A few days have passed since I last recorded that episode and so many things have happened in the interim.

I think when I said surrender I meant to trust in life so that my participation in life won’t engulf me again the way it did when I was younger.

Now that there is this stillness in my life, I can trust that to be my anchor and let go.

Not future cast, not try and solve the next 10 years’ problems in the next six months. I tend to do that with my finances for instance when I look at how much I need to earn to support my children and enable them to be independent adults, and it’s a little scary thinking how am I going to do this given my age and given the nature of my job.

But things are happening and I can trust that each day will take care of itself, each year will take care of itself, and solutions will emerge. So that’s part of the, as an example of what the surrender might look like.

But it’s also to surrender to an invitation to be a part of life, not to withdraw and become a hermit, which is really what I’ve been contemplating for a while now to just live quietly in my silence and and do just the bare minimum that’s asked of me or needed of me.

And interestingly, after I finished that episode in the space of the last few days, life has kind of exploded in a very positive way. I got an opportunity to record audiobooks for underprivileged children and I started doing that. I went back to the books I used to read for my children as when they were really young and I used to really enjoy reading those books aloud to them. And so there’s a return of something that I used to enjoy doing and now it’s come in the shape of giving it back and in an anonymous way to children I may never meet.

So I think as long as I stay anchored in stillness, then I think I can participate in life without fear. That’s I think the surrender.

And this has happened in this most beautiful way, I would say, which is really just one thing leading to the next, and I’ve simply just followed whatever call has come my way.

So I think the first step was when I was listening to a video of a Rupert Spira’s retreat and then in answer to a question, he mentioned a documentary between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. And I was curious and I went to check out that documentary. And it turned out to be this most extraordinary documentary called Mission: JOY, and about this friendship between these two extraordinary spiritual leaders, but also at a very human level, not just the circumstances through which they have come through, which of course forms the background and makes it that much more valuable, what they have to say.

And one of the lines that Archbishop Desmond Tutu says is that, you know, you can go through the most horrendous experiences, come out and you can end up on the other side without being broken and with a desire to be compassionate and of service to the rest of the world. And that line just really hit me. I realized that one half of my journey was over, which was really to come out on the other side unbroken. This I recognize. I have gone through my share of difficulties, of course nothing compared to, you know, the lives of these two individuals. But in my own journey I’ve had to face a lot of crises and I’ve come on the other side and I’m unbroken. That I recognize, and I’ve written about it.

So to hear someone else say it was an instant recognition. But the second part was interesting, that it leaves you with a desire to be compassionate and of service to the world. And their take, both of them, was that joy is really consequence of being of service to others. And it felt like the missing piece just fell into place. That joy was unlikely to come by continuing to live like a hermit, but rather in participation in life again.

So I wrote up another blog piece on Mission: JOY, I put that up and then I said, I don’t really know what shape this is going to take, let me see. And promptly a few minutes later I signed up for these volunteering opportunities on a website that I know, and I got a response the next morning saying, will you create audiobooks for underprivileged children in India, just read any book that you love?

And I took up the books that I’ve enjoyed reading to my children. Julia Donaldson’s A Squash and a Squeeze was the first one that I did. And it was an absolute delight to do. And there it was. The experience of joy. So simple. After that it’s just been a cascade. I have signed up for a volunteer opportunity with cleaning beaches. I heard somebody make a presentation today where they spoke about moving from awareness to action through their work with accessibility design for disabled people. And that led to a conversation with them and something may come through.

And then I sat in on a session today where some students were leading a game design session and I made a simple game. And I was like, hmm, I enjoy playing video games and this is something that I enjoyed doing. And suddenly it’s opened up creative opportunities.

So literally at this point of time it’s like a cascade, it’s like a snowballing effect. One thing after another, it’s almost like every step of the way some new opportunity is turning up and I’m just simply going along with it.

So I don’t know if I have a grand answer to it but it’s really I think there was a certain readiness within, and the universe responded, or did I respond to the universe’s readiness? I don’t know whichever way it was, but we met. And now we go forward from here.

I remember journaling a couple of years ago saying that this is now my fallow period of my life and I’m not going to take on anything new, try something new, I’m just going to leave it empty and attend to just what I need to attend which is to go to work, earn my money, support my kids, take my tutoring classes in the evenings and weekends and then do what I have set up as my basic self care which is exercise, journaling and meditation.

And so this went on for a while until last year sometime I began to feel like I have so much space and time on hands. Despite being very busy and full, I just had this experience of a lot of space and I didn’t know what to do with it and there was no particular desire to do anything with it so I just let it be.

And it’s interesting that I did this book on a squash and a squeeze because the whole story is that about cramming your life with so much, so many things and then suddenly when you take them out, your experience of space is enormous.

At the beginning of this year, because a colleague left work, my workload increased for me and it was a very busy quarter for the first three months of this year. So there was no writing of the blog at all during this time. I was just busy doing that work.

And suddenly that space that I had spoken of was now full of work. It felt like a challenge but then I realized I had the capacity for this and I was able to meet it despite it being a lot of work quite without a flutter.

I hope my boss doesn’t read that and think that I can get equal amount of work next year as well.

