I haven’t written in a long while. Not unless you count the
occasional postcards, letters and emails. My fingers have been aching to write
(or type) but every time I sit with my laptop, my mind is as blank as the
screen in front of me.
A couple of nights ago a friend and I sat under the
moonlight talking about issues of gravity. Our conversation, as is the case of most
late-night terrace conversations, meandered from our personal definitions of
happiness to the economics of love and the cusp of change that our generation
is at. I don’t remember how we then meandered towards discipline but we did. Like
most people who like to call themselves creative, we despised terms that had
anything to do with organised structure. But after many years of low artistic
productivity, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that discipline is not just
an art, but a requisite for all art.
“If only it weren’t such a boring word – discipline,” I
said.
That’s when he told me about the Japanese term - Kaizen. He
didn’t do a great job of explaining the term and neither did I bother looking
up the exact definition. But he did give a brilliant way of implementing Kaizen
in daily life.
Pick a thing to do and a time to do it. And every day, at the
exact same time, do that thing for just one minute.
Sounds easy right?
That’s what I thought, except that I woke up an hour after
my “scheduled” time on the next two days and instead of going ahead and doing
it, I pushed it to later telling myself that I would be breaking the rules of
Kaizen if I didn’t stick to the time.
Today, I have decided to give it a shot without falling back
on excuses. So even if there isn’t much written here, consider this my first
day of kaizen.
And for now, the goal is to get to Day 23 without any
misses.
Fingers, toes and elbows crossed.
