1 Balancing the Bicycle of LifeUnfortunately, most of us are slightly off balance. No? – Jiddu Krishnamurti1

Berry-picking vs bookkeeping

Like several other Hindi films, Paheli2 (Puzzle) begins with a song-and-dance routine in a wedding. After the wedding, bride Lachhi (Rani Mukerji), groom Kishan (Shah Rukh Khan) and Kishan's family are all travelling from Lachhi's village to Kishan's village, Navalgadh. The wedding procession is travelling on camel carriages through the beautiful desert land of Rajasthan in western India. Kishan's father is a successful trader and has groomed his son for the family business. While many are catching up on sleep, Kishan is busy balancing accounts: 'phal, phool, gulab, jal' (fruits, flowers, roses, water). Unaware of his newlywed bride, he is deeply engrossed in tallying the accounts. Numbers do not match, and he cannot find the missing items. Lachhi watches with amusement the person she has to spend the rest of her life with. Perhaps her husband's fascination for accounting is not surprising to her because, in all likelihood, she also comes from a family of traders. And perhaps she has seen men married to their business. Completely oblivious to his surroundings, Kishan continues with his account balancing. In fact, the only thing he notices about Lachhi is her fiddling with her wedding ring. 'Give it to me, or it will fall off,' Kishan warns her in a paternal tone and she dutifully surrenders her precious possession. 

Suddenly, a few kids on a carriage trailing behind Kishan's notice shrubs filled with berries on the roadside. 'Look, look, so many berries,' one of them points out. Lachhi gets excited and tells the kids to grab a few for her. The camels are walking slowly. There is ample time for the kids to run to the shrubs, pluck a few berries, run back to Lachhi and hand them over to her without anyone noticing. Kishan is still lost in his own world and has no clue what's going on. When they offer him a few berries, he issues a warning. 'Don't do it again,' he says, 'If father sees it, he would be very upset.' Poor Lachhi, hearing this indirect comment on her behaviour, drops the the berries from her hand.

On their first night home, Lachhi is sent to her new bedroom, decorated beautifully for the newlyweds, with a glass of warm milk for her husband. But as she enters the room, she realizes Kishan is still engrossed in bookkeeping. She had been told by her experienced friends that she should wait for her husband to lift the veil. After waiting for a while, she realizes that nothing of that sort is going to happen. So, she asks Kishan, 'Won't you take the veil off?' Kishan awakens from his train of thought, goes up to her, takes it off and stares at her face. 'What are you looking at?' Lachhi asks coyly. 'Coconut, I forgot to add the money given for coconut,' Kishan happily announces his 'aha' moment.

This is when Lachhi finally asks him, 'Listen, accounting all through the journey, accounting here, is this the time for doing accounts?' Kishan replies, 'What do you mean? Business and accounting are a trader's first duty.'

Mindfulness is a process of learning to balance between berry-picking and bookkeeping. What is berry-picking? Metaphorically, it is about perceiving small and big surprises life offers every moment. For most of us, for the larger part of the day, life in the present moment looks the same as the previous moment. The table, the chair, the clothes, the traffic, the shops or even the news— all look monotonous. There is hardly any surprise. However, there are moments in the day when we notice a bud in the garden or a sunset, or come across a joke or a chocolate that we like, and those few moments give us joy. One characteristic of berry-picking is that it happens in the present moment, not in the past or future. The other is that it carries freshness and newness. It doesn't feel the same old.

When we are lost in thought, like Kishan, we don't notice the berries. It is no surprise that berries are noticed first by kids whose thought processes haven't yet acquired the momentum of an adult's. They have no business to worry about like Kishan, and no husband to feel anxious about like Lachhi.

