Lessons I learnt being in a Long Distance Relationship

There are no two ways around it… being apart from the one person you most want to be spending time with is stressful. Learning to communicate well and stay connected across distance is stressful. And there are plenty of other things that pop up in life that are stressful, too.

Dentists, anyone? Exams? Driving in Capital?

Is stress always bad for us?

Don’t get me wrong, stress is not always bad for us.

Without some pressure in our lives, we stagnate. We need some challenges in life to help focus us, motivate us, and keep us stretching, learning, and growing.

However, too much stress can overwhelm us—at least temporarily.

Most of us in long distance relationships have experienced times when we felt close to breaking or completely overwhelmed.

And what do we tend to do when we feel stressed and overwhelmed?

We often reach for things that bring us comfort (familiar foods and routines). Or escape into entertainment or games. Or try to avoid the things that are stressing us out.

We often to spend all our “coping energy” on what we need to do to get through the day, and then take out our fatigue and frustrations on those closest to us.

How stress impacts your relationship

Many couples communicate quite well when life’s skies are sunny and it is all smooth sailing. However, when clouds roll in and the wind picks up, it can be a different story.

When you or your partner (or both) are tired and stressed, misunderstandings and conflicts can arise as quickly as summer storms.

You might find yourself getting annoyed more easily. Or arguing more frequently. Or speaking to your partner in a curt, impatient tone you’d never use on a work colleague.

On the other side of the coin, you can find yourselves confused and frustrated by your partner moods, words, and actions. You can feel helpless to know how to approach them (especially if you’re far apart), or what to do or say.

Either way, the very relationship that you count on to help sustain you can become another draining source of tension, right when you need help the most.

How to stop stress destroying your relationship

One of the best things you can do to make these times easier is to discuss these dynamics with your partner when you are not tired or stressed.

The better you understand how each of you typically thinks or feels during times of stress and pressure, the better you will be able to encourage and support each other during those extra-stressful times. Yes, even if you’re far apart.

Answer these questions

Here are 10 questions you can talk over with your partner.

These questions are designed to help you learn more about how each of you responds to stress and pressure. Take your time with these and really delve into the details! Discussing these questions on good days (before you’re all stressed out) will yield big dividends on bad days. I promise.

1.    What are the biggest sources of stress or pressure in your life right now?

2.    Where is the biggest mismatch in your life right now between what you believe and how you are acting?

3.    Do you feel “out of balance” in any area of life right now? What are those areas?

4.   When you feel stressed, how does that show up in how you interact with other people?

5. When you are under pressure, what are some of your “early warning” signs of stress?

6.   When you become aware of your early warning signs, what do you do to help prevent your stress from growing?

7.    What are some of your typical self-care and coping strategies when you are stressed, tired, or anxious? (Make sure you think about coping strategies you use that are “good for you,” and those that “aren’t so good for you.”)

8.  What are one or two things that help you manage stress and pressure that you want to be able to do more often?

9.  When you are struggling, how can your partner best help you? What are good ways to approach you and good questions to ask you when you’re stressed?

10. Since caring for yourself is foundational to being able to care well for your important relationships, how can your partner encourage you to take care of yourself?

Just another random mystery

If you’d ask me for one word about how Rishi and I felt with each other, for being together since so many years now, I would say “AZAAD”. We felt free with each other, without any boundations to entertain each other all the time.

          He’d be sitting in one corner of the room while I would be in another, with NUSRAT filling the space between our comfortable silences, where I’d be packing my bags to leave again and he’d be sitting and browsing through YouTube or busy attending the limitless phone calls. In between we’d stare at each other, smiling and I’d melt. I’d lose all my concentration for few seconds, before regaining myself.

