Author: Swati

There is a good chance you have come across either of the following cliches : 

• No gain without pain
• Success comes with sacrifice

I think the idea behind these thoughts being so commonplace is that we all tend to see at least some value in them. After all, who wouldn’t describe practicing WWE moves at home on your younger/older sibling as a quality use of their time? 

You have been trained for the off chance that walking down a dark street in some city, if someone pounces at you, you have just the right move to ram their head against that broken leg of that dilapidated cot. 

Granted that the scale is heavily tilted towards the side of pains, what with years of childhood training to perfect the craft and at least a couple of scars to show for it, the day you get to use them – Boy o Boy! What a feeling of pride!

Often the pain may not even be physical but psychological, like wanting to read a Harry Potter book (the fifth one) with your midterm math exams looming over your head. The allure of the secret defense order in this wizarding world is just too much to bear. 

You see yourself robotically reaching out to that thick book tucked (hidden) cozily in your bedside drawer when you had your trig books lying shamelessly on your bed, crying out for a little bit of attention. 

You read Sirius Black’s family history and half heartedly and painfully stow the book away to work out the math of distance between buildings and an onlooker eyeing them with a weird angle. It hurts very much, but you do it regardless because later, when you are all grown up, you will have a job that will pay for all the books you would have earned the right to forever banish trig or calculus books from your personal space.

You make calculated decisions based on Pains (Cost) vs Gains (Benefit) analysis. You make them feel good about yourself. 

Yes, there are occasions when you doubt your choices based on this logic, but then you quickly skim through your introductory Psychology textbook about the benefits of delayed gratification.

What better way to test a kid’s patience than having them drool over marshmallows and pretzel sticks!

Yes, there definitely is some merit to the premise and the conclusion of these studies. That’s what you console yourself with. 

Those people experimenting at Stanford definitely know what they are doing. If they are smart enough to say it’s true, who are you, a mere mortal, to argue?

All is well in your world until one random day, you lay your eyes on this harmless-looking book titled “Three men in a boat,” written by a guy who happens to have the same first and last name. You find it curious. In all your naive glory, you flip over the first page of the book…

And your life is never the same again. In this book, frequently mistaken to be only humorous, you find life lessons that impart to you the wisdom of the sages, the kind that lets you live your life unapologetically, idiotically and (mostly)in (idyllic)peace. There may or may not be gains to be had, but a land without pain seems worth getting citizenship of.

And you are a transformed person!

You don’t set the alarm to wake up in the mornings anymore. You have donated all your trigs and calculus books. You don’t have to hide your Harry Potters in your bedside drawer. You give in to your laziness and stop toasting your bread – what difference does it make anyway? 

You have decided that life from now on is going to be painless. And then, as if by a stroke of luck (or a signal from the force field, if you will), you find this gem:

Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance? – Edgar Bergen

Every now and then, I indulge my mind’s whims. Let it run wild.

Not that you don’t know it already if you are a working individual, but Monday blues are the worst! Unless you are one of the unicorns that love the work they do, in which case, I hate you.

But this is about me and not you, so I will focus on the topic – which was – yes, Monday blues! 

My only effective way to cope with it is to dedicate Monday evenings to mindless movie watching. These movies are carefully chosen for me to ‘relax.’ I don’t like to be inspired on Mondays; that job is better done on Fridays. 

These movies are carefully chosen to use minimal brainpower; they are supposed to make me feel good or feel nothing. They can’t be too interesting, lest it makes me go into a wondering spree; they can’t be too dull. I have to be able to sit through them.

So one of those Mondays, I happened to watch a movie about a guy who was a millionaire, trying to lure/trick single moms into dating him. Women, drawn to his charming personality, would mostly love hanging around this guy, but those ‘romances’ were almost always cut short the moment the conversation drifted to the man’s occupation.

Here is a paraphrased version of the conversation for you

Woman: So what are you doing these days?
Man: I am on a break.
Woman: A break from what?
Man: Break from a break.
Woman (confused): So you have never worked in your life?
Man : Yea, something like that.

Now, this single mom is from a working-class family; she finds it repulsive for a respectable man to do nothing but live off royalties. The fact that he is a millionaire does not mean anything to her. This apparent ‘relationship’ gets nipped in the bud.

I am writing about a movie I watched on a Monday, which made me break a pact I made with myself – never to watch movies that make you wonder. 

