My Living Obituary

It started out as an activity at a corporate networking event. There was a lady from God knows which organization who was there to speak to us about "work life balance" and all that jazz. Given that every person in that room was working an average 70 hours a week, it all came across as a bit of a joke to us. But the lady surprised us. Instead of boring us with a PowerPoint presentation, she made us meditate for 20 minutes and followed it up with a mandate to write out our obituaries. The catch -  she asked us to write them as we'd want to be remembered, not how we were likely to be remembered given our current jobs and relationships.

The faces of people around me reflected exactly what I was feeling at that point. We were spending every single day rushing towards objectives set for us by our organization. In the midst of our crazy schedules, how many of us had actually taken out time to think about why we were running all the time? And where were we headed towards?

I knew my soul had been crying for some time now. I felt overwhelmed by the daily pressure situations I'd find myself in. My clients were demanding jerks with zero empathy and wouldn't pay us for our efforts (taking the project was a "strategic" call for the organization, we were practically doing CSR, very stressful CSR). My team was demotivated. I had never greyed at a faster pace than in the last four months. My hormones were all over the place as a resylt of all the stress I was under. In short, physically, mentally, emotionally I was a wreck. Spiritually - this was the longest I'd gone without meditating because I kept feeling that any moment spent not working was a waste of time. 

Strangely, her words brought me the first ounce of peace in months. It was as if I were connecting with my soul after a very long time. I finally put my pen to paper and poured my heart out.

D's Obituary

"D was a girl with a sunny disposition and a deep, incorrigible love for life. Whenever you looked at her, you thought of a garden full of fresh flowers or a litter of playful puppies for whom the world was a fun, happy playground. She wasn't familiar with an emotion called cynicism and believed the best about people and about situations that came to pass. With age and experience, she'd realized that there's no room for gullibility in life, but her experiences made her wise, rather than mistrustful. Every fun experience was lived up to all its glory and every so called set back was a lesson learnt. 

D had two passions in life apart from her family (including her adorable pet Maxi Boy), travelling and writing. Nothing gave her more pleasure than walking the unknown streets of a new town and discovering new places and then finding a quaint little cafe with vegetarian food, where she would prop up her laptop and write about her latest burst of inspiration. She loved the freedom of roaming the world with the love of her life and her kids, belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. She had sworn she'd bring up children in a way that ensured that they weren't constrained by the mental models of the world. She spent the years before she had kids, on herself, breaking away from preconceived notions that she'd grown up with and rediscovering herself and her passions.

When D wasn't writing, she was learning  new languages, or dancing, or talking to every passing animal and bird on the street. A firm believer in magic, D believed in living in harmony with the universe and being best friends with Mother Nature. She held no grudges and believed that her responses were hers to define and she could not be instigated into a bad mood. She saw the world go haywire, but she knew that newspapers had blinkers on when it came to all the good news in the world. So she made it a point to spread happy news with whoever she came in contact with. 

D was a ray of sunshine. In fact she was an entire sun beam. And she helped us discover the personal sources of sunshine we had within us. In a world that was moving towards darkness, she spread a lot of light and made her trips around the sun truly worthwhile and fun filled. That was her personal legend. She lived it with all the honesty that one could have asked for."

I wrote this, stepped back and read it. And then I thought about my haggard, sleep deprived face, my constant frustration at the thought of going to work and suffering through another stressful day every morning, the dark circles that had become permanent fixtures on my face, the way I scowled at my family sometimes if they wanted to do something fun on a week night, the way I only seemed to come alive on weekends and went into deep depression on Sunday nights. And I realized that I NEVER EVER wanted to be remembered for the person I'd turned into over the last few years. That was not my idea of success. That was not my idea of life! And yet, I slogged, day in and day out, for a salary that allowed me to travel for 10 days in a year. 

I felt weirdly free just reading my obituary. I couldn't wait to become the person I used to be years ago. Because that girl did surface every now and then. And as I sat through the remaining sessions, I knew that that girl was here to stay.