          Rishi would stare outside the window, sometimes the mirror and most of the time his mobile phone that usually fills our surroundings there in Jammu. Whereas, I usually find myself sitting in our room, catching the birds flying back to their nests, orange sun settling behind the far looking hills, stray dogs settling themselves in the cozy corners of the streets and the decreasing number of vehicles on the busy road and sometimes catching hold of his face and holding his palms or hugging him tight in a comfy hug. We are use to spending our days with the routines in our respective places and evening like these when together.

          Remembering a day when we saw that movie together. As he laid down next to me, staring at me and he said,

“If you ever write about me, think of me as a man who was free in his soul, who flew with wind, and yet longed for love. A love that could move the world. Write about me as LOVE.”

          And then today, on the eve of his birthday, I sat down to write about this love that have filled my life with colours, care, charm, calmness and full of memories to hold on to. And the first thing that I could write was about love within me because of him.

          That is the thing about us. Rishi and I are always destined to be together, and we knew it since day one, when he was sitting in the balcony of a calm place somewhere in Jammu and I were standing near the parking lot of the busy south Delhi market and messaging him, just after few days I have met him for the first time.

          We knew that that our companionship won’t be easy like a cake walk and yet we went ahead with it. Loving each other in every moment, for we never knew which moment would have been our last. But we sailed through all the odds and as we were destined to be together, we are together, stronger than ever and to be with each other till our last breath on mother earth.

          With each night I spend in Jammu, with him, feeling his physical presence, smelling his magical fragrance; the morning comes with a beautiful promise. As I watch the sun rising from behind those small looking hills and ironically the bigger looking trees and painting them golden with its rays, and I watch his angel looking face, deep in sleep and Thank the Almighty for every moment of magic that had and have the power to change my life forever.

          I think these are the mornings I fall in love with him again and again for forever and ever again.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOVE

People Die but Memories Don’t

Death moves about at random, without discriminating between the innocent and the evil, the poor and the rich. The only difference is that the poor usually handle it better.

I heard today that the vegetable vendor had died. The old man would always be in the middle of the grocery market of my locality, selling his fresh green vegetables and if not surrounded by the customers then always busy sprinkling water on the green vegetables so that they stay fresh and attract as many customers as possible.

He’d been there for as long as I remember, and he could be seen at almost any hour of the evening or night, until all the stock was sold. Summer or winter, he stayed close to the vegetables and water bottle to sprinkle water on them.

He was probably quite tall, but I never saw him standing up. One judged his height from his long, loose limbs. He was very thin, and the turban always and perfectly fixed on his head was the sign of his experience in life and so about his old age.

His vegetables were always fresh and always the season’s most wanted. They were not only popular with the old ladies who would not be able to bend to choose the best among the available, as all the Indian ladies do while doing grocery shopping. But they were equally popular with the young females, like me, who are actually raw, when it comes to choosing the best vegetables. Actually that man use to treat all of them, rather us, equally and try to give the best of the lot to all of us. And the best part was that no one have ever bargained with him on the price because they were the most reasonable and also fixed. This was rarely the case with any other vendor in the whole grocery market. On winter evenings, or misty monsoon days, or summery sunny evening, there was always a demand for his vegetables.

No one knows his name. No one ever thought of asking him for it. One just took him for granted. He was fixed as a landmark as the clock tower or a Banyan tree that is there near to the bus stop of my locality. The tree is always being lopped; the clock often stopped. But the vegetable vendor seems less perishable than the tree, more dependable than the clock.

I don’t know if he had family or not, but in the way all the locality was his family, because he was in continuous contact with people. And yet he was a remote sort of being; always polite, even to children, but never familiar.

Did he enjoy being alive? I wonder now. He was always smiling, but I doubt if he was a joyful person; but then, neither was he miserable. I should think he was a genuine stoic, one of those who do not attach overmuch importance to themselves, who are emotionally uninvolved, content with their limitations, their dark corners. I wanted to get to know the old man better, to sound him out on the immense questions involved in selling the vegetables all his life; but it’s too late now.

