Reflections on Sandekphu and Salesforce

So I just reached back to Bengaluru and I keep thinking perhaps this is a good moment to write something. Some kind of mental snapshot is warranted.

I am hoping to join a new company - Salesforce after working in Visa for just 1.5 years. I just completed another trek - some 80 kms walk in the park. During the trek, I wrote down a bunch of mental sticking points and the advantage of having such a list is to see which one of them are perhaps temporary and which ones might stick around for sometime and haunt one.

During the trek, I kept reminding myself that I should not fixate on the destination - that lofty peak or that supposedly pretty valley. The trek itself was the prize that I have earned. And the one that I wanted to celebrate. And celebrate is the right word for it. There is nothing that comes close to describing what it was. Just stretching the body and mind and asserting its capabilities. During those walks, I got reminded of Illayaraja's song "Pitchai Pathiram" from the spine chilling movie "Naan Kadavul". Rams explained some years ago that the "begging bowl" mentioned in that song actually refers to one's body. And I got reminded of this metaphor while walking as i realized that it is the body which is the actual vehicle for this trek. All the trekking gear are useful yet frivolous accoutrements. And what is true for the trek is also true for the life in general.

Thinking about this "celebration" part, I have been aware of a tendency of mine to hyper-fixate on some destination - on some outcome. And this has served me very well. I am quite proud of some of the results of these fixations - both to myself personally and to the small part of the world I think I can influence. But i know that this fixation is just a device and sometime i lose sight of the utter meaninglessness of the said outcome. In the recent past i have been influenced by probabilistic thinking and Bhagavad Gita's retort of focussing only on the action and not the fruits. All of these somehow came together alive in this trek.

And i was loving the way my body was responding to the challenge. I have been trying to restart Hata yoga practice and the impact of all that hata seemed evident. Pain was there. Challenges were there but the body persisted. Perhaps the best way to describe the exuberation of finding one's body raise up to a challenge is to find that at the end of a long day of trekking, i realized that i can go through it all over again. And when i twist my body next morning in those cyclical Surya shaktis, it does not complain much. Incredibly i was able to keep up my hata yoga practices through out the entire trek. This involved me doing yogic contortions in a shephard's hut to the utter bewilderment of those said yak shephards. And Yak calves are the cutest. It all reminded me of my trek in Uttarakhand..

These are small silent victories that I console myself with.

There are those other victories which are simple and fundamental but i am not sure they are small. Those are those tiny moments of meditation and awareness. Sometimes those moments of awareness are moments of freedom - sometimes they are moments of pause and painful introspection. I feel if there was something close to what i can call it "earning it", it would be those moments.

I want to sink into these moments of acknowledgement of what i have earned and what i actually value as i step into another trek - the one involving me being yet again a paid coolie to yet another American corporation.

Why do I always seem to be wearing SWAGs from ex-employers?