Confusing the temporary with the permanent, happiness with pleasure, continuing to search for vague things rather than appreciating what has already been given, and trying to change conditions instead of changing oneself, almost always lead to suffering. There are always signs and signals provided by the higher intelligence of the world to avoid this confusion. Sometimes such cues are received but mostly ignored, and when reality bites, it hurts. Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, under whose tutelage I matured, was very sensitive to such signals, and promptly adjusted his life to the rise and fall of fortunes. In hindsight, I feel that he was even aware of his departure from this world when he wrote in our book, Transcendence, released a month prior to his death, “No maneuvers are required any more, as I am placed in my final position in eternity.” 

It was a sacred moment, when I met the “founding father of the Republic of Zambia” and “Gandhi of Africa,” Dr. Kenneth Kaunda (1924 –2021) on November 30, 2018, in his house on the outskirts of Lusaka. A heavily built man but frail in his mid-nineties, Dr. Kaunda stood up from his seat, raised his hand, carrying his signature white handkerchief, to my head, and murmured a prayer of blessing. I instantly knew that it was one of those times, when a phase ends and another starts, like the summer solstice, when sun moves farthest to the north in the sky and then start returning from the very next day, or the point of contraflexure, when the bending moment changes direction in a beam, or allotropic transformations in metallurgy, when a metal changes from one of these crystalline structures to another while remaining solid.

Besides Zambia, this tour of Africa included Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda, and turned out to be my last international travel. I had a cardiac complication in February 2019 and after that, stopped traveling altogether. I adjusted myself to a home-confined life with structured reading and diving deep into books that I would not have dared to earlier, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and the ultimate novel ever written by anyone, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Excellent English translations are available for all these books and can be accessed on the Internet even without buying the books. And then I realized the truth that we all are basically minds, mistaking ourselves as bodies. And at the mental level, we can connect to even those who have lived before us in faraway lands. 

Recently, I enjoyed reading a short, beautiful book, Search Inside Yourself by Chade Meng-Tan (b. 1971) and his talks on YouTube. Meng, as he is normally called, is a software engineer, born and educated in Singapore, and worked at the Google campus in Mountain View, California (2000-2015), spending the first eight years in Engineering and later starting “mindfulness training” courses at the company. After quitting Google, Meng started the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, and a movement called One Billion Acts of Peace. There is nothing new Meng is presenting, but his take on the traditional Buddhist technique of mindfulness is scientific, and the way he blended it with the famous concept of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (b. 1946) is both, brilliant and practically useful. 

Meng defines “mindfulness” as paying attention to the basic fact that you are alive by feeling your breath – the air going in and coming out. This is not as simple as it sounds. Thoughts arise in the mind, the body distracts us by itches, muscular twists, and even the sensation of pain here and there. Meng tells us to return to keep feeling the breath, ignoring these interruptions, and keep expanding these “mindful of breathing” spells by practice. Meng writes in the aforementioned book, “The good news is that mindfulness is embarrassingly easy… the hard part in mindful practice is deepening, strengthening, and sustaining it, especially in times of difficulty… All you have to do is sit without an agenda for two minutes. Life really cannot get much simpler than that. The idea here is to shift from “doing” to “being,” whatever that means to you, for just two minutes. Just be.”

Meng kept the book simple – no complicated terms, or jargons – but included simple examples that anyone could relate to. Meng compares meditation with exercise. “When you are weight training, every time you flex your biceps in resistance to the weight of dumbbells, your bicep muscles grow a little bit stronger. The same process happens during meditation. Every time your attention wanders away from your breath, and you bring it back, it is like flexing your biceps—your “muscle” of attention grows a bit stronger.”

After enhancing the attention on our breath, or rather, bringing it back to our breath when it wanders, Meng asks us to extend it into every part of our life. Meng quotes William James, the father of modern psychology, “And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgement, character, and will.  No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”

Meng now integrates the emotional competency concept of Daniel Goleman. Once you start living in mindfulness, you become more aware of yourself. Three emotional competencies are cited – to be aware of your emotions, knowing your strengths and limits, and a sense of your self-worth and capabilities. Meng writes, “Eventually, we reach a point where we are comfortable in our skins. There are no skeletons in our closets we do not already know about. There is nothing about ourselves we cannot deal with. This is the basis of self-confidence.” 

Meng compares mind and mindfulness with a pole and the flag hoisted upon it. Meng writes, “In the presence of strong emotions, the mind may be turbulent like a flag fluttering in the wind. The flagpole represents mindfulness — it keeps the mind steady and grounded despite all that emotional movement. This stability is what allows us to view ourselves with third-person objectivity.” 

My favorite part in the book is where Meng writes, “Thoughts and emotions are like clouds — some beautiful, some dark — while our core being is like the sky. Clouds are not the sky; they are phenomena in the sky that come and go. Similarly, thoughts and emotions are not who we are; they are simply phenomena in the mind and body that come and go. Possessing this insight, one creates the possibility of change within oneself.”  

And what is that change? Allow life to live through you, instated of trying to waste your life in trying to manipulate it. Meng closes the book with a poem.

With deep inner peace,
And great compassion,
Aspire daily to save the world,
But do not strive to achieve it.
Just do whatever comes naturally.
Because when aspiration is strong
And compassion blossoms,
Whatever comes most naturally,
Is also the right thing to do.

I traveled when opportunities presented themselves, taking me to distant places and meeting great human beings. When my cardiac situation halted it, I replaced traveling with reading books, not disturbing my meeting with great minds. In addition to traveling to faraway places, through books, I can even visit the past and dive into the future.