Today his dark corner, which use to be the green and the most crowded corner of the market earlier, was deserted; the old man had vanished. ‘He died in his sleep’ said the neighboring vendor. ‘He was old’. Very old. Sufficient reason to die. May the soul of the stranger, yet so close, rests in peace.

But the corner is very empty, very dark, and I know that whenever I pass it I will be haunted by vision of the old vegetable vendor, troubled by the questions I failed to ask.

That is why, the memories are like the sky full of stars, so beautiful yet unreachable. We can look at them and smile but couldn’t complete the urge to get closer to them. May be that’s what the memories hold. The power to put the heart in craving.

Ways to have control over things

Philosopher and novelist “Umberto Eco” is a big fan of lists and has some fascinating ideas about why they’re so important to humans:

Umberto explained that lists are often seen as relics of primitive cultures – simplistic devices that don’t belong in our modern day and age. However, the simple form of the list prevails again and again over time, because, as Umberto says, it has “an irresistible magic”.

When we struggle to express ourselves, we use lists. Like Umberto says, lists help us to make sense of the world around us. We create lists of the sights we see on vacations, the places we want to visit, the food we want to eat and the groceries we need to buy from the store; and the other tasks we need to get done. It is a simple habit of increasing our day to day productivity.

We pack all the madness and ambiguity of life into a structured form of writing. In short, making lists is a great way to increase our overall happiness and feel less overwhelmed.

The Funny reality

To-do list in particular is one that we spend a lot of time and energy on perfecting. Somehow, we don’t seem to struggle when it comes to making a shopping list and buying everything on it, but getting the tasks on our to-do list done is a whole other ball game.

LIST FOR PRODUCTIVITY: 4 top tips for a to-do list that gets things done

1. Break projects into tasks, don’t succumb to the ZEIGARNIK EFFECT

We kind of have a reminder system built-in to our minds that nags us about unfinished tasks, that is called the ZEIGARNIK EFFECT. It sounds pretty cool that we already have this, but it’s actually not that reliable or healthy for us.

What really happens is that there’s a disconnect between our conscious and unconscious minds—the unconscious mind can’t plan how to finish the task, but it gets annoyed with the feeling of it being unfinished. To shake off that feeling, it nags the conscious mind with reminders about the task—not to finish it, but simply to encourage us to make a plan.

The best way is to get familiarize with the method called “next steps”. It’s the process of breaking down a project or task into smaller tasks, and planning which one will be the next step towards completing the whole thing.

This abates the nagging of the unconscious brain, as it satisfies that at some point we’ll get onto that task, and we know exactly how we’ll do it. And the essentials of creating these do-able next steps are to make “a few very specific, actionable, non-conflicting items.”

2. Prioritize ruthlessly

There is a story of a psychologist who gave a talk about managing time and resources. Before the talk began, the psychologist asked everyone in the group to write a summary of their strategic approach in 25 words.

Apparently, 25 words were too little for the men to express their strategies, and the only response came from the single woman in the group, whose summary read as follows:

First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.

I’ve heard this approach suggested before in various places, and I would suggest you to post it on your desks that should read, “Prioritize until it hurts” in other words, learning the powerful skill of saying NO.

To-do lists invariably crop up when we have so many things to do that we can’t keep track of them all in our heads (Aha! We’re back to Umberto’s thoughts on how lists help us to create order from the chaos of our lives!); which means that we end up with lists far too long for us to complete.

Prioritizing ruthlessly seems to be the only way to actually get done what’s most important in the little time that we have.

3. “Plan ahead” – advice Charles Schwab paid $25,000 for

Here’s another cool story of how to-do lists evolved in the workplace:

Almost 100 years ago, the President of the Bethlehem Steel company in the USA was Charles M Schwab. His company was struggling with inefficiency and Schwab didn’t know how to improve it, so he called in Ivy Lee, a well-known efficiency expert at the time.

Lee agreed to help the company, with his fee being whatever Schwab felt the results were worth after three months.

