My Indulgences – Mindful Observations To Self

Indulgence becomes a crime if it starts harming others. Well, it is not the complete truth. Indulgence is okay if done mindfully and kept within a limit. It is difficult but not impossible, at least for short intervals. The Advent and The 12 Days of Christmas was the chosen period of my experiment of self-observation and being mindful about what I indulged in 2020, the year of COVID-19 and how I feel about it. This is the period which I call ‘My Yuletide’ (I could not be bothered about what some may call me, I am not a religious man), a little different from Yule or Yuletide. It started on 29 November 2020 and ended on 5 January 2021. This period gave me nearly six weeks to make observations about myself and how I came to be that way. It was an attempt to try to discover something new about myself as regards indulgence.

Anything that can be called an indulgence may not affect others directly, but affects the indulgent someway or the other. It just struck me what is the difference between those who indulge and those who do not. I had resisted the average human instinct to indulge born out of and driven by the consumerism we see all around us. I had so far never ventured out in that domain as a grown-up. So, I thought but still, I need to look a little deeper and I had to try something that could be called an indulgence to understand the idea better and if it is really worth it. What better way than to have an experiment going during my most productive part of the year. I hoped to learn something from it and surely I did learn something.

What was an indulgence for me? Well, a simpleton with minimalist tendencies has an enormously vast scope to categorize activities as indulgences. What I observed threw some light on what I could call as my indulgence. Some of which could prove harmful if not regulated. My observations are thus very limited in scope as regards my perceptions — maybe some will brush it all aside, saying that it can’t be termed as an indulgence at all. But then, every person is different and experiences things differently.

I wanted to identify seven of the things that I could call indulgences and something that would give me what to work on in 2021 to be a better me. The list of indulgences that I compiled is an outcome of mindful observations of my responses during The Yuletide conditioned over many months. My list of indulgences, not in any degree of extremity or specific order, goes like this:-