What is bookkeeping? It represents all the thinking we do to secure a better future. The thinking could be about our child's progress in school and planning for their future; or job insecurity, due to an impending downturn; or our ability to buy a house or a car that has been on the cards for sometime; or an argument we had with our spouse, parents, friends or in-laws and so on. Bookkeeping has an important place in life. Unless you balance books, how will you run your business smoothly? Unless you plan a project properly, how will you execute it well? Unless you study for an exam, how will you get good marks? Unless you apply for a job, how will you find one? Each of these activities is important. They involve looking back and learning from past successes and failures. Of course, it also involves looking ahead to plan for the future.As we grow older bookkeeping gains importance. Life begins to feel more like a race against time. It feels imperative that we anticipate the future and prepare for it, else risk going under. We hear stories from our friends and family that support this belief. Kids who failed their exams, people who got fired from jobs, broken marriages, unsuccessful businesses and so on. Besides, there is a constant pressure from society to 'be someone'. What's the point of becoming an average Joe? In the process, thinking about the future becomes repetitive and compulsive. It assumes various forms, such as worry, anxiety, guilt, blame, et cetera.

Like Kishan, somewhere along the way, we lose our ability to balance between bookkeeping and berry-picking. Most of the time, we get lost in bookkeeping. In fact, it is much worse. We lose our sensitivity to recognize that we are off balance. When questioned, we have a justification ready: 'What do you mean? Business and accounting are a trader's first duty.' This belief is so ingrained in Kishan's mind that there is no difference between seeing things this way and knowing that the sun rises in the east. This belief is unshakeable.

Each of us carries many such beliefs that we treat as truth. So, the question of doubting them doesn't arise. Sometimes, someone like a Lachhi comes along and questions us: 'Are you overdoing this?' This innocent question is actually an opportunity to reflect and check if we are off balance. It is an opportunity to step out of our train of thought and observe what's going on around us. However, it requires Kishan to listen to Lachhi's question with openness and curiosity, and a mind that is lost in bookkeeping generally doesn't have the ability to listen. Mindfulness is about learning to notice the berries. Let's call this the 'notice the berries' approach. It is more popularly known as present-moment awareness. This is the first approach we will explore.

Awakening to a beliefSometimes life is not kind enough to ask prodding questions like Lachhi's. It lands a big blow and shakes us up completely. Then we are left with no option but to reflect deeply. To see how this might happen, let's turn to one of the central episodes from another Hindi movie, Queen3 (2014).

The film also starts with a wedding event, but, unlike Paheli, the ceremony never happens in Queen. The day before the wedding, bride-to-be Rani (Kangana Ranaut) meets her fiancé Vijay (Rajkummar Rao) in a café, and he calls it off. He says that his priorities changed after going abroad, and he feels the marriage would not work out. This comes as a shock to Rani, who by then had tied her future to this event. She breaks down and locks herself in her room. Her parents take turns to offer consolations from the other side of the closed door. Her grandmother also tries to help by narrating an incident from her life, which went like this: She lived in the undivided India and had a boyfriend named Faizal. Then the Partition happened, and her family had to leave their town in the newly formed Pakistan and come to the Indian side. It was here that she met her future husband in a refugee camp, with whom she shared a tent. She advises her to just live her life. In that moment, Rani may have felt that her life was ending. But she would meet the right person one day, and realize that whatever happened was for the greater good. Her grandmother's life philosophy was simple—whatever is destined to happen will happen, and nobody can stop it.

Be it the 'granny effect' or something else, Rani snaps out of the 'my life is ruined' mode and decides to embark on her pre-planned honeymoon to Paris and Amsterdam by herself. There she meets people who have been through much worse in life, and slowly, she awakens to a belief she has held for most of her life. In her words, 'I obeyed everything my parents said. I obeyed my teachers. Never cheated on exams. Never lied. I obeyed Vijay. Name a person and I have obeyed them. And yet my life got ruined. My situation has become like Gupta uncle's. He never drank or smoked, but he still got cancer.' She believed that if you listened to your elders and did the 'right' thing, only good things would happen to you. However, with this turn of events, she realized that there was no cause-and-effect relationship between the two. You may do all the so-called right things and still bad things could happen to you.

