The most beautiful thing about time is that whether you do something or nothing, whether you are joyful or miserable, it passes by. No matter who you are or how you are, it passes at the same speed for everyone. It is just that our experience of time varies depending upon how intensely we live or how slack we are. If you are very slack with life, it looks like time is passing by very slowly. If you are very intense, time just flies by. But in reality, time is happening to all of us at the same pace.
If you look at life in its full depth and dimension, life is a certain amount of space. If you look at life in a linear fashion, life is a certain amount of time. If you look at life from your psychological perspective, life is a certain number of problems. Every day I meet all sorts of people – thousands of them. The variety of problems they have is unbelievable. Birth is a problem, death is a problem, and in between there are a series of problems.
Now, a new year is on us. This a choice that you have to make: are you going to invest your thought, emotion and energy towards making up problems or creating solutions? This does not mean you have to take a resolution to stop creating problems.
Keeping Accounts
There is no need to make any resolutions. You make a resolution because you want to do something you are not naturally inclined towards. But the simple thing is, are you naturally inclined to be joyful or miserable? Think about when you were a child – you were joyful. Someone had to make you unhappy. The natural inclination of life is for pleasantness and exuberance.
So how joyful shall you be in the coming year? Just keep accounts. Many people who are in business think they should keep accounts only for the sake of the Income Tax. No, you keep accounts because otherwise you do not know whether you are making a profit or a loss. To know whether you are moving forward or backwards, you need an account book. So why don’t you keep an account book? Just check at the end of the day, “Am I a little more joyful today than yesterday?” If you had done this since you were five years of age, you would have been ecstatic by now.
Every day, every month, just keep accounts, “Am I becoming more joyful or less joyful?” There are only two things to keep track of – how joyful you are and how much joy you give to people around you. You can keep accounts of this. People are keeping accounts of their money, as if they are going to carry it with them forever. But the real wealth of life is how joyful you are, how wonderful and profound your experience of life is.
Joy is not a goal by itself, but it is a necessary ambiance for life. If you do not set this one ambiance, then whatever you have will go waste. You may have health, but that will go waste because there are more people on this planet who are healthy and miserable than unhealthy and miserable.
This is our time on this planet. What are we going to do? Are we going to make this into an exuberant, joyful, wonderful planet, or are we going to make this into a miserable, horrible one? We are free to do this either way – the choice is yours.
(Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. He was conferred with the Padma Vibhushan in 2017 for exceptional and distinguished service.)
