RamGanapathy.com

Tag: leisure

  • Recapturing the Saturday 4pm zone

    If there was an election to choose the best time of the week, my vote is for Saturday. Particularly, i will tick the box : 4pm Saturday afternoon.

    There is competition. Sunday is popular and highly rated. It prides itself as the first day of the week, and a holiday. It is precious – and that, paradoxically, is its downside. The pressure to do something relaxing, while being constantly reminded of the slippage of time, that drags us towards yet another week that is still to be planned.

    Monday stands no chance whatsoever – infamous for its morning blues. Historically, it hasn’t proven to get better during the day, as one bears the brunt of many mails, calls, actions and the sudden realisation: should have worked during the weekend to catch up.

    Tuesday is the day people wake up to the reality of the week. So, it won’t win as there is no time for frivolous elections.

    Some of us are mentally dead by the time we scrape through Wednesday. It is nevertheless a decent contender for the vote, as I have noticed a lot of people pre-maturely celebrating its evening as the beginning-of-the-end-of-the-week.

    Thursday is usually a serious day, when the managers chase their teams to see what could be salvaged for the week. The last chance to “begin” something, as it would take at least two days to do an acceptably shoddy job of what was originally estimated to be a week’s effort. As the philosopher of our times Alain de Botton says, “Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”

    Friday is like a celebrity who simply expects everyone to vote for her, being famous for the TGIF theme (Thank God its Friday!). She doesn’t realise the truth: people don’t really thank God for giving them a Friday; they are just relieved that the week is soon over.

    What is special about a Saturday? At one end, we have the morning, which begins with a “hangover” of the arduous week – the unfinished business still lingering – followed by weekend chores and errands. Saturday nights at the other end, have a special significance in the popular culture – a time set aside for entertainment, a chance to catch up with friends. All of this require planning, scheduling, coordination. Effort. But there is something about an undemanding, effortless Saturday afternoon.

    Illustration by Sowmya Ramanathan

    It is that period, when it would be too late to finish anything pending for the current week, but too early to worry about the upcoming week. A golden, yet fuzzy time space that overlaps the boundary between the weeks. A land without rules, ruler or expectations. A zone to indulge on a meaningless pursuit where no one keeps track of your time. No one cares.

    I have cherished the memories of many such blissful Saturday afternoons of my childhood days (late 80’s). Life was simple. Less TV, no social media, and there was such a thing called boredom. A scene from a typical Saturday 4pm: My mother eager to prepare the perfect afternoon snack, enthused by her weekend wish coming true – being taken out for shopping earlier in the day. My younger sister quarrelling with me over trivial things. Me being physically outmanoeuvred by her yet again; we end up disrupting my dad from his well-earned nap after a gruelling work-week. The unimpressed grandma admonishing us for making a fuss. All of that brought to a peaceful end by the spattering sound of the spicy bajji and the smell of filter coffee. The nourishment for not just the body.

    Growing up, the sweet Saturday afternoon zone got shrinking. Weekend homework increased, priorities changed, we all got busy. Still, those afternoons were a medicine, a recharger of sorts, where time stood still for a brief while, preparing us for the countless weeks ahead. It was all about leisure, less focus on doing anything specific and more about just being together, often spent talking about a random, point-less matter that appears meaningful when I look back.

    2020 was a tough year on many respects. Nevertheless, it was a blessing in disguise. After many years, i sense to have re-acquired this “zone”. The recent year-end break was a great time for me, my wife and our daughter to do what the younger-me did with my family during those Saturday afternoons: be together and do nothing in particular.

    I did something after all. Picked up a few of the books that were staring at me for a while. One in particular blends with this Saturday 4pm mood. Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, by James Suzman is all about how we humans have completely misunderstood what Work means, missing out on what our (hunter-gatherer) ancestors had an abundance of: Leisure.

    Stepping into 2021, i promised myself to dwell more often on this Saturday 4pm zone that i voted for.

    What is your vote ?

  • Press Any Key to Continue…

    Press Any Key to Continue…

    My boss put two questions in front of me recently, during the half-yearly review meeting. “What is the aspect of the job that gives you joy” – a nice, ego-boosting leading question that lead to a delightful conversation.

