The fourth of December is my birthday. In 2023, I’ll be turning 22. For the first time in a long while, I have written something about it and would want to share it with friends, acquaintances and strangers on the internet.

The Mind, Body and Spirit are separate entities that form the person that we see and interact with. They come to the table wanting different infinite things from their existence yet there is finite time and willpower to do them all.

My mind - the faculty of consciousness and thought - wants to know more. Wants to experience and feel more. It wants to go to the unknown and find what lies therein. It wants to ask the hard questions all the time with no end.

My body - the physical structure within which the rest reside - wants to look good and feel even better. It wants to work out and run. It wants to be stronger than ever before every morning.

My spirit - the seat of emotions and character - wants to be upright. It holds the rest of my person to high moral standards and wants it to remain the same.

There is a consistent tussle between the three entities. Each is selfish. Each wants to standout in all and through all. With each comes some sort of individuality that demands for the entity to be considered independently. It is for this reason that I refer to myself as “we”. (I also think it sounds cool and, you know, this is my blog.) Indeed, we are the mind, body and spirit that come together to form the person that you all know.

In the coming year, my greatest aim is to strike a balance. It will not be easy. We are not here to do easy things. There are some ruminations I have had during the weeks leading up to my birthday that I think would fit into this memo.

1. We do it at the highest level and do it to win. All the time.

Whatever the price of winning is, we will pay up. We define winning and work towards it relentlessly. We might try to find the off switch in 20 years, for now, we have no idea how that looks like.

2. We have a standard of excellence and we keep it up. All the time.

There is no way, that we can accept any form of mediocrity on any level at any time. We have a high standard and cannot go beneath it.

Anytime we speak, we (try to) find the right words to speak our minds. We understand that some sentiments are not shared with whoever is reading or listening to our words. That is why we don’t push. We listen. We want our beliefs questioned and the Mind changed.

4. We have strong opinions that are loosely held.

We give new, foreign ideas five (metaphorical) minutes. We understand that there as many ways of viewing the world and how life works as there’s sand in the Diani beaches that we’ve never been to. We are open to having the Mind changed. Not barking off at ideas ferociously but giving them time to settle, you know, ruminating and all.

5. We show up. We do the dirty work. All the time.

Successful people don’t love doing the dirty work. We are not like them. We do all the dirty work if that’s the price that needs to be paid.

6. We fall short sometimes. We are human. All the time.

We accord ourselves and others grace when we fall short, because we will. We haven’t been doing that and that has been bad to the Mind and the Spirit sometimes. This year, it’s different. We accord grace.

7. We, in unison, believe in God and the gift of salvation. All the time.

The Body has felt His power, the Mind sees His hand in all creation, the Spirit feels His calming presence in all situations. There has never, is not and will never be any conflict regarding this. We firmly believe so. And with all our might, we will try to express His love in all our works.

8. We care little what opinions people have about us. All the time.

We look forward to controversy. We are not afraid of confrontation and being different. That we have got here thus far is testament to our dedication to not thinking of the status quo, always going against the grain and expressing ourselves in the purest of ways.

9. When we love, we express it and we give it our all. All the time.

This has been hard to do thus far. Moving forward, We want to understand people and how to make them special. I mean all forms of relationships - work, personal, family, strangers. We have said it before, we want to be a channel for giving God’s love.

I understand that some of these might be controversial. And that’s totally fine. If it itches really bad, give me a call. Let’s talk about it. I understand equally, that the ones that have gone ahead of me would probably judge some of this as the heat of youth and most of them as the wrong outlook towards life. Like I said in number 4, we are looking forward to having the Mind changed. 

PS: In addition to all this, the final year of the first part of my educational journey will end before my next birthday. We are working on a great tribute to the person who made us value putting in the work nonstop. The person that was grinding in the trenches with us all the time. She put perspective and added meaning to the struggle. Mama is gone but never forgotten.

Ruminations, Birthdays and Internal Memos

What makes us human apart from the clothes that we wear, the houses that we build and live in and the amazing destructive gadgets that we create and rely on isn’t the food we eat. It is the innate desire to be in control. All of us want to have a seat at the table where decisions that matter are made, we want to be in the percentage of people who “matter”. We want to be in control, to know what’s coming before it happens, to understand why something happened the way it did and so on and so forth.

This very desire to be in control and want to know our situations and surroundings to the level best of our abilities is in itself what makes us very much like the animals we are not. Animals, in their natural environments, are built to be hierarchical. Right from insects like ants that have the queen and the worker, each knowing their place in society and living up to it - we can see the hierarchy. I could mention more examples, but I won’t because I want you to finish this post ;-)

In an effort to be in control, when faced with a difficult situation, we want to rearrange the world into arbitrary hierarchies to make sense of the world, maintain our beliefs and most importantly, 

Being in control makes us feel way better about ourselves. Quite a number of people think of me as a nerd. It, therefore, follows that when I study as much I get as good results. This is an ideal situation. I was in control till the very end. In some situations, when I am not grounded enough, I might think - “Perhaps I’m better than him or her because I did better than them in this discipline.” My underlying animal nature allows me to.

Then comes the situation where I put in the effort and the outcome does not match my expectations. Then, I say - “This semester was difficult anyway. At least I have a really good laptop and my favourite team beat our derby rivals when we met last.” In that very subtle way, I have rearranged the world that now seemed not to be in my favour to seem like I am still in control and everything is going great. Very “animalistic” if you ask me.

Think about when you tried to rearrange the lego blocks of your life to make a wonderful picnic site from a pile of garbage. No, I do not want you to feel bad. Neither do I want you to feel good. I just want to make you think about some of the stuff that I think about.

Once you see this happen, it is very very difficult for you to unsee it. This bias is everywhere, in people of all ages. You see it, quite a lot if I may add, in politicians, in courtrooms, in the words we choose to describe people and their decisions and actions. We see it in all these situations.

This happens instinctively, like Rick from Rick and Morty says "

Yeah, sure, […] if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad.

The discovery of this has made me think of ways where instead of comparing myself to other people in the same situations, I do it to myself but from different situations. If I really want to be better, I think I should strive to be better than how I was a while back.

Control

Writing is the purest form of thinking. This is the space that I put up all the little and mighty thoughts that I feel worthy of public audience.

Thoughts