Not a Bad Place to Be Standing
- Abhijeet Chauhan
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
Today I woke up in Pushkar on my birthday with no one here to celebrate it with.
Not sad. Just quiet.
I finished my morning sadhana and I walked down to the ghat and sat on the steps and did the thing I do on this particular morning every year, which is take an inventory of everything that has moved since the last time the calendar said this exact date.
This year the inventory was a decade, not a year. So I was sitting there with a fairly heavy load and nobody to hand any of it to.
I sat and watched the light arrive over the next hour.
A black dog came along the steps.
I said hi to him.
He sat down next to me and made me pet him. Not asked. Made me. Every time I took my hand back to go on thinking, a paw arrived on my lap. So I would start again. He stayed the entire time I was there.
The first thought that came was Kal Bhairav.
Reminding me I am not alone.
Some years that inventory is just a list of what is still missing. It writes itself. It arrives most mornings before I am properly awake and it does not need my help.
This year it handed me something else.
The Business of Not Being in Business
For a stretch of the last few years I was chasing more clients and more sessions. That was the shape of the day. Someone books, I show up, I talk, they leave, the calendar refills.
Then somewhere in the middle of it I stopped and asked myself a question I did not enjoy.
Did I actually leave business, or did I just change the product? Had I gone from selling technology to selling spirituality and told myself it was a different life because the vocabulary changed?
I took a break. Slowed it down. Started looking at the mechanism under the whole thing instead of the output of it.
Life answered it about four months later, and not in the way I had framed it. An old reference contacted me in the middle of the year and gave me a substantial order to build technology for them. Actual software. The thing I had not done since the mid 2000s. Sitting there with a scope document in front of me, at the turn of a decade, running a spiritual practice.
The old framing would have called that a distraction from the real work. A step backwards. The version of me who was still building companies would have taken it as evidence that the spiritual thing was not paying.
I did not experience it that way at all. I experienced it as a correction.
Because the tradition I actually come from never asked me to choose. Artha is one of the four Purusharthas, the aims of a human life. Wealth, means, the material engine. It sits in the list alongside Moksha, which is liberation. They are not two teams. Nobody in the Gita is told to stop working. Arjuna is told to fight, on the field, with his hands, and to stop calculating what he gets for it.
I am not a renunciate. I keep discovering this. I am also not a loner, though I have played one convincingly for years and had people applaud the performance. What I actually am is somebody trying to align himself with the weather around him instead of arguing with it every single day.
I also spent an obnoxious amount of this year building astrology software. It pivoted into a two app ecosystem with the professional version still coming. Months of my life inside a database, waiting for a result that has not fully arrived yet. There is nothing spiritual about a database schema. I have never been clearer about who I am than I was inside one.
Thirty Years
I had not played live in almost thirty years.
Last year I sat in an audience watching my daughter perform at her school's annual show, and the only thought in my head, uninvited and complete, was that I wanted to do one song with her. On a stage. Once.
So I joined Performers Collective and started learning vocals. Not returning to something I used to do. Learning something I had never done in my life, at an age where the assumption is that you have already finished deciding which parts of yourself are still open for revision. I did not know I could sing. I am still not sure I can.
What I did not expect was that the school would take all of us adult learners and build an actual band out of us. Most of us had not stood on a stage in decades. Some of us had never stood on one at all. And somehow we ended up playing the annual concert at The Piano Man in Gurgaon, in front of a hundred and fifty people.
So, on that day of the concert, first my daughter's band called me up and we did Teenage Dirtbag, which was her pick, not mine, and I would like it on record that I sang a song about a teenage dirtbag at an age when I am supposed to have opinions about that sort of thing, and enjoyed it more than most things I have enjoyed as an adult.
Then, after a few more bands, I got on with the rest of the adult learners My monitor died halfway through. I could barely hear my own guitar. I hit a couple of stupid notes in Unstoppable and I know exactly which ones they were.
We played okay. Not great. Okay.
It did not matter even slightly. The room was lit, we were having the time of our lives, and I had not felt like that in a very long time.
I had gone in for one song. I came out with a set.
I have have been telling other people not to keep the thing they love filed away as something they used to do. This year I finally did what I say. Not as a discipline. Not because I had processed something. Because a thirteen year old got on a stage and I wanted to be up there with her.
Who Is Asking
The question I have taken more seriously than any other is Ramana Maharshi's, and it is three words long.