And yet, wonder I did, for days after. And I still do.

The guy lives the lavish life, doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

How incredible is that! 

I even thought of a whole movie starring me doing nothing. Well, I won’t be as useless as him, I guess. I like to read, the most random things I can find. I will probably make more constructive use of my time to perfect the art of using chopsticks. I may even add ten more words of French to my vocabulary. How about that! 

I may hire an assistant to manage my calendar, but seeing that there is nothing to handle, maybe she/he will quit of her own accord, or I will dramatically fire them. 

Maybe I will get one of those cool beach houses they keep rubbing into my face in that sitcom I watch on non-Monday weekdays. 

Perhaps I will call TV a telly to confuse my friends. 

Maybe I will hire that angry chef to be my butler.

What else would I do? Let me think.

I seem to be drawing a blank now. I have dreamed of this day to be doing nothing all my life, but now that it is here, I am not sure if I like it as much as I thought I would.

Without the fear of money running out, what will motivate me to get out of bed to be or do something?

What will I do with 10 hours of idle time every weekday? I know chopsticks are hard, but they are not hard enough to need 51052*40 hours of my life. Who would have thought doing nothing could be that hard?

Leslie Nelson apparently, when she said:

“Doing nothing is very hard to do. You never know when you’re finished.”

Who am I to disagree with Leslie Nelson?

You probably imagine something went (horribly) wrong when I say this. It’s only natural to use expletives to let the frustration out. Isn’t it? 

And you would be right in drawing that conclusion. 99% of the time. Just not this once.

Fast forward, or rewind if you please, to the scene in the movie Aviator, where Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Howard Hughes, seems to be stuck at the phrase, ”Show me the blueprints,” repeating it umpteen times to the confusion and then horror of his colleague. 

Hughes doesn’t seem to notice anything off. He doesn’t realize he is doing that.

Now, why the sudden rant about this? The reason being that I recently watched a standup special on Netflix, where I suddenly felt myself paying attention to what the guy had to say, which for the past half hour I had no success doing. (Watching Netflix is a better use of time than chewing up your nails dry). 

So the guy was talking about the sudden urges he has to randomly say things (primarily expletives) without realizing that he was doing so. He would only come to know when his well-meaning wife reminded him not to do that.

It’s funny, the topics you can relate to strangers on, I am not particularly a fan of this guy’s work, and here I am hooked on to what he has to say. 

Why? 

Because he makes me realize that I have been doing that my whole life, mostly in showers randomly saying Shit or F%$& or range of other colorful expletives. For no damn reason, apparently. 

Now, why would I do that? The mystery is too much to bear. 

So naturally, I do a little experiment on myself.

So for the next week, I consciously made an effort to note down what I thought when I did my random shower shout. The results were interesting. Not to bog you down with details much, but let’s just say, every time I did something like that, I was thinking of an embarrassing incident or mistake from the past. 

And some of these incidents were more than two decades old!

Now, this was a fascinating revelation to me for two reasons. 

One – I didn’t expect my memory to be that sharp, like ever! Where was this frickin memory when I was sitting holed up in the library wasting away years of the ’good life, trying to memorize those horrible equations and formulae, only to forget them conveniently right before it mattered?

Two – I never thought I could care about such incidents this much to be expressing my frustration after a 20-year time lag on random shower days without even knowing. Maybe I just assumed I was over them, but I never was. 

So obviously, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t the only one doing this.

For starters, I knew that that comedian did the same thing as me, but the fact that he is a professional comedian didn’t make for a good salve. 

Was I taking life advice from a comedian? For real? 

I must get professional here. 

Next step: a survey of my besties. Misery loves company, I gotta find me some more of it. 

Funnily enough, one confident soul came forth. His thing was that he would randomly blurt out one-liners and catchprases from movies, like ‘Aye, Aye, sir’, ‘Fire away,’.

And, unlike me, he would do that even when in public. He would realize he did it as soon as the words came out of his mouth, feeling embarrassed for himself and piquing the curiosity of or sometimes scaring some fine pedestrians in the process.

I laughed when he told me that; I felt a great sense of belonging—belonging to a group of random shouters and proud of it. 

We are all humans, all unique yet so similar. The feeling is humbling and exhilarating at the same time.

John Donne wasn’t wrong when he said, ‘No man is an island.’ 

So let’s maybe not try to be one?