An important realization in this episode, which is not so apparent to the viewer, is the point when Rani understands that her repetitive thoughts on self-pity and blaming Vijay for her misery are not serving any useful purpose. That is when more options open up before her.Mindfulness is a process of learning to recognize that your current thoughts are of no use. Let's call it the 'is this a useful thought' approach. This is the second approach we will explore.When one is trapped in a continuous loop of complaining creativity takes a dip. One gets too busy blaming people and situations to think of anything else. When wasteful thoughts subside, room for deeper reflection opens up. The realization of her wasteful thinking, and maybe the openness of the city of Paris, created a space for Rani to begin to see that at least some beliefs that she took as a given were not always true. The moment a belief is seen to be false, the world starts looking different. It is like a child realizing for the first time that Santa Claus is not real. Suddenly, a new world of possibilities opens before him. Thus, shocks have the power of awakening the mind to some long-held beliefs that could be flawed. Whether the awakening remains short-lived or continues as a process is anybody's guess.Mindfulness is about learning to investigate rigid beliefs. Let's call it the 'could I be wrong' approach. This is the third approach we will explore.

All of us carry beliefs that are rigid and non-negotiable. For some, it could be 'One who makes more money succeeds'; for others, it could be 'Work hard and it will pay its rewards'; or 'My family comes before everything else'; or 'My country is the most important thing and I must be ready to die for it'; or even 'My religion is the most valuable thing and I must do anything to protect its sanity.' Many such beliefs are deeply ingrained in our memories and not easily accessible to us. We become aware of them only when some situation stirs that part of the memory and the belief springs into action. Sometimes we ourselves are surprised by the speed at which we react to some situations. Does one have to get a shock to question beliefs? Or can it be an ongoing process? That is something we will continue to explore in the book as we go along.

Let's recapitulate the three approaches to mindfulness we have noted so far.: one, 'notice the berries', second, 'is this a useful thought' and third, 'could I be wrong'. One aspect common to all the three approaches is learning. Mindfulness involves learning. You may be learning about what is going on in the present moment or the usefulness of your current thoughts, or you may be investigating the rigid belief behind a worry. How does this learning take place? Can it happen by reading textbooks? We have so many books that carry the ancient wisdom preserved over centuries. Or through the tales of sages on how they attained enlightenment? It is possible of course. However, that is not the approach we are proposing here. To get an idea of the proposed learning approach, let's turn to a trick played by a welder on an engineer with a modified bicycle.

Riding a reverse bicycle'Like riding a bicycle' is a phrase popularly used to indicate that skills once learnt can never be forgotten. We are all used to riding a cycle whose wheel turns left when the handle is turned left and vice versa. What if you are given one whose wheel turns right when the handle is turned left and vice versa? How difficult would it be to ride such a cycle? And if we are not able to ride it in the first go, how long would it take to learn to ride it? Destin Sandlin, an American engineer, who has a video channel called Smarter Every Day on YouTube, demonstrates this in the video titled 'The backward brain cycle'.4

Not only is Destin not able to ride this reverse-handle cycle, he doesn't find anyone who can. The video shows how he offers a $200 reward for riding the bike for a distance of just ten feet in an event at a school in Connecticut, US. He repeats this challenge at several places in the US and Australia. Nobody is able to ride the cycle on the first go. Destin doesn't give up though. He decides to practise riding the cycle for five minutes every day. It takes him eight months to ride it smoothly.

Why wasn't it easy to ride the cycle? Because it involved working against a bias that was built over a number of years. The welder's trick made the existing bias a liability. Life creates situations that are very similar. Say, you get a report card that shows you are now diabetic. And just like that, your sweet tooth becomes a liability. Every time you are supposed to avoid sweets, you end up having more. This is similar to turning the handle of the reverse cycle left when you want to go right. Like Destin's experiment, learning to balance the bicycle of life also involves experimenting with biases.

The process of learning involved in mindfulness and Destin's bicycle experiment have two things in common. One, both processes involve being attentive at all times. For Destin, a slight distraction and he was going back to the old mode of riding. Thinking was a distraction too; worrying about not 'getting it' hindered his learning process. Similarly, while learning to balance the bicycle of life we need to pay close attention constantly. Worrying repetitively is going to hinder learning. The second aspect is that both need special attention to 'wrong' steering. For example, Destin had to focus on how he turns the handle the wrong way, which is the right way for the reverse bicycle. Similarly, whenever life takes a different, unexpected turn, it needs special attention.

