Reflections From 2024

I’ve been reflecting these past few days on the year that’s gone by. I think that every start of the year for me, signifies celebrations for my beautiful friend, Ana (her birthday falls on the 1st of Jan) but also a key juncture to take an inventory of the year. So here’s my inventory:

Start with the assumption that people are good, unless proven otherwise

Over the past few years, especially 2024, I crossed paths with some phenomenal human beings. I witnessed their way of living — how they consciously chose to live from the center of their hearts, how they chose to focus on the good of the world, how they gave without expecting anything in return, how they truly wished well for you, how they wanted to evolve and encourage others to do the same.

Growing up, my dad, who wears his heart on his sleeve too, witnessed a lot of suffering. He spoke about how you couldn’t trust human beings, how friends and family could betray you and you really have to have your own back in a world that’s out to get you. I believe, his experience was very valid, however, I took this assumption on without experiencing the world for myself. I began to believe the world might actually be out to get me, and developed a subconscious framework that said human beings have an agenda, unless proven otherwise.

However, the assumption was proven wrong more times than it was proven right, thus, making me overturn an age-long belief I’ve subconsciously held (work still ongoing).

Tend to the conditions

There is this small video I recently watched by Alan Watts, which talks about how a gardener cannot construct a rose but only tend to the conditions of the garden that would encourage the growth of one. So much of my life, I have chased goals and results, instead of just focusing on nurturing the conditions for those goals and results to materialize by themselves. For example, if you’re hoping to refine your attention, simply focus on reducing distractions. If you want to be fitter, simply eat good food & move your body. If you want to feel more present, reduce the number of things you do in the day. It sounds so simple yet it can be so easy to get stuck in the cycle where you’re trying to construct the rose, rather than tending to the conditions that it would birth within.

Choose who to invest in, then accept them wholly

I’ve come to realize that one of the crucial decisions you make in life is the people you let in. However, once you’ve made that decision, you simply accept them for all they are, their dark & light and whatever they come with. Once you choose the people you wish to invest it, that’s it. Period.

There is seriously no rush

I fall for this every time, which makes sense too given our society is struggling with slowing down and I’m part of it. I find myself rushing to do things, doing a disservice to the quality of the things I engage in and to myself, by speeding up my internal clock. There are strategies I have realized I can put in place to slow things down, to allow myself to experience them fully and inhabit a more peaceful inner state like gentle reminder put on a note where I can see it, remembering to focus on my breath amidst any activity to consciously slow down, putting a timer for tasks that allows me to fully immerse myself in them without worrying about the next thing. This also means, for me, having patience with myself — being gentle in the manner I speak to myself and patient in the way I work on myself. It matters how you achieve something, not what you achieve.

Doing things with intention

I have first hand witnessed the quality of my attention and work when an intention is set versus when it isn’t. An intention allows you to consciously enter into the right mental state and direct energy. Every activity we do in the physical realm has a corresponding mental state, whether we realize it or not. You could do something with a frustrated mindset, a fearful mindset or a calm mindset. Getting into the habit of setting an intention for everything I do is perhaps one of the single most important lessons from this year.

Integration (through lived experience) is more important than acquiring knowledge

My friend, Tomas, first warned me about this when he said,

“Ashna, make sure you’re not hoarding all the knowledge in your intellect and you’re actually transforming it into lived experience.”

That advice, I knew then, like i know now, was extremely relevant to me. I’ve been such an avid reader since I was young, and in the past couple of years, I’ve picked up self-development books like candies. Instead, I didn’t realize, that for this theme of books, I can’t possibly do them all justice. They all require you to develop yourself, which can only be done through experience, which has to be repeated in order to become a part of you. I know how overwhelmed I’ve felt in certain circumstances, when I’ve read too much and wanted to become it all, without acknowledging my limitations. I began to mull over this, when another friend of mine, Felix, says to me,

“Ashna, why don’t you try to focus on less things to feel and absorb more?”

It really brought the lesson home!

My life is a canvas of lessons, so this piece can’t possibly do justice to everything I’ve learned and honed upon this past year. I will continue to weave the tapestry of my life through lessons picked up from all corners of my life, some that become an inherent part of me and some that don’t and that’s okay.

If nothing else sticks, I hope the lesson from Friedrich Nietzsche does,

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”