Most of us seem to be living life on an assembly line.
We finish our education, get a job, get married, and become parents. We change jobs, manage relationships and life challenges while upping our lifestyle. The new lifestyle demands more resources, making us feel poorer and sets us off again on a chase to find better jobs, while simultaneously raising our lifestyle bar, thereby chasing poverty all over again. Meanwhile, age catches up, life’s challenges become more complex demanding more from our already stretched selves leading to stress and a general breakdown of our health. For some of us, it seems like being on an unforgiving treadmill not knowing how to switch it off.
I believe that there are always other ways to live our life. Around us, we are seeing people making a choice of a different life. Not everyone wants to be on this treadmill for ever. More and more people today are getting off the treadmill and at a much younger age. People are taking sabbaticals, pausing their treadmill to find their calling, picking up courage to stand apart and walk a different path.
This is not to say that staying on or getting off the treadmill is good or bad. It is to say that each one of us can make a choice and that every choice represents a trade-off. One could trade health for money, money for fame, time for relationships, heart for the head and so on.
However, it is certainly important to hold a compass as we go through life. The compass helps us press the pause button and reflect on what is happening right now in our life, where we are headed in areas of our work, health, relationships, money and well-being. Is this the right direction? Are we going at the right speed? Are we joined by the people we care about? Have we thought about their journeys as well? Do we need to pause and catch up with what we consider important? Is there a need to walk a different path?
Life is like a pizza with several slices. The different slices represent the different areas of our life – we need to have toppings on all the slices to savor a wholesome pizza. The toppings represent our investments in the different areas of our life.
I invite you to keep the metaphorical compass by your side. It can tell you what you have really achieved in your life and if there is a need to do a course correction.
Let us look often at our compass and propel our life forward in the direction of our choice.
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I Loved the metaphor of using Compass to periodically reflect on our life activities.
Thank you, Ram!