Living Lightly
In 2016 I wrote a note on my phone’s lock screen as a reminder. The note says, “live dangerously”. It is still on my phone’s lock screen. Ever since, every tense situation, tough decision, and rainy day, I passed looking at the note. Thinking, this is what I want, to live dangerously.
Living dangerously, for me, means doing things on which the general consensus and accepted truths are that “it is hard” or “stupid” or “simply dangerous”. Living dangerously also means not evaluating whether the bets are paying off, it is done for its own sake. It is kind of stupid but enthralling at the same time.
But now when I look back in retrospection, I see a lot of my decisions that went against my motto of living-dangerously. Not taking an actual risk but maintaining a misperception that I am taking a risk, misperception without reality is worse. Because it stagnates the progress, negative or positive, it stagnates the change. As I recall this and browse through my notes, I see a note from August 2020 that says, “Tired of ‘working on myself’ I will now be unapologetically insane” titled “Someday”. This again points that I slowed down (failed) on living-dangerously.
Living dangerously allowed me to act without taking the causality into account. And it gave me the freedom to be truthful in all events. By far the most powerful things it made me do were about speaking the truth, saying something without mincing, manipulating, or lying. It is a relief. Once you accept that no matter what the outcome, I will act as per the truth, it makes life easy in many ways and allows you to not store a list of manipulated data points in your head about yourself.
The point of writing this blog is to extend the motto. Because it is time I make another change to guide the next 5–6 years of my life. I was 20 when I took that note and I turned 24 this month. It seems that living dangerously isn't enough, to sum up, the kind of lifestyle I want for myself and things that I want to work on in my life. Sometimes, the state of my mind becomes too tense and paralyzes my efforts. And in order to take big bets, solve big problems, and do great work, I need an element of lightness. An element that says, “it is the time to react and not act. And this is the time to act and not react”. An element that keeps me uplifted and insulated from everything that’s out there to push me in the wrong direction. “Living Dangerously” welcomes and appends, “Living lightly”.
