70 Promises

I begin my eighth decade on the planet at the end of this week. Against the weight of eight decades, seventy sounds really young, and I still have five days to get there. So, I am still young, really young. But, things change on July 10th, so while I’m still this side of the divide, I need to put down guidelines for living life on the other side.

Worry not, there won’t be seventy of them - that was just clickbait. These are my promises at seventy.

At My Age…

I will not use my age as a crutch.

Except on the Delhi metro, that is.

I don’t have to tell anybody how old I am: it’s pretty apparent.

More importantly, I must not tell myself how old I am, to justify laziness or a lack of curiosity. Life is a delicate balance between acceptance and pushing the boundaries. Between the inevitability of physical and cognitive decline after a certain age - roughly thirty years ago for me - and the elasticity of exercise. Use it, and you will still lose it. But much, much more slowly. And you will continue to be both engaged and engaging for a long time.

…I Must Keep Moving

Shareer gyaanam, pratham gyaanam.

This machine is aging. I have learned to respect that, not by retiring to a couch, but by coaxing it into movement and training, by living with its limitations, but also striving to explore those limits.

Almost two years ago, I fell off my cycle, and severely damaged the ligaments around my left shoulder. It took two months before my sports doctor allowed me to swim, just in time for our winter time in Goa. Not more than half an hour at a time - he warned me. All of December, I struggled to regain my swimming form. More than once, my shoulder refused to cooperate, and I exited the ocean, frustrated. These were the same waters in which Mohit Oberoi and I had swum a triumphant five kilometers just ten months earlier. Same year, different body.

Of course, I often asked, “Will I ever be able to swim five kilometers again?”

More important though, I decided, was to enjoy every swim. To work at repairing my shoulder. To believe that, as long as I listened to my body, it would tell me how much I could do. This January, Mohit and I swam across Bambolim bay again. His Garmin watch logged a little over 3 km. Way short of our last swim together, but done with ease, and above all, with joy.

Movement is joy, a joy I will keep nurturing.

Be Big, Not Just Old

Dil chhota nahi karnaa is a thought that has populated my annual musings in July.

This thought goes beyond both charity and generosity. It reminds me that I must not allow my being to shrink in response to the smallness of others. If I can turn my mind away from the presumed injustices other people have done to me, I free myself to be creative and constructive. If life has to continue to be positive, I must walk away from my own mistakes. Why then should I be held back by the misdeeds of others?

I used the word ‘presumed’ to qualify injustice because my feeling of being wronged might just be a distortion in my lens. When I see myself having been wronged, it may not have been wilful, just a mismatch of expectations or worldview. Walking away may be warranted, but when I do, I must leave the sense of hurt behind.

If I look through the lens of charity, I must also recognise that other peoples’ actions come from the emotional baggage they carry, from their own morality; unless I have taken the trouble to deeply understand them, I should not even begin to judge them.

‘Be Big’ reminds me to be the best person I can be, at all times, not a reflection of each person I encounter, each with their own frailties, insecurities and alien value systems. I must take the best, not the worst, from every situation, and try to be myself, my best self.

Keep Listening

With a hearing aid, if necessary.

After a certain age, ‘Uncles’, especially Indian uncles, think they don’t need to listen to anyone at all. They will hold forth, and if you dare to disagree, they will shake their heads violently in response, turn away, or try to shout you down. They’ve seen it all, they know it all, and the longer they’ve believed that, the less they actually contribute, because the more out of touch they are with reality.

Besides reading voraciously, I try to listen carefully, really carefully, to young people. To meet them in their own spaces, whether coffee shops, bars, rehearsal stages or behind their microphones. My engagement with the world of start-ups has taught me an incredible amount, about the emerging shape of business and technology, about evolving styles of management, and most of all, about the way younger people think. Being a board member or advisor to a start up is, as someone said pithily, to be both a mentor and an intern. What a privilege!

Always be an intern to life.

Be Humble - You Have a Lot to be Humble about

This is closely tied to what I wrote above.

Do not assume that age, money, or position should automatically bring privilege.

In India, especially, they often do. That can be quite charming, and convenient. But it can also be crippling, and will inhibit your continued growth. Privilege brings distance, and reduces communication and learning. Humility, on the other hand, brings openness, and is a pre-requisite for learning.

I take that seat for the elderly on the metro, but I also try to talk to my neighbour. And if she is scrolling reels, well, I peek at them, to get a sense of what is engaging her, before I retreat to my oh-so intellectually superior editorial from the Financial Times.

Cultivate chance, or karma.

Some of my most meaningful experiences and relationships have come from random encounters.

Once upon an Edinburgh festival, I engaged a lost stranger at the bar I was tending, thought I detected a German accent, and commented on it. We ended up speaking into the wee hours of the morning. First in an emptying Georgian apartment in Edinburgh’s New Town, then in front of the fireplace of our mountain home that winter, when he accepted my invitation to visit. A few summers later, our two families sailed the islands of the Ionian Sea together, one of the most sublime, joyous, light-filled holidays I have ever had.

As we grow older, we seek more comfort, more predictability, and close off the spaces for the unexpected, for the sparks of a meaningful new encounter. This is a sad containment of which I am increasingly guilty. But I promise myself to still steer my cycle onto new strips of tarmac, or off, engage with new spaces, new faces, and continue to sip at the nectar of chance.

“Learn to listen. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly.”

No Time Left to Sweat the Small Stuff

As we get older, we can get more and more finicky about the really small things - the favourite ballpen, the correct place for the cup, the right angle for the rug, the creaseless shawl…

The “search for perfection, is all very well, but to search for heaven is to live here in hell.” Gordon Sumner aka Sting. And, as you grow older, it takes that much longer to form that tie into a perfect knot. A bad example - ties are an abomination, at any age.

I’m not advocating slummy surroundings or crushed kurtas, though I do tend to the latter. But, I hope I never lose sight of the really important stuff - the time to listen to music, to admire the sunset, to give gratitude for the many gifts brought to me by the tides of fortune.

Those tides have been eternally kind to me. This June, we spent our twenty-ninth summer in our beloved Cowshed. “You will be permanently deformed”, my wife said, only half in jest, as I spent all my waking hours slouched against a pile of cushions in the bay window, looking out on the garden, the cascade of ferns, and the venerable old utees trees that have watched over us since the time we bathed our infant son in a plastic tub by the fireplace.

Dance

I love to dance. Or what passes for it.

If not wildly, then certainly with abandon.

The assurance that age should bring, should also enable one to cast off restraint. Restraint, or needless inhibition, is the domain of the insecure, those still groping for their identity. By now, you should know yourself.

Be secure in your wholeness. Wholeness is never absolute, for life is full of loss; of family and friends, of teeth or mobility. We are never whole, except in that we make ourselves whole again, after loss upon loss, upon loss.

In this ever new wholeness, this spiritual spiral into new realities, we must dance, with joy for today, not sorrow for yesterday.

And when I find new people to dance with, I will dance with them.