The process of learning associated with Destin's experiment is different from that in mindfulness in two ways. First, Destin had to work with only one bias—that is, the bias of turning the handle in the wrong direction. Hence, after he overcame the bias he could declare that he was done. The biases we carry are probably unlimited; as we grow, we are forming new biases without our conscious knowledge continuously. That makes balancing the bicycle of life a lot trickier than balancing the reverse bicycle.

Second, when Destin was off balance, it was obvious to him. He fell off. When Kishan was going off balance, he didn't even know it. The conflict resulting from an off-balance living could be subtle and not obvious to a person who is especially lost in thought. The thought may be building an elaborate story to create a façade of normality. But sometimes, the blow can be so hard that it may be difficult to maintain the façade. For example, the intensity of suffering was so high for Rani that it became apparent to her that she was off balance. So, the first step in mindfulness is to recognize that you are off balance when the going gets tough. Our body and people around us are giving us signals all the time, like how Kishan got a signal from Lachhi. However, you need to be sensitive to receive them. We will look at several types of signals later in the book.

Destin's experiment also highlights some of the myths associated with mindfulness. Let's look at three of them.

Three myths of mindfulness

Throughout the eight months Destin practised, he knew how to ride the reverse-handle bicycle, but that knowledge wasn't sufficient to actually perform the task. Destin concludes by saying that knowledge is not the same as understanding. What does he mean by this? Destin knew which way to turn the handle and in what circumstances. However, that knowledge wasn't getting translated into the desired action. The habitual reflex was still governed by the old algorithm. This tells us that a new rule you learn doesn't get translated into the brain's network so easily. It just sits in your memory in the form of knowledge. Over a period of eight months, through repeated mistakes and learnings, the new rule of steering got integrated with Destin's complex memory network, and possibly his entire body, to create a desired automatic response. When Destin was able to execute the rule at the appropriate time, it tranlated into understanding.

Reading of ancient texts might bring us knowledge. However, knowledge alone may not help us be mindful. For example, one of the most quoted verses from Bhagavadgita says that you are responsible for your action but not the result.5 One may recite this several times or even deliver lectures. Yet it may not become an understanding.

This brings us to the first myth, which says mindfulness is about acquiring new knowledge. It is not. It is about understanding, which involves investigation, experimentation and learning. What does it mean for the reader of this book? It means everything written in this book is tentative, to be treated at best like a hypothesis to be tested. There are no principles to be followed. It may have worked for some people. The question is, does it work for you?

The second myth says mindfulness involves changing for the better—changing old beliefs into new beliefs, changing old habits into new habits, changing old biases into new biases. The new beliefs may be more relevant today. The bias to steer to the left to turn right would be useful for the reverse cycle. However, if the bias sets in over a period, it would again pose a challenge when you turn to the normal bicycle. Similarly, when an old belief is replaced with a new one, it may work for a while. But the situation may change again, making the new belief a liability. Mindfulness is not about change, it is about changeability. It is about an openness to change whenever life takes repetitive wrong turns.

Sometimes the change we desire is to arrive at a particular state. This is a state where life is healthier, wealthier, more peaceful; or a state of mystical experience with energy flowing from head to toe; or a state with no 'I' and so on. There are innumerable stories of gurus describing the final state. We are taken by this idea and want to reach there—a destination. Mindfulness is a journey, not a destination. It is a journey where you are learning every moment to balance the ride of life. The moment you declare you have arrived, you may have stopped learning. The very next moment might put you off balance.

The third myth says that mindfulness is a practice especially done at specific times of the day and seated in a particular posture. If mindfulness is about learning by paying attention to the wrong turns, then wrong turns don't happen at a prespecified space and time. The first signal Kishan got about his off-balance behaviour was when Lachhi asked him the question, 'Is this the time for doing accounts?' It didn't come at 6.30 a.m. when he was seated in the lotus posture. Life throws surprises at unexpected times. Anyone interested in learning should be ready and attentive all the time. Mindfulness is about learning any time anywhere.