Lee’s advice to each member of the company’s management team was to write a to-do list at the end of each day, which consisted of the six most important tasks to be done the following day. Then they were told to organize the list based on the highest priority tasks.

The next day, the employees worked through the list from top to bottom, focusing on a single task at a time. At the end of the day, anything left on the list would get added to the top of tomorrow’s list when the employees once again planned for the following day.

As the story goes, the company was so much more efficient after three months that Schwab sent a check to Lee for $25,000.

In your own planning, you can take Lee’s advice for free and use the night before to plan your workday. Setting out the most important tasks you want to complete the following day will help you to avoid time-wasters and distractions by knowing what to work on immediately.

4. Be realistic in your planning

Sometimes it’s nice to know that even our great heroes are fallible. This story about Benjamin Franklin’s struggles to keep up with his daily to-do list shows how important it is to be realistic about how much time we have and what our priorities are.

Franklin was known to be a meticulous tracker of his daily routine and his work towards the virtues he prioritized. Unfortunately, the demands of his business meant that he didn’t always keep up with his ideal daily routine. He often got interrupted by clients and had to ignore his schedule to meet with them.

He also noticed that some of the virtues he aspired to practice, such as frugality—not wasting anything—took up too much time for him to live life as he wanted to. Preparing his own meals and mending his own clothes all the time, for instance, meant that he didn’t have enough time for business or his side projects.

The result of these conflicting priorities was unhappiness over not completing the tasks he set for himself. As a result, he had to re-prioritize, which is something we should keep in mind.

If we’re struggling to complete our to-do lists on a regular basis (we’ve all been there at some point!), we need to make a change to the list—make it more realistic.

Although a to-do list can be infinite, our time is not. We need to match the tasks we require of ourselves to how much time and energy we can afford to spend on them. This is where prioritizing can really come in handy, as well.

Starting to develop your own, personal daily routine is one of the most powerful ways to become a great list maker.

 

Bonus: Johnny Cash’s perfect, semi-efficient to do list

As a last example, I found a to-do list from Johnny Cash. This wouldn’t necessarily be one we’d advocate to help you become more efficient. But then again, we can’t argue with Johnny Cash’s success, can we?

And I promise, if nothing else, at-least you will feel that you have some control over things and time.

Recipe for Happiness

All of us are humans, we are all enmeshed in a world full of opposites – pleasure & pain, joy & sorrow, profit & loss, victory & defeat, success & failure, birth & death. We work and sweat and plot and plan and spend all our time trying to achieve one side of each pair of opposites – pleasure, joy, profit, victory, success – while avoiding the other – pain, sorrow, loss, defeat, failure.

But here’s the thing – both sides are really not at all that different from each other. What’s more, one cannot exist without the other. You cannot avoid the bad side of the equation because rejecting the bad side means denying the good side as well. You don’t feel even half much of pleasure of achieving something if you have never failed in the process. More importantly, neither side ever lasts – not pleasure, not pain, not victory, not defeat.

So what should you do? Accept both sides of each pair of opposite with the same sunny attitude. And there is another way of achieving the same result – rejecting both sides of each pair of opposites! Whichever one you pick, it means the same thing – you neither get elated when something “good” happens nor depressed when something “bad” happens. You are always calm. And calm means no fear (of failure), no desire (for victory), no sorrow (over loss) and no anger (at rejection).

Isn’t it very hard to accept or reject every pair of opposite, especially since our entire world is made up of them? You bet it is. But one simple way to start on the long journey is to stay completely focused on the work at hand, whatever that work may be – studying for exam, helping your parents around the house, taking care of cranky grandparents, researching a science project with team-mates you don’t go along with…… Don’t think about how disagreeable the work is, don’t wonder what the point of it is, and don’t worry about whether it will bring you any rewards, that you hope, or the failures or dread. Instead put your head down and JUST DO IT.