    Her next question stumped me: “What is going to be your pet-project?”. “The one activity you could do on your own, during free time. Something you could come home to, when you have had an especially bad day”.

    I drew a blank.

    Homecoming

    This question is significant today, as we perceive time, work and life very differently than just a few months ago. During the pre-COVID era(?), a knowledge worker like me would have separated work and life – at least physically, straddling across office and home each day. We used to talk about work-life balance. These days, there is not much of a discussion about balance. It’s all a blur at the moment.

    A good blur, at least for me. I no longer need to get up worrying about ironing the shirt or to drive to work to be in time for the first meeting of the day. Time is aplenty. (My wife isn’t too excited though – having to come home each day only to see unwashed stained tea cups – one on the table, two lying on the floor and one missing).

    Sorry, I digress. The point is, a different sort of homecoming is necessary to keep our sanity.

    But, a pet-project ? You see, this phrase has two words that sound dangerous to the lazy-me: a pet needs maintenance, while a project needs diligent work towards completion.

    Spend, Manage or Invest ?

    On a serious note, what would i do with a bit of extra time ? Time = Money, they say. There was this crude poster i saw recently that compared how the poor, middle-class and rich deal with money:

    – the ones who have less, SPEND.

    – the ones who have moderate amount, MANAGE.

    – the ones who have excess, INVEST.

    How do i invest this little excess time? Typically i am bored, i look for interesting things in twitter (will write a blog one day, about the gems i discovered by following a few interesting people in twitter during this year), read a bit of philosophy/self-help books, watch movies (these days i’m into Turkish rom-coms). I also play a bit of amateur sports. However, i’m not serious about any of these things. I dabble.

    Making Choices

    To be serious about a pet-project, i have to generate a list of options, make a choice, invest time and energy, report on its progress, and show some result.

    Choice! If i have a, b, c, and d as choices, it is mainly a question of what appeals to me the most. What if there is something outside this list that suits me better? How do i know what i don’t know ?

    One would argue, it is not easy to make decisions even with clearly defined, discrete choices. The red or the blue pill, as Morpheus asks Neo in The Matrix.

    When my daughter and my nephew were toddlers, they used to fight for the best toy. Once, faced with a red and a green plastic trumpet, the kids couldn’t come to an agreement who gets what. It ended like this: my girl grabbed both the trumpets and offered the guy to choose one of those. As soon as he decided on the green one, she knew exactly what she liked. She snatched that very green trumpet from the hands of the baffled boy, and threw the red one to him.

    What to look for ?

    Life is easier as a child. I am more indecisive than ever before and struggling to answer a simple question, with no clear list of options, nor a play-mate to try out a decision tree.

    Perhaps this question should be framed as: what would you “work” on, given unlimited time & resources without any constraint whatsoever?

    I looked around for some quick inspiration – maybe mentors could help? Or the so-called thought leaders – like Paul Graham – who says in his blog, What Doesn’t Seem Like Work, “The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.” He ends by asking, “What seems like work to other people that doesn’t seem like work to you?”

    Unbounded and Unflattened

    When i look back at my life so far, someone or something has always driven me somewhere. A rank to achieve, a course to finish, a job to get, a project to complete, a step to climb in the corporate ladder, a problem to solve for a customer, etc. Even when i indulged in creative pursuits, there had always been constraints or a boundary.

    I am not sure how to wrest myself out of the set path – even if it is just for a hobby. Something different and random but not trivial; a pursuit that delivers pleasure but no expectation (i certainly don’t want additional responsibility and having to justify to anyone – including my nice and well-meaning manager, who surely will be reading this blog with a chuckle).

    Anything, that amounts to something in the end.

    Anything

    This reminded me of a story about Compaq computers: In the 1980s, their customer support team had to spend a lot of time explaining first-time computer users, who called up to ask “Where is the Any key in my keyboard?”. The users were confused by the message in the computer monitor that instructed them to “Press Any Key to Continue”.

    Where is my “any” key ?