Religion & focus, girls & friendzones, remote work & shame
Religion & focus, girls & friendzones, remote work & shame
Currently, I’m writing this in Sri Lanka, but what I will be writing about is my reflection on my time in India.
Religion & Focus
We visited Tiruvannamali for three things:
Staying at the Sri Ramana Maharshi Ashram — here you are given a guest house and are fed and certain times.
Inside the gated complex of the Ashram Attending the Annamalaiyar temple — this took 5 hours of cueing (we were also fast-tracked as well because my father knew one of the priests).
Outside one of the gates of the Annamalaiyar Temple Walking around the Annamalai hill — this is 14km and took us about 5 hours because we were visiting the 8 Lingam temples.
The temple along the walk 
You can see the silhouette of Annamalai Hill among the full moon
Now, I want to bring up focus.
I recall when I was 14/15 years old. I went overseas to India for a long holiday — about 2 months. I hated it because I wasn’t interested and I would rather be at home browsing the internet.
It’s a while ago, and I recall actually being addicted to the internet. That’s why I wanted to go home so badly. I also had a lot of mental issues too.
But I recall we visited another religious centre in India, Tirupati. My father and I had our heads shaved also.
Why do I want to bring this up? Even though I didn’t want to go, I was glad I went. I recall coming back to New Zealand feeling fresh. Remember that internet addiction I had? It was gone. And I remember making a promise to myself to focus on my education and I was rewarded. I performed well academically that year.
Only now, yes now, that I realise why it was so good for me (and maybe you too).
It’s something about a religious place that sets my mind up for a focus.
We break from our routine. Or maybe we see others who are so devoted. I also think that it allows us to process our emotions since we are thrown into a new space and not just living life automatically.
Emotional processing just requires presence, boredom and the removal of distractions like the internet.
Once we emotional process, which the subconscious does on its own if you give it the required environment, then we have mental clarity. Mental clarity allows us to focus and thus build our best selves.
This requires upkeep and should be done periodically.
Girls & Friendzones
After meeting this girl nothing happened. And I don’t think anything will happen in the future. This can be disappointing but I’m looking at the bright side of things.
I’m happy to announce that I don’t have a strong racial preference.
I thought this was a problem because I thought I only liked girls of certain ethnic backgrounds (i.e. not my own).
I even discussed this with my friend and they reassured me and said you likely have a cultural preference, which I can confirm. And when I say a cultural preference, I adore girls who grew up in a similar culture to what I grew up in.
This is reassuring because I thought I was a self-racist. It probably turns out that I haven’t met many girls in my life or am surrounded by many.
Finally, since we are talking about girls, I want to talk about the friendzone.
Navigating these feelings of liking someone was something unnatural. It feels like most people have it figured out and I’m completely clueless, which is a frustration in itself.
I’m always stuck in the friendzone. And I feel like most of my friends don’t have this issue — they just somehow get into fulfilling relationships from day one.
I had a friend describe this problem so well: the problem is that you fantasise over a love story between you two when the other person isn’t even thinking about this or is thinking the complete opposite.
Another problem is the fear of rejection. You are too afraid to admit your feelings or you are unaware of them in the beginning. But you are attracted to this individual.
Since you are attracted to this person, you naturally want to spend more time with them. You emotionally open up to them as well. So the combination of these two only intensifies the attraction (sadly on one side).
Then, at some point, the bottled-up feelings expose themselves. This leads to bone-shattering rejection, reinforcing that fear of rejection once more.
Also, while you are in the friend zone, your capacity for possibilities of new relationships with other people also diminishes because you are blind to them — you can only be emotionally invested with one person at a time.
The combination of a reinforced fear of rejection and being invested in a person who isn’t invested in you leads you to repeat the cycle of falling again with others — again getting into the friendzone.
The key is to be aware. The second is the be honest with your emotions and includes the other individual in your thought process. Ensure it’s a mutual feeling and if it isn’t move on, you can always come back and be friends later.
This can be really hard to do. For one reason, you may see a sparsity of potential partners, which makes you want to latch onto this person. It’s risky opening up and potentially losing this person forever, so you would rather play it safe and not take the risk now, which hurts you in the long term. Another reason may be due to a lack of secure attachment. If you aren’t secure in yourself, you look for love as a form of security from others. Here, we have some things to work on already.
So the solution to the friendzone is not to get into it in the first place.
Coming back to the previous girl, I didn’t get to the point of revealing my feelings and it’s not likely I will see them again as we both live in different countries.
Also, I’m enjoying life at the moment which is full of freedom and personal growth. There is always a risk with bringing someone else into your life. It will be amazing to have a great relationship whilst also growing as an individual, which I think is very achievable. But there is always a chance that you will need to compromise or change your life completely.
The above paragraph is a bit silly, can you see what I did? I just imagined a future without getting the other person’s consent. I have much to learn.
Remote working & Shame
I also want to talk about remote working. I think I am getting more comfortable with remote working. Remote working while travelling does present some challenges. Maintaining productivity is difficult, but it’s important, to be honest about work and communicate this with the team. I only miss out 6 am standup if I’m travelling, but I make the effort to see the team during that time.
If I can’t do work during the week, I make sure to catch up during the evening or on weekends.
When I was getting my national identity card, it was about a 5-hour wait — I took my work with me!
I have dual citizenship between New Zealand and Sri Lanka, and I have been spending some time here making it easier to stay in Sri Lanka (getting a national identity card and a Sri Lankan passport) so travelling between countries will be a breeze. Sri Lanka is a nice holiday destination while my life in New Zealand is good for working and focussing on hobbies as well as friends.
Now, I am a bit ashamed that I can’t speak my mother tongue, Tamil. And I can’t speak Sinhala, yet I am a dual citizen, of which one of those countries is Sri Lanka. But why fret? I can always learn even if I’m 30 years old. It took me 3 years to change my career. So learning a language to a conversational level shouldn’t be too bad, right?
A goal of mine in the future is to be able to travel and work and learn about the world, but I also like the routine of being at home with the gym, and various other hobbies. So, I think it just requires some balance.
I hope you found this thought dump interesting and I’d be interested to hear what you have to say.
Stay focused and talk soon,
Shivan
Some Projects
Here is a blog post on bounding user inputs. Finally, I want to mention that I am writing more small blogs on things I learn at work and also turning them into videos.
Here is a small QR code webpage that I made. It’s a QR code for my personal website: https://shivan.xyz. I can show others and they can find my webpage. That’s the hope, anyway. Here is the code on Github.
Kindle Highlight of the Week
