Changes, Part 2/3: Meet the Elephant God

In Part One of my three part series on Change I was telling you how I have learned through real life experiences that trying to fit more into an already full day is practically impossible. I am a very disciplined person who is able to multi-task to some extent (breathe and answer the phone at the same time without too much effort) and I must admit that it doesn't make sense to follow the belief that you can always add more just by "working harder or smarter". Those who do jam more stuff in usually end up burning out and dropping even more of the stuff they can't afford to give up due to brain (and body) drain. So this "smarter, harder" belief is not sustainable for ordinary mortals such as me.

 

But I figured out how to do it. the answer is brilliant and yet sooo obvious at the same time that I still slap myself in my forehead and say, "How could I have bee so stooopid?!?"

 

I'm glad I figured out how to make time for adding meditation and reading in my day; I need this time at this point in my life because changes are in order. I do not have the tools to easily make these changes, but I want to acquire them. And in order to do this, I need more time to learn how to find, and then use these "tools of change".

 

Considering how I haven't been able to add this stuff into my life for the past couple of years I never thought I really could, but thanks to a book that Mayu just finished reading, something she explained to me one day gave me an "Aha!" moment that makes perfect sense. Let me tell you a bit about this book ...

 

A Japanese businessman wants change in his life; he desperately craves change, but he doesn't really know what to do, or how to do it. So he takes a trip to India to try and shake up his boring life. It doesn't work. Or so he thinks.

 

One night some time after his return and his life has returned to the same old doldrums he goes out to a party and gets really drunk. He comes home and passes out, only to wake up to a dream/nightmare vision of a fat elephant-headed chain-smoking, bitching Indian god that floats around his apartment, and constantly drives him nuts.

 

The businessman realizes that this god Ganesha is there to help him change his life. If the man promises to do exactly as Ganesha says, he will have the chance to improve himself and thus his life dramatically, but if he ignores any of the steps, or fails to do as he is told, he will be doomed to live his life in boring mediocrity, and exactly the way he does not want to live!

 

From that point on, Ganesha, a very human-like God who is completely addicted to cigarettes, loves bacon and a specific Japanese sweet gives the businessman ("Boku", or "me") lots of tips about life in a very realistic, and extremely funny way. The strangest thing is that this elephant-headed stubborn, bitching, grumbling and very picky god speaks for some strange reason to Boku entirely in Osaka dialect, which according to the Tokyoites, a very funny way for a god to talk.

 

Boku agrees to write up a contract with Ganesha to follow his advice and do as told. He then learns every day the most bizarre things that to him, seem to have absolutely no relevancy to becoming a better, enlightened person! In fact, these seemingly incongruous lessons sound more like an excuse for Ganesha to hang around, chain smoke, be fed bacon every day, and have a place to sleep.

 

But as the days pass, Boku starts to understand more and more how these simple principles in life can have a huge change on the way we perceive our world, and thus the way we act within it. And this is where the change comes in.

 

In the end, as time draws near, Ganesha finally fades away, leaving Boku on his own, having learned all of the lessons taught, and ready to head back into the world, a changed man. The epilogue shows Ganesha appearing to some other person in need of life lessons and talks about Boku as "that famous architect". So it obviously worked!

 

The funny thing about this is that Ganesha uses all of the famous people in the world for examples that he personally visited and helped become famous: Bill Gates, Soichiro Honda, Ichiro, Richard Branson, The Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and more, all the way back to the ancients (as gods live forever). Mayu was laughing the entire time she was reading this book. She likes to read at night to fall asleep, but during this book instead of falling asleep, she would wake me up at 2am with her laughing! I am glad it was a wonderful book for her because I only had to deal with night laughter two or three nights in a row.

 

Here is one of the things that Ganesha taught Boku, and one that makes a lot of sense to me, and gave me that "Aha!" moment I was talking about earlier:

 

We all have ONLY 24 hours a day and in our busy life, those 24 hours are often all booked up. It is important to add new things, try new things in order to grow but how do we fit them in? This is the biggest issue most people have. Ganesha explains that in order to fit in more than what we can do, sometimes we have to take away some things. This means in order to do something new, we need to stop doing something old (Boku sells his chesterfield so he doesn't come home from work, plop down on it, turn the TV on and waste time vegging out). And then that space will open up. Just adding another thing onto an already full schedule won't work, even though people say "squeeze it in". It never lasts. The trick is to STOP doing something else, to give up something else, and then you can get the time for something new.

 

In Part 3/3: From the mouths of elephants, I shall share the 20+ activities that Ganesha uses to train the people who want to move onto greatness. I will also try to explain the philosophy behind them, just in case you are wondering HOW some of these things could possibly be of help. But when you read these, please keep in mind all of the activities that the Karate Kid had to go through in his training...

 

I love you!

 

Cam