1. Food — I have been a big-time foodie and have often loved going berserk on food. Eating to live is something I have often been associated with! I have tried many different cuisines and have been able to make out a difference between the variations of cooking, even though I am not a cook. I got onto Coffee Forum and learnt something about coffee out of sheer interest. I am fond of coffee but fortunately not addicted to it. I visit restaurants for an experience and for hunger. Food is to be cherished and enjoyed. The more the variation the better. But of late I think that I must restrict myself to eating what grows locally, say within a couple of hundred kilometres from where I live. Still, I get enough opportunity to be savouring the delicacies for my job allows me to move every two or three years.
2. Money — I have always been a person who has never really required a large sum of money for my needs or even for being happy. Never really felt the need to spend it ‘thoughtlessly’. Not because money meant a lot to me (it has little meaning for me even today!) but probably because my needs are minimal. Indulgence is spending money thoughtlessly on things that one does not really require. Indulgence means a certain degree of recklessness with money. I have spent when I wanted to spend not necessarily based on requirements. I have often been called unwise as regards my money handling capabilities. Some find me to be spendthrift others a miser. It all depends on what aspect of my expenditures they look at. I will spend a lot of money on cycling and gadgets or software, quite a bit of which, I must confess, is not needed. On other things like clothes, I am quite happy in my trekking shoes and Levis with any of the few turtle necks that I have. Many find that as being a miser. My spending habits are not based on saving money, which I must classify as an indulgence of sorts as it is no different from any other person spending money, albeit of very few things. I have used budgeting tools like You Need A Budget more for the sake of understanding how the app works than for budgeting!
3. Gadgets — I have been a gadget freak of sorts but have never gone overboard with acquiring gadgets. Have tinkered with all sorts of gadgets — exploring various devices from cameras to computers and from GPS trackers to operating systems, tweaking software, tuning machines, some bit of coding, experimenting with design parameters, exploring alternate utilities, trying out various apps, and almost anything and everything to do with gadgets. The driving force is to see how it all works and how much more can it do or cannot do. The indulgence involved going overboard with changing complete ecosystems when it wasn’t really required! experimenting with Apps that I won’t possibly use even for writing a review. Spending money to take the steeper learning curve, when actually it wasn’t really needed. Well, all this is an indulgence for me because it is neither my professional requirement nor my personal need. Nor was it born of a need to any intent to participate in any forum of any sort, except once in my life so far.
4. Clothes — It may sound funny to most, but for a guy who can easily exist the entire life in jeans and turtle neck T-shirts, buying clothes of any type is an indulgence. I never get bored of standard clothing and colours. Comfort matters to me more than fashion and I call it my fashion statement. Not that I do not own classy clothes. I need them for my professional work but that is just not my choice. I just cannot succumb to all the advertising to make an ultra consumer out of me. As long as I have shoes that will allow me to go everywhere I want to go and clothing that I am comfortable with, I am okay with whatever others may say to me or behind me. Clothes really don’t define me, yet I allow myself to have a few more cycling shorts than I actually need — an indulgence of sorts indeed.
5. Digital Exposure — I have been guilty of excessive digital exposure, having reduced my dependency on conventional paper and my precious fountain pens to less than 5% of my requirement as it existed about a couple of decades back. But it became an indulgence when most of my awake time was spent with my eyes glued to various types of screens — TV, iPad, iPhone, and the MacBook, even when discussing important issues with people! It ate up other pieces of my life’s pie so much so that the roundedness of life become a little jagged. Hence I want to term it as an indulgence. Anyway, digital over-exposure is never good. My activities including a lot of recreation have narrowed down to a digital screen — be it reading a book, analysing the cycle rides, debating (I don’t argue!), listening to music, watching a movie, or listening to a podcast. My productivity practices have allowed me the wisdom to segregate my exposure. It is an outcome of learning things the hard way than the application of wisdom born from mindfulness. I will never read a book on my iPhone or my MacBook, it will always be on my iPad. Emails on MacBook, messaging on phone and Youtube videos on TV. Saves me time as well as distractions. However, refinement is a continuously changing process. The only change that will remain constant is the ever-increasing exposure to a digital screen.
6. Laziness — Most people would think that being lazy in itself is an indulgence. I don’t see it that way. I see a lot of value in being lazy. It is the virtues of being lazy that make my mind think the way I think. Laziness adds to my mental agility. Surprised, well don’t be, just try it. But indulgence in laziness is also a truth. It leads to procrastination and the destruction of a structured life. It can happen only when being lazy is the only worthwhile activity. It is living on the edge without losing sensibility. Does it sound contradictory when I say that laziness and a structured lifestyle go hand in hand? Well, only the mindfully lazy percentage of the human population can tell that the answer is a resounding no. Laziness is a blessing of sorts — it allows you to exist on the edge of sorts. It is the edge of one’s comfort zone. If overdone, it easily allows you to drift downward and becomes an indulgence that could be wasteful and sometimes harmful.
7. Wasting Resources — Time and energy are the two most precious resources that I have always valued. Time is created by man, it doesn’t exist in nature, yet is a great tool. Energy is what exists in nature and needs to be managed efficiently. Indulgence has led me to have depleted these two very precious resources. This one is a big regret. The fallout — not reading as many books as I would want to, not writing as much as I would love to, not riding the bike as much as I yearn to, not sticking to the exercise regimen, unable to sort everything into a workable priority and then some more. With a certain greater degree of mindfulness, I could have easily done more of these activities I love. This wastefulness of time and energy on things that do not matter much to me has been the worst of all my indulgences. I aim to get these to the optimum levels of happiness soonest. I have learnt that it is not time management alone that is important but energy management. No point going for a century ride early morning on a Sunday after having indulged in a party on a Saturday. For the sake of discipline and burning calories, it is good but it sucks the fun out of a long ride.

Thus goes the list of my indulgences. There have been many lessons learnt. I hope to bring these lessons to affect at the earliest. My only advice to people (unsolicited of course) is to observe oneself mindfully over a given period and find what moves you to be what you are.