Who am I?
Atma vichara. Self inquiry. It sounds like something you do sitting down, on a mat, with the eyes closed and the incense going, and for a while that is exactly how I treated it. A practice with a start time and an end time.
It stopped being that.
Now it runs while I am buying fruit from the man on the road who has decided my haggling is entertainment. It runs while somebody fills air in my tyres and we say nothing to each other. It runs in a negotiation with the CEO of a company who wants a number out of me. It runs while a person sits across from me and cries about a marriage that is finishing, or a career that has come apart, or a body that has stopped cooperating.
Same question in all four rooms. Who is the one buying the fruit. Who is the one negotiating. Who is the one filling his tyres on a Tuesday afternoon with nothing on his mind. And who is the one sitting across from a person whose life is coming apart, being asked to do something about it.
That is the whole thing. Not a technique. A question that has percolated so far down into the ordinary hours that I cannot get it back out, and I no longer want to.
People write to me and ask me to come and heal them. I do not use the vocabulary of healing, and it is not because I think the vocabulary is fake. It is because the word puts me
in a chair I have no business sitting in. There is nobody coming. There is no transmission. There is no one who can take the thing out of you.
"It is only by not just accepting but embracing the past that we are delivered a future unlike the past we have lived." Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers
Accepting can be done with the jaw clenched. I did it that way for years and called it growth. Embracing is when you stop needing what happened to have happened differently.
And this is where the seeking usually goes wrong, mine included. You collect. Tarot, numerology, palm reading, Jyotish, energy work, one modality after another, each one arriving like the answer and settling in as furniture. Every gate looks like the last gate from outside it. I know because I stood at several of them believing I had arrived.
Avidya is not stupidity. It is not seeing clearly. You can be extremely well read and still not be seeing.
"Those lessons are what is important, not the path that is chosen. This is a great level of wisdom." — Robert Schwartz, Your Soul's Plan
You already know this about your own life. The thing you keep circling back to has never once been waiting for a better method. You already have more method than you can use. It is waiting for you to put something down.
Kanchi Dham
After a couple of years of not doing it, I took a trip with my children, their mother, and my own mother. All of us. We booked a property at Kanchi Dham and everybody had their own room.
It was pleasant. I want to say that plainly, because pleasant is the whole achievement. Nobody performing closeness for anybody's benefit. Nobody managing anybody. A few days that a version of me from a decade ago would not have believed possible and would not have trusted if you had shown it to him.
At some point during that trip my son looked around at everyone and said, I love this family.
He is nine. He was not complaining about where I live. He was not talking about the days in a month that get counted and allocated. He does not think in those terms yet and I hope it stays that way for a while.
He was talking about that week. Those rooms. That table.
Family, for us, was never going to be everybody under one roof permanently. It turned out to be something else. It is made by presence. A nine year old worked that out in four days at a booked property while the rest of us were still counting who lives where.
You Need a Woman in Your Life
My daughter told me that this year.
She is thirteen. I asked her why.
Because you're lonely, she said.
She has decided, with the evidence available to her, that a person who does not go out, does not keep late nights, does not collect friends and noise the way the grown ups around her collect them, must be living a sad life. That is not an unreasonable conclusion from where she is standing. It is the only conclusion available from where she is standing.
I sat down with her and tried to explain. I could see it landing in parts and sliding off in others. It is not supposed to land fully at thirteen. It did not land fully for me until a long time after I had run out of excuses for why it should not.
hopefully, I was able to get my perspective across to her, which is, I do want to be seen. I want somebody across the table. That has not changed and I am suspicious of anybody who claims it has changed for them.
What changed is what the wanting means. It used to arrive as evidence. Proof that a piece was missing and that the piece was a person. Now it arrives as weather. It comes, it sits, it passes, and I no longer file it under things wrong with my life.
Somewhere between the ordinary conversations and the strangers in Pushkar who sat with me without once asking what I do for a living, I understood something I still do not have clean language for. There is no such thing as being in relationship with nobody. The man at the tea stall who has stopped asking how long I am staying. The one who fills air in my tyres. The steps at the water, which were here a very long time before I started sitting on them. All of it is relationship, whether or not a specific person is in the room on a specific day.
Loneliness had been a fact handed to me. This year it became a choice. And once it was a choice, most days I did not choose it.
What I am grateful for is not that either of my children has any of this figured out. It is that they keep bringing me the parts they have not figured out at all. Whatever half formed thing is actually on their mind, they bring it, and they trust me to sit with it and not make it worse.
