Forgiveness

This Christmas something very sweet came to my mind. Those were the lines from the moral science chapter in 2nd Grade, the lines from Jesus. " Father, forgive them , for they know not what they do."

Very deep lines indeed.

It led me to write the following. Just felt like sharing.

Forgiveness helps us!

Forgive the people, Remember the lessons.

If one holds a small cup of water in a hand, it doesn't bother for some time, then it starts making one realize that something is in the hand that is needing some effort. After a few hours, the feeling turns into a dull pain, then a nagging pain and if one keeps holding that cup of water for over a day, it then starts bothering a lot and starts affecting the sleep as well as mental and physical well being.

Imagine holding that same cup of water for months and years, it will slowly diminish the happiness and life out of one.

They say that demented patients are very happy once they lose the realization that they are forgetting something. It is a blissful phase when one has no grudges against anyone and all that one wants to do is feel loved and give love and warmth.

If someone harms us or makes us feel sad, that someone also gives us a lesson of life. Our job is to imbibe the learning and then move on to the next lesson.

If instead of the lesson, we focus on the teacher's methods and behavior, the purpose of the lesson is defeated. 

Think of it another way, if someone harms us or makes us feel sad, is that someone now more important than our loved ones that the person who made us sad occupies a larger area in our minds than our loved ones. And the mental pain overpowers all the other pleasures in our lives.

In the end, we want to feel happy and feel loved. If we forgive the people who made us sad and give them the credit for the lessons that they gave us and remember the lesson and build on it, it turns into a positive outcome. And once we have learned our lesson, there is no need to repeat the class.

In order to lead a blissful, successful and happy life, it is very important to forgive the people who hurt us, remember the lessons from the experiences and move on to the next lesson in the journey of exploring one's own self and attaining one's own peace of mind and happiness.

Forgiving helps our own selves us the most.

Stay happy and blissful.

After all, "It's the season to be jolly." 🙂

Merry Christmas 🎄

Jaya Sonkar MD MPH 

12.24.2019

©All rights reserved. Jaya Sonkar 2019

The Healthy Competition!

The Healthy Competition

Is competition good? Does competing bring positive changes?

Yes and No. 

Yes, to some extent. It releases huge amounts of endorphins on winning and gives the winner and their fans a great sense of achievement. At the same time, if it is done in the healthy spirit, the loser and their fans also enjoy the spirit of the game as well as the workout, whether mental or physical. Let's consider the Olympics. It's fun to watch it. The sportswomen and sportsmen compete against each other to put up a great show. This is just one example. 

There are several competitions going on every minute throughout the world. Sometimes it may motivate the players to do better. However, there could be several factors that can affect the loser's ability to cope with losing and may unnecessarily put them through stress.

Let's talk about the competitions in our day to day lives, whether during the phase of learning or working or any other. One may say, the survival of the fittest is how our existence came into being and competition is a vital part. That may have been true when we were living in the stone age. At the current times, when we have evolved to the current living arrangements that we have today, kindness and empathy play a bigger role than competing.

Competition in day to day lives does not necessarily provide a sense of accomplishment. In fact, it can give birth to the fear of being suboptimal and substandard. Believe it or not, a lot of young and old lives have succumbed to these "day to day competitions".

Some of the small kids learn to compete right from the very early childhood. And this is at the age when they don't even know who they are competing with and why are they competing. Is their opponent big or small, older or younger? They stress on losing and they are happy on winning and may sometimes make other kids feel less about themselves. It is our job as grown-ups to help the kids use competition in a healthy way and teach them to compete with their own selves.

The best and healthy competition is competing with oneself. 

Yes, you heard it right, 'COMPETING WITH ONE'S OWNSELF'. This way, the candidate is always a winner. Either s/he breaks her/his previous records and wins over her past achievements or the winner's own past achievements were better.

This way they are not limited by their competitor's caliber and they can continue competing with themselves until they bring the best out of them and can feel great about themselves. 

Speaking from experience, I myself have done much better when I competed with my own self than when competing with others. It is less stressful, more joyful, more accomplishing and less mean.

A lot of us may have experienced this already. For example, if you ever played a simple one player videogame, have you experienced the urge to beat your own previous score? And when you did it, didn't it give you a thrill? Sometimes we do look at the highest score and try to achieve it. It's good to use it to set a goal. But if we start competing with it, then we are reducing the joy and also limiting ourselves to that highest score. Instead, if we keep on beating our scores, we may reach even higher scores.