Eventually, the work itself will become the purpose, and you will not care about the results. The work itself will become the reward, and you will stop looking outside it for rewards.

On the surface, it may seem like a recipe for a dull life, but those who have tried it swear it is actually a recipe for perfect and lasting happiness.

If the Gita’s philosophy were reduced to one sholka……

It would be Shloka 47 of the second chapter of the Gita

You only have the right to perform your duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself as the cause of the results of your activities and do not attach to inactions.

Ways to improve your mood when you feel low

“The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.” ~ Anais Nin  

Since quite a sometime now, I got depressed and stayed depressed for a little over half a year. For that time, every single day was a battle with myself, every single day felt heavy and pointless.

I have since made tremendous progress by becoming more self-aware, practicing self-love, and noticing the infinite blessings and possibilities in my life, but I still have days when those familiar old feelings sneak up on me.

I’m not always self-aware, I don’t always love myself, and sometimes I agonize over everything I don’t have or haven’t accomplished.

I call these days “zombie days.” I’ll just completely shut down and desperately look for ways to distract myself from my feelings.

I suspect we all have zombie days from time to time. I think it’s important to give ourselves permission to not always be happy, but there are also simple ways to improve our mood when we’re feeling down.

Everybody is different, and everybody has different ways of dealing with pain, but if you’re looking for suggestions, you may find these helpful:

1. Step back and self-reflect. Whenever I start feeling depressed, I try to stop, reflect, and get to the root of my feelings. 

2. Reach out to someone. I used to bottle up my feelings out of fear that I would be judged if I talked about them. I’ve since learned that reaching out to a loving, understanding person is one of the best things I can do. And the role is played by my husband only.  

 3. Write. Writing is usually the first thing I do when I’m feeling down. It always helps me get my thoughts and feelings out in front of me. And that is why I have started writing new blog which was all about love and the stories we live. Check that out on tanukathuria.blogspot.in

4. Take a nap. Sometimes we just need to recharge. I always feel better after getting some rest. Because that is the best way to shut your mind and stop thinking about anything and everything which makes you feel depressed and low.  

5. Go for a walk. Walking always helps me clear my head and shed negative energy. It’s especially therapeutic if you choose to walk at a scenic location.  

6. Do something spontaneous. Some of my favorite memories entail choices I made spontaneously. We should all learn to let go of routine every now and then and do something exciting and unplanned.  

    

7. Prioritize. Sometimes I feel depressed when my priorities are out of balance. I try to make sure I’m giving a fair amount of attention to all the priorities in my life, such as work, relationships, health, and personal happiness.

8. Look through old photographs or snap some new ones. Sorting through old memories or capturing new ones usually puts a smile on my face. 

  

9. Laugh. Watch a funny movie or spend time with someone who has a good sense of humor. Laughing releases tension and has a natural ability to heal.  

10. Cry. I don’t like crying in front of people, but whenever I have an opportunity to slink away and cry by myself, I always feel better afterwards. Crying releases pain.  

11. Read back over old emails or text messages. Whenever I feel dejected or bad about myself, I like to read kind emails and comments from my blog readers. Doing so reminds me that I’m loved, thought about, and appreciated. 

12. Reconnect with someone. Get back in touch with an old friend or a family member that you haven’t spoken to in a while. Reconnecting with people almost always puts me in a good mood and fills my heart up with love.   

13. Bake something. Baking has always been therapeutic and entertaining for me. Plus, I can eat whatever I baked and share it with others afterward. 

14. Focus on what truly matters to you. Sometimes I forget what matters to me and what isn’t that important. Some things just aren’t worth getting too upset over. 

15. Take a negative comment or situation and look for something positive about it. If someone says something negative to me or I get stuck in an unpleasant situation, sometimes it helps to look at it from a different angle. Perspective is everything.  

16. Let go. This is a very simple mantra of mine. I usually say it to myself multiple times each day, which has been very liberating and empowering.