Mindfulness is primarily a form of learning. A practice may or may not involve learning. To observe your beliefs and biases in action involves the spirit of investigation. That spirit is an important element of the journey. If the investigative spirit of learning is missing, then any amount of practice will not help. How long do you meditate every day? How many years have you been meditating? These are common questions. However, once you see that a practice without the spirit of inquiry is meaningless, you begin to see the folly of these questions. Destin practised for only five minutes every day. Was that the best way to learn? He wasn't sure. However, once he learnt the skill, he couldn't go through the process again to test this. So, he offered a challenge to Mike Boyd, who also publishes a video channel where he demonstrates how to learn new skills in a short amount of time. He has videos like 'Learn to Juggle in 3 Hours 44 Minutes', 'Learn to Throw a Boomerang', 'Learn to Play Violin', et cetera. In short, Mike is a master learner. Destin sent one of his reverse bicyles to Mike and requested him to learn it as quickly as possible. So, Mike went about learning it and published the video 'Learn the Backwards Brain Bike'6 of thes process on his channel. On the first day, he practised for about fifteen minutes and felt exhausted. On the fifth day, he could do a fifty-metre stretch after a one-and-a-half-hour practice session. Moreover, he showed that immediately after the fifty-metre ride on the reverse bike, he could still ride the normal bike without any problem.One thing Mike's video establishes is that there is nothing sacrosanct about eight months—the time Destin took to learn the cycle. Depending upon your intensity of effort and learnability, the time taken would vary. Mike's video shows us that no two people learn the same way. The path of learning for each individual is unique. Let's not underestimate Destin's perseverance of spending five minutes every day for eight months. That's not easy either. And he didn't even know that he would ever be able to learn it.

One thing Mike kept repeating during his practice is, 'That's definite progress.' Depending upon how much distance he was able to cover, he was concluding whether he was making any headway. The question is, could we say something similar when we are learning to balance the bicycle of life? I may feel that way if I observe that the things which used to upset me earlier don't bother me anymore. But could we say this confidently? As we have seen before, each of us carries unknown and perhaps unlimited biases. And as we live our life, we are perhaps adding to the expanding list. If life feels like a smooth ride for a while, would it mean we have mastered the bicycle of life? What if a new situation springs a surprise that stimulates a belief buried deep within and puts us off balance? Is it possible? Yes. Hence, mindfulness is not about progress. The journey is for its own sake, not to arrive at a destination. The question of what progress means is something we will keep alive in the book and return to from time to time.

For Destin and Mike, learning to ride the reverse cycle meant doing an activity in addition to the others. Learning to ride the bicycle of life doesn't have to be like that. You are riding the cycle anyway, whether you like it or not. Rani was off balance and, in all likelihood, Kishan was too. Learning to pay attention to these wrong turns doesn't have to happen as a separate activity. It can happen on the go.

As you may have guessed, this book is not about Kishan, Rani, Destin or Mike. It is about you. We are using the stories as analogies to help you learn to balance between berry-picking and bookkeeping. We will explore the three approaches to mindfulness—'notice the berries', 'is this the right time', and 'could I be wrong'—in more detail in subsequent chapters. We said, we need to learn to pay attention. But why not thinking? After all, we are what we are thanks to our thinking ability. We get paid, promoted, recognized because we apply our thinking to solve problems and make good decisions. So why not use it to solve the balancing problem? To explore this question, let's begin by looking at the nature of our thought process and how we arrive at decisions.

Experiments:

❖ From time to time, ask yourself: Am I living in the train of thought?

❖ Catch yourself doing bookkeeping and ask yourself: Is this the right time for this?

❖ Look around and see if you can spot/notice/listen to the berries around you right now. (Note: berries could be anything, from the chirping of a bird or the blooming of a flower, to the clicking of a clock or the humming of refrigerator or air conditioner.)
❖ Watch your tendencies that put you off balance. It could be overeating, oversleeping, excessive drinking, over working, compulsively worrying, et cetera.