Category: Living

Surrender yourself to a different high

Written by Suraj Shah.

You’ll see the sky is clear, you’ll find you’re free from fear,
The peace you feel is real, and your life is again filled with zeal.

When you’re struggling in life, facing so much pain and strife,
When you’re filled with despair, feeling that life is beyond repair,
Let me show you a way to cope, so you need not resort to dope,
Simply look up to the sky, surrendering yourself to a different high.

You’ll see clouds glowing bright, but holding back the daylight,
You’ll see clouds moving slow, with no real place to go,
You’ll see clouds hide the sun, trying hard to stop the fun,
You’ll see clouds span the sky, mostly low but sometimes high.

You see, we often think we’re stuck, in tonnes of nasty muck,
We may think we’re out of luck, and that no-one gives a ____,
But look up just once more, so we can get right to the core,
The clouds that were once overhead, you’ll see something else instead.

The day’s doom and gloom, that once made you run to your room,
Has completely cleared away, to brighten up your precious day.
You’ll see the sky is clear, you’ll find you’re free from fear,
The peace you feel is real, and your life is again filled with zeal.

Then when you look back at me, I’ll ask “what did you see?”
You’ll say “there lies the key, to overcome life’s misery.”
What was once there is now no more, so no need to still feel sore,
Troubles in life come and go, that’s really all you need to know.

(Photo courtesy of Newsbie Pix)

9/11 didn’t affect me

Written by Suraj Shah.

When mass death takes place and you’re not there, how does it affect you?

We all saw that something big was going down. It shook the whole world, it stopped everyone in their tracks, yet 9/11 didn’t affect me.

“Where were you when it happened?” is what was often asked following the World Trade Centre disaster, even 10 years on. I was on my industrial placement at the IBM UK head quarters in North Harbour, Portsmouth, England. There was one small ‘play’ room on the floor which had a small TV in it. Almost all my colleagues in that department were gradually getting up to huddle around that room and witness what was taking place, live, on the news reports. I thought it was probably something about a football match, which I didn’t really care much about. But I soon found out what was going on.

As the events unfolded, we all realised how grave the situation really was. Concerns started to rise about whether similar events may take place in England and what we ought to do about it. Some of our colleagues were even concerned that we may have to evacuate our office in Portsmouth in case there was an attempt to blow up IBM’s head office.

Ha! Isn’t it funny how we always try to make it about us?

It didn’t affect me

However, I wasn’t really affected. None of my family or my friends died or were injured in it, so it didn’t affect me. Terror alerts, especially at airports, were set to critical, but I wasn’t flying anywhere, so it didn’t affect me. My possessions weren’t damaged and my work wasn’t delayed. It didn’t affect me. I just saw it on the news and got on with my life.

Same with the tsunamis in Asia in 2004. I was backpacking in India at the time, but it didn’t affect me. I just saw it on the news and got on with my life.

Same with the London riots in 2011. I was living close to where some of the riots took place, but it didn’t affect me. I just saw it on the news and got on with my life.

Far away or just disconnected

When something big happens, and a lot of people die or are harmed, or affected in some major way, how do we respond to it?

I thought I was a compassionate person, but sometimes I do wonder whether I am watching the news with eyes of compassion, or merely with eyes of curiosity and intrigue.

All these events that I witnessed through the news, certainly did happen. A lot of people were hurt. A lot of people have died. Following the 9/11 incident, 3000 children were left without a parent. How can these children ever make sense of it?

It’s an uncertain world with many small and large-scale tragedies taking place daily, and yet all we can do is try to remain calm, connect with those who are grieving, support them as best we can, help move them away from their suffering, and continue to live each day the only way we know how.

(Photo courtesy of Samantha Marx)

Mundane time drain verses enthused creation

Written by Suraj Shah.

Three days doing a mundane repetitive task verses three hours enthused in creating something that will benefit other people too – if you were me, which would you have picked?

Much my work on the web team at Heathrow involves carrying out mundane repetitive tasks. However, I thrive when I find ways to automate the task and eliminate boredom.

How much time do you lose doing things you don’t want to do, yet have to do them over and over and over again?

Time is such a precious commodity for each and every one of us, and we often find ourselves trapped in doing chores that are boring and tedious. What I’ve found though, is that many of the things that we find mundane and repetitive can become simplified and automated.

Getting enthused in creative work

Rather than getting bogged down in the work, we can get enthused and enjoy it. We can create something that goes beyond getting the job done and make it so that it contributes to the wider community.

Barrie Davenport suggests an approach:

Rather than groaning, “I dread this crappy task before me,” ask “How can I create this task in a way that feels joyful, creative, and giving?”

At work yesterday I was tasked with identifying the title of every single page on the website for one of our airports.

If I had done this manually, then once I got into a rhythm, it would have taken a minute or two to copy and paste the link into a browser, wait for each page to load up, copy and paste the title text into the spreadsheet and move onto the next item.

Multiply this by 150 to 200 pages and we’re looking at around 2 to 3 hours per website, without breaks, just for one mundane task, not to mention how numb my mind would have become by the end of it! For 12 websites, with breaks, we’re looking at perhaps three days of work, just for one mundane task.

Contrast these three days I could have spent doing the repetitive task, to the 3 hours I actually did spend implementing a script I found off the web, letting the script run for each of the sites and documenting the process for anyone else in the team to be able to do the task quickly and easily in the future.

It’s something that challenged and fulfilled me, got the same end result, along with bonuses (the automated process, fully documented), in 10% of the time it would have taken if I did it the manual way.

Three days doing a mundane repetitive task verses three hours enthused in creating something that will benefit other people too – if you were me, which would you have picked?

Automating or simplifying mundane repetitive tasks

Now I get that you are rarely going to need to copy and paste page titles from airport websites, but what other mundane repetitive tasks do you and I do in our day to day lives that we could automate or simplify?

  • Handling money: Automate your finances – get paid directly into your account (no more cheques), set up regular savings deposits and set up automatic bill payment.
  • Filling forms: Have people fill forms out electronically rather than you having to manually type out hand written forms that have been sent to you.
  • Co-ordinating diaries: When organising meetings or a social function, get participants to fill out an online poll (such as Doodle) rather than clogging up email inboxes and trying to work out who is available when.
  • Sharing documents: When sending documents to groups of people, load them up onto a central shareable space (using a tool like Dropbox ~ referral link) and point people to it, rather than manually sending the files out to each person that asks for it.
  • Regular communication: When someone expects to receive a text message from you every day or each week, schedule it and let it run automatically (using a tool like SMS Scheduler for Android phones) rather than trying to remember to send them that daily or weekly message.
  • Daily meal planning: Create a simple weekly dinner menu rather than stressing about what to make for dinner each evening.
  • Gardening: Put sand in between paving slabs on your front drive to minimise weed growth, rather than pulling out weeds every month. More at: How to make your yard easier to maintain.
  • Buying clothes: Buy quality garments that last a long time, rather than shopping for new clothes every other week.
  • Daily commute: Live closer to work, or work closer to home, rather than getting stuck in traffic for an hour each way.

This is just the beginning for moving beyond the drudgery of day to day tasks and fretting over how much time you have lost. It is about claiming back lost time and doing more of what enthuses us.

What else could you do to simplify and automate rather than drown in the repetitive and mundane?

(Photo courtesy of Texas Tech University)