enjoy the process and not focus on the outcome. A commitment to the process gives you a great deal more clarity than the view of the end result. Also it helps keep things simple as a process is made of simple operations. Having found your happy place and having made a commitment to enjoy the process, we stick to the basic operations of breaking down our existing situations into small milestones. Every complex problem was built by adding many basic operations gone wrong.
Back to Square 1 :
Square 1 is place where everything starts where we do not have preferred paths of resolution. Square 1 is where the ego does not cloud your decision. Square 1 is about openness and willingness to change. We are willing to change only when we see greater good in the change. To see the greater good in change we need to have a open happiness. The basic unit for a open happiness is a happy place.
Square 1 is about re-visiting your assumptions, re-visiting the variables you are trying to change and most importantly re-visiting your fears.
Its about you revisiting your happy place and starting the process afresh.
One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.
~Oogway
Imagine the pyramids ; Imagine the engineer looking into it and saying “We just need to build a smaller square on every square”
Keep it Simple
Pensive
I can totally relate to what you have written….
A simple addition and an inverse and we have the physics mathematics and technology all with two operations….
Its so simple yet so complicated.
[...] Tourists, Aha my favourite bunch. Whatever said and done we like a consistent experience when we go out. People all over India know that here is a place which I used to frequent back home/or during college . The menu does not change, the coffee does not but the crowd changes. It says a lot about people, that we do want change but as I mention in one of my older posts – one variable at a time. [...]