Any talent or skill that we have should be used towards the good of mankind. Who knows, we may be up against a great unpredictable, unknown and unseen competition with an unknown opponent somewhere in the universe.  Of course, the person who possesses those skills should get her/ his fair share of recognition and profits. If people believe in this way, then people can do what they are good at and contribute to making the world a better place together.

We should also remember to reward ourselves for the hard work that we do in the process. The net result is not everything. The achievement of a paralyzed person to be able to transfer from the wheelchair to the bed may be more meritorious than a sprint winner.

The journey and the process count too which is oftentimes not visible to the other people. So one should always pause and look back at the efforts that one put in and then reward oneself for that. Don't always wait for others to recognize and praise the work. Sometimes the results may not be that appealing to the others as they are not aware of the journey. In the end, what matters is that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you are able to tell yourself honestly that you worked hard and you improved and that you are proud of yourself. 

We can all reach our own peaks! Let's do a healthy competition with our own selves and let's all be proud of ourselves! 

Jaya Sonkar, MD, MPH 

06/29/2019

©All rights reserved. Jaya Sonkar 2019

HUMANISM

HUMANISM

Q.Who are you? 

A. I am a human being.

Q. What is your age?

A. My age is Grown-up. I have completed the wonderful phase of childhood.

Q. What is your gender?

A. My gender is one of the two types.

Q. What is your skin color?
A. My color is skin color.

Q. What is your race?
A. My race is human.

Q. What is your nationality?

A. I am an Earthian, more appropriately a Universian.

Q. What is your caste?

A. I belong to human caste.

Q. What is your religion?

A. My religion is Humanism.

Q. What are your festivals?

A. The occasions that make people feel happy and allow them time to enjoy with their loved ones are my festivals. I enjoy celebrating every festival that I come across, especially if it makes my child happy.

Anyone can celebrate any festival. Festivals are not copyrighted by any belief system. The best festivals are the ones that can bring a smile on the face of children.

Q. Do you believe in God? Who is your God?

A.  I believe in the vastness of the universe which is infinite and undefined. The forces of nature have a tendency to randomize everything and make it fair and square in the eyes of nature.

My God is the undefined vastness and laws of nature who always has its own ways of keeping things in control.

If one likes predictability and likes being in control, one can only try to fool oneself for as long as one can. The biggest truth is that things are random and unpredictable. Yet, the statistics have shown that randomness leads to the normal distribution leading to a standard bell-shaped curve, regardless of the parameters in question. 

Imagine our sizes as compared to the vast universe. Our bodies are so small but our minds are limitless and can wander anywhere.

All of the above questions are very small and meaningless when we look at the vast universe. Imagine the ants fighting with each other to prove superiority when the tsunami or avalanche or earthquake is about to happen.

The important questions that can make a difference are:

Does one have adequate resources to meet the basic necessities? Is one educated?

If someone doesn't have food to eat, clothes to wear, home to save oneself from the extremes of weather or more importantly if one doesn't have enough resources to educate their young ones, the country should treat their children as their own.

It is said that India is a rich country of poor people. India also has great leaders. They say, 'with great powers come great responsibility'. People who have great powers need to take the onus of upliftment of the poor people of India.

I have enjoyed growing up in India and pursuing further studies and career in the US. Both countries are very close to my heart. And as I say this, I have great respect for the other countries of the world. All countries are trying to make good of some part of our universal mother, Mother Earth, who is rotating fearlessly at all times and is saving us from the unseen forces of the vast universe.

The thing that I loved the most about the US is the education system for the children. All children are provided with great opportunities to gain basic education such that when they grow up, they can choose to pursue further studies and can apply for student loans if they need to. There are pros and cons everywhere, However, this system ensures that if someone wants to do more, that someone has been equipped with all the basics to do more. Not only this, they identify the gifted children and challenge them more to bring out the best in them based on their mental or physical capacity.

Imagine, if Einstein or other great scientists didn't have an opportunity to study or innovate, what would the world have been. We wouldn't be living in a world of comfort and luxury that we are living in today. Who knows we may still have been struggling for basic necessities for survival instead of enjoying the luxuries of life. 

There are some selfish and lazy people who try to use lame reasons to prove themselves superior without having real talent. They avoid working while making hard-working people work even harder. History has shown us that people who promoted differences based on religion, race, color, gender, caste, and creed, as well as the people who promoted slavery had their selfish motives to lead the life of luxury at the cost of other people's comfort. History has shown us the miseries caused by the people who killed other people in the name of religion and the people who killed each other over a piece of land without realizing that it is everyone's universal fate to be turned into mere dust eventually.

No religion promotes injustice. No God promotes cruelty. None of the artificial boundaries are the work of nature. It is the price that we pay for being at the top of the animal kingdom. 

