PERSONAL GROWTH by Manishi Sagar Finding joy How I find it. How I keep it. Why I am not writing a self-help book about it. Let me start by saying what this is not. This is not a listicle about morning routines. I do not own a gratitude journal. I have never woken up at 5 a.m. to meditate while the rest of civilization sleeps. The people who do those things are very admirable. They are also not me. I am a Samosa-and-Chai person. My philosophy of joy has been developed over decades, tested in boardrooms, kitchens, airports, and conversations that ran three hours too long. It is not perfect. It is, however, mine. Here is what I have learned. Joy is your factory setting. Not something you have to earn. The Upanishads describe the nature of the soul as ‘Satchitananda,’ meaning being, consciousness, and bliss. Not bliss-if-youmanage-your-to-do-list. Just bliss, full stop. It is what you already are, underneath the noise. I find this deeply reassuring. I am not chasing something I do not have. I am just removing the things blocking something I already possess. Most of those things are optional. Half the drama, it turns out, is entirely our own making. Once I understood that, I started choosing the low drama version of life. Contentment as a discipline Santosha — contentment — is one of the foundational practices in Hindu philosophy. Not contentment in the passive, resigned sense. The active choice to be here, in this moment, rather than perpetually somewhere else. I am not naturally built for this. My mind has an impressive capacity for carrying things that should have been left behind some time ago. But I have been practicing. The past is useful as a reference book — consult it by all means, learn from it absolutely — but it is not something that needs to be hand-carried everywhere. Constancy beats fireworks. Every single time People spend a lot of energy looking for the moment, the grand revelation, the fireworks that are supposed to signal that joy has arrived. In my experience, joy does not announce itself. It accumulates. The Gita calls it ‘Nishkama Karma,’ action without attachment to results. Do the work. Show up. Joy lives in the doing, not in waiting for the outcome. Quiet consistency, I have found, is wildly underrated. The small ritual, the walk, the tea, the call, the meeting that holds the shape of a day. These are not dramatic. They are, in fact, exactly what joy is made of. I am not on social media. This is not an oversight People sometimes ask me why I am not on Instagram. Or LinkedIn. Or Facebook. Or any of the other places where professionals now perform the act of being professional at each other. They ask this the way you might ask someone why they do not own a microwave. Politely. With a small undercurrent of concern. The Sanskrit word ‘Maya’ refers to the veil of illusion. The ancient teachers were, I think, describing social media several thousand years before its invention. Social media is not a place where people share their lives. It is where they curate the performance of their lives for an audience they are perpetually anxious about. All ‘Maya’. All noise. And noise, in my experience, is the single greatest enemy of clear thinking. Here is what the absence of social media has given me: I do not know what my competitors had for lunch, and I do not care. I am not reactive to a news cycle manufactured by an algorithm. My opinions are mine, formed over time, from actual observation, rather than positions adopted in response to whatever the feed decided I should feel outraged about this morning. The Gita teaches that real strength is the ability to remain still when stillness is what the moment requires. Real power is the ability not to flex it. I build relationships. I do not manage headcount There is a phrase I dislike intensely: hire and fire. It describes people as positions to be filled and vacated, which is both philosophically wrong and commercially shortsighted. Hindu philosophy holds that the divine exists in every person. To treat someone as a unit of productivity, acquired when useful and discarded when inconvenient, is to miss something fundamental about what a person is. I am making a human case, not a business one. The Vedic idea of ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,’ meaning the world is one family, sounds like something you would embroider on a cushion. In practice, it is an operating principle. The trust accumulated over a decade is not recoverable in a quarter. The colleagues, clients, and partners who have stayed are the ones who know that I show up, not just for the deals, but before and after. Constancy beats fireworks, in business as in everything else. FishCoolish / Shutterstock.com enterprising Women 95
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