Interestingly at the same time my students whom I was tutoring privately many of them were finishing their coursework this year so that also came down, the number of students.

And I took an interesting decision which was to not fill up those slots again in a hurry. I said let me just leave it open even if it meant a loss of income, I would just leave it open and see what emerges.

And as the universe has its way, a few weeks later I got a call from a former boss of mine and he said, this is the work we are doing with AI would you like to join?

And I said absolutely you know this is something that I would love to do. So it’s interesting work, it’s a new area of work, I don’t know how it’ll grow, what will happen. We haven’t started that work yet but it will come sometime over the next few months and it’s something I can do additionally over weekends and during my holidays.

And it would meet my need for additional income during this time as well as create newer opportunities for other kinds of work than what I have done all these years.

Also at the same time I had been on dating apps for the last three odd years and then I decided enough was enough. For some time I’d been feeling that my sense of joy might come from a relationship and so I think maybe my energies were a little locked there and I think now when I decided enough is enough and shut the whole thing up and I just deleted all my apps and I said enough of this.

Then I think something began to come in. It was suddenly some energy just got released.

And then interestingly the passing away of someone I knew has played some kind of a catalyst role. I can’t quite say what it is. I think maybe my writing of an email to him a few days prior to his passing away gave a sense of closure and putting up a poem, I mean I did hear of his passing away. It did something and I’m not able to say what it did but it did something.

And it led to me writing those pieces on the blog then it led to the podcast, now it’s led to the audiobooks and it’s just become a flood.

So perhaps that fallow time did its work and when the time was ready then things began to shift and I’ve just gotten busy again.

I’ve never had difficulty with being responsible. I’ve never dropped the ball on that through all of it, whether it has been illness of my mother, three children to take care of—young children to take care of—household work, sometimes working two jobs to earn the income that was necessary for the family.

I have simply never dropped the ball. And I have to say, I’ve just been very lucky that when things have ended, then a new beginning has come quite quickly for me, and things have just worked out.

So even through all of this crisis, I never took a day off, or I never stopped doing what I needed to do, or I went into a kind of a depression which prevented me from being functional. Being functional was not optional; it’s just something that I just did regardless of the circumstances in my life. And this has been so for, I would say, the last 25 years or so, particularly from the day I got married.

But after the passing of my brother, something collapsed over there, obviously I’ve spoken about it earlier. And then the whole spiritual journey began, and then it is clearly two distinct worlds. I felt like here I was sitting in silence, and there I was functioning in the world, and the two just did not meet. There was no meeting point between the two.

I really did feel like I was two different—well, not people, because I was a person in one place and not a person in the other place, so I can’t say I was two different people—but the experience of the silence was not touching the rest of my life.

And yet it just continued the way it was. So it was a bit dull, flat, monotonous, no vitality to it, but functional. Completely functional.

Now what’s happening is that with these movements over the last, I don’t know, should I say weeks or months—I’m not sure however back long it—one wants to go back to trace where it began, the shift began to happen, I don’t know—but now the vitality is also beginning to come. And I can see that what I do, having touched the silence in my meditations, is now beginning to seep into my outer life, so to speak.

And my identity is very clearly in the silence. It is not in the outer work I do. So all of the outer work I do is not a pursuit of meaning, purpose, or identity. It is more and more an expression of the identity of the silence.

In response to that question, I would refer to two things that happened today. One was something a colleague said, and the second is some conversation I had with another colleague.

So in the first instance, this colleague who was retiring after many years of service at our workplace, in her closing remarks, she asked this question of all of us which is: “Beyond your work, beyond your family, beyond your responsibilities, what is your great cause? Why have you been placed on this earth at this particular point in time?”

Now I know the previous version of me would have felt like, “I don’t know, and I’m still searching.” But as I heard it today, I was like, “Hmm, it’s quite clear to me what my great cause is.” And it’s simply the abundance in the silence and allowing whatever form it will take. And one possible form it seems to be taking is simply the channeling of wisdom in various ways, whether it’s in the form of this blog and podcast (if one can find wisdom in this) or even the children’s books, because these books carry wisdom in them. So that seems to be a task that has arrived at my door.

Not that I intended it that way; the blog didn’t start as a channel of wisdom, it was really a sharing of the books and the poems and the songs that have impacted me and weaving it along with my life experiences. But I see more and more that there is something more that shaped that this particular blog, podcast, audiobooks, and who knows whatever else form that this can take.

So that’s one part—a clarity in terms of what my great cause is. The other conversation I had was where we were joking a bit about, you know, choosing to be teachers and having been teachers for so many years. And we asked each other what would we do if we weren’t teachers? And she replied immediately saying, “I’d be an interior designer, I love doing interior design.” And she turned to me and she said, “What would you do?”

And I thought I knew my answer, I started answering and then I was stuck. Well not stuck-stuck, but I paused because I wanted to say what is most authentic. And in that moment, I found myself saying, “I would do my blog and my podcast.” These are things that I’ve been doing; she didn’t know that I had started a blog and a podcast. And I said, “Yes, that’s what I would do.”

So right now this blog, this podcast, and the children’s books—and I’m not sure what other channels may open up, who knows, video games to some purpose or the other—this is what I find most right to do.