Thoughts...

Many organizations have a bulletin board where they paste a 'thought for the day' and sometimes you find rare gems there...The other day I read "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it"...and that set me thinking...Do we actually price ourselves properly? For example, when you take up a job, you often compare the salaries drawn by peers and then benchmark yourselves as a success/failure - at least in your professional front...Most of us hardly would go to a salary negotiation table by calculating the amount of life we have to exchange for the demands of the job...It is an entirely different matter of discussion whether the employer needs to know about this.

The statement changed my perspective on a lot of things...we all know at some sublime level that some day we will all be dead, and thus we strive to balance out our various conflicting dreams, ambitions and duties...but this statement gave a more quantitative approach to evaluate my choices...and the engineer in me felt happy....It makes things so much more simpler...there are certain things that need to be enjoyed at the moment...and certain others which easily lend themselves to delayed gratification...the amount of life that I exchange for any transaction - be it at the workplace or at home - to me is the number of joyful moments that I let go...and unless I am compensated monetarily or otherwise in order to be able to achieve one of those delayed gratification things that I want as much as I want the present moments, then the transaction is not worth entering into...Well, that to you my dear reader, may not have made much sense...'cos I am at a loss of words to translate the funda which is so clear in my head that it need not be expressed in words...

These days, every time I am faced with a choice, I think of the amount of life I have to exchange for it, and decide whether it is still worth pursuing...and that makes decision making easy...It also makes me feel a lot more empowered...empowered to say no...I am happy and liberated....