Our job as educated people is to identify such foolishness and try to stop it from happening.

One way our future can be better is by promoting education and kindness among all. We are fortunate to be living in the world we have today. We should come together in making it even better or at least stop it from becoming worse.

Let's unite! Let's forget the differences. If there is a soul, it doesn't have any form. The bodies are mundane. The forms can change while the feelings remain. 

Let's follow one religion, Humanism, the religion that promotes kindness and freedom. 

Let's try to raise the level of our country and our world as a whole. 

Let's be humans and follow HUMANISM!

Jaya Sonkar M.D., M.P.H.

5/30/19

©All rights reserved. Jaya Sonkar 2019

Meet People Where They Are!

Meet People Where They Are!

As I was enjoying listening to the wise men and women at the Annual Geriatric Conference, something penetrated deep into my mind.

It was the phrase, 'We meet people where they are.' It was said in the context of a research grant where it was advised to link the value of the research to the values that the donor had. But the context was not exclusive. This applies universally! The best way to engage with children is to be like one and meet them where they are.

A few months ago, I met a very sweet and homely woman in the park who brought her children to the park to play. We looked at each other and smiled. We greeted each other and introduced our kids to each other. Her warm demeanor made me feel very comfortable. 

I am a quiet person and generally don't have much to talk about if it is not medicine or work-related. Fortunately for me, she was a great communicator and had an enormous treasure of things to tell. She spoke and I listened. I enjoyed listening to her speak about different foods, recipes, different clothes, tailoring techniques, and community parties. She was very kind to invite me to the various religious and community events which I would have loved to attend if my schedule permitted.

Initiating and facilitating conversations that are engaging can be challenging. Meeting people where they are and linking your ideas to their interests may be easier. I found myself being good at that. I enjoy food, appreciate fine clothing and of course am all ears when it comes to parenting techniques. I could relate to the things that she talked and we had a long engaging conversation and became good friends.

I had several other such experiences in the past. They all started coming to me one by one.  Along with the pleasant memories, some unpleasant interactions struck my mind too.

Coming from an emotional background, care and affection is embedded in my DNA. And that is how I look at things. I was able to get along with people who were sensitive to other people's emotions but wasn't very comfortable with the ones who weren't. In life, we have to interact with all sorts of people. And every personality has a value. They all play a role in making the survival of humans possible.

To be able to come to terms with people, we need to understand their deep values and talk to them in terms of those values. Just like the wise researcher said, to submit a grant for a cause that is aimed at improving well being among people, it should also be tied to expected favorable and cost-effective outcomes for the people. This will not only promote understanding among each other but will also lead to a collaborative approach in making a positive difference.

In summary, whether it is to get anybody's buy-in for any cause or it is to make a pleasant conversation with someone, we need to find where they live and then we go there and we meet them where they are. And some of them may come to you and meet you where you are!

Jaya Sonkar M.D., M.P.H.
5/29/19

©All rights reserved. Jaya Sonkar 2019

New Year& Resolution For All!

New Year's Resolution!

I will not be upset,

I will not be mad

I will not let anyone

Make me sad

There can't ever be enough

Of what one has had

I will expect things

Both good and bad

I will love myself 

As I love others

I will be kind to myself 

As I am to others

I will continue to work hard 

To achieve my goals

I will still wear several hats

And play those roles

I will believe in goodness

I will believe in fortune

I will believe in struggle

And earn my silver spoon

I will help people in need

But not be taken for granted

I will not let any seed

To be wrongly planted

I live in my body

That is my precious place

I live in my mind

Not in outer space

I will keep them pure

I will keep them clean

I will keep them pretty

And lush green

I will keep my conscience clean

And have a pure face

I will not let anything

To dampen the grace

My morals will not be shaken 

My kindness will not be taken

The goodness will prevail

As I will sail, As I will sail

Jaya Sonkar

1/9/19

©All rights reserved. Jaya Sonkar 2019

Happy New Year!

Every year is born new and every year gets old.

Every year has its life story to be told

Some stories are good and some stories are not

Some memories are good and some memories not

Some experiences teach us a few, and some a lot

What really matters? It is a food for thought

The new year is here again, to be embraced

There are new joys to be shared and new challenges faced.

Let's be ready to open yet another door

And be ready to explore

And challenge ourselves more and more

And see what life has for us in store

Wishing everyone health, wellness, success and more

HAPPY 2019, Let's soar, Let's SOAR!!!

- Jaya Sonkar

6/1/19

©All rights reserved. Jaya Sonkar 2019