That is its own kind of family. It might be the only kind that counts.
The Same Room
I was at Pushkar for my last birthday.
Same guesthouse. Inn Seventh Heaven. Same verandah. Same low seat under the arches, with the block print covers on it and the vines pushing in through the opening at the far end.
I did not plan that. I did not book it as a ritual or a return or any of the things it would be easy to call it afterwards. I came back because I wanted to come back, and the room happened to be free, and here I am sitting in it a second time.
And here is the part I only noticed this morning. This is the seat where I built the software. Last year, on this cushion, with the laptop on my knees, and again this year. The astrology platform that took an obnoxious amount of my life got most of its hours right here, in the place I come to when I want to be nowhere. I did not choose that either. I just kept sitting down in the same spot.
There is a sparrows' nest lodged in the top of one of the arches. It was there last year. It has probably been there a lot longer than that. Things keep falling out of it, twigs and bits of straw and whatever else, and the people here sweep up what lands on the floor and leave the nest exactly where it is. Nobody relocates it. Nobody tidies it. The birds arrive, they lay, the chicks get loud, and at some point they go.
Then it happens again.
I carry my own coffee. There is a sealed container that exists specifically for this, because I love coffee more than a reasonable person loves coffee and I have long ago stopped apologising for the amount of thought I have given it. Instant. I know. People have opinions about this and I have heard all of them.
So the morning is this. The container. Hot water. A low seat on a verandah I have sat on before, plants in pots that somebody else waters, and a day that has not once, in either year, been interested in what the date is.
Last year I sat here with a book that was not planned. This year it is finished. The seat has not changed. The coffee is the same coffee.
I am not going to pretend that completing something you have carried for years feels the way films tell you it feels. There was no swelling music. No sudden pride. A cool morning, a plastic container of instant coffee, and a man sitting where he sat last year.
I felt fine. Better than fine. Grateful for that exact ordinary morning without needing it to become anything else.
None of the external problems are solved, and I want to be honest about that because I have read too many pieces where the author quietly solves them offstage. Money is not fully sorted. There is travel I need to plan and have not. The professional version of the software is not shipped. Finishing a book resolved none of it.
What is different is the volume. The list still gets written. I do not believe anything leaves permanently, mine or anyone else's, and I would not trust a man who told you his had. But it is quieter. And in the quiet I noticed that most of the noise I had been living inside my entire adult life was not my life at all. It was the commentary running over the top of it.
The actual life was underneath the whole time. This seat. The nest in the arch and whatever falls out of it. A container of coffee I carried here because I knew I would want it exactly at this spot.
"One day, this mountain will be behind you, but who you become in the process of getting over it will stay with you always. In the end, it is not the mountain that you must master, but yourself." Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You
I used to calculate how far along I was. Some internal odometer, checking progress against people I had decided were ahead of me. I have stopped. There is no instrument for it. Nobody hands you a certificate confirming the inner work is complete, and if somebody offers you one, walk.
I wake up now with actual curiosity about what the day is going to show me, instead of running the inventory of everything filed yesterday that needed managing before I was allowed to feel okay.
The Dog Again
I do not usually talk publicly about it but Saturn rules my chart. Anyone who works with Jyotish and has seen my birth data knows that in about ninety seconds, and anyone who watched my life from the outside could have guessed it without the chart. Saturn is not the planet of comfort. It takes things away on a schedule.
The black dog belongs to Bhairava. He also belongs to Shani. So a man whose chart is run by Saturn sits on the steps on his birthday, at the turn of a decade, counting what has been removed from his life over ten years, and a black dog arrives and physically refuses to let him sit there uninterrupted.
I know how that reads. I am not asking you to believe anything about it. It is what happened and it is what I thought.
There is a dog at the end of the Mahabharata.
Yudhishthira walks toward the mountain at the end of everything, and the others fall away one by one on the climb. His wife. His brothers. Every person he had. Each one drops and he keeps walking, and by the top there is nobody left except a dog that has followed him the whole distance.
At the gate they tell him he can enter but the dog cannot. He refuses. He will not go in without it.
The dog was Dharma. It had been walking beside him the entire way in a form he did not recognise.
I read that story as a child and understood it as a story about loyalty. It is not only that.
In the end you are alone. That is not the tragedy people treat it as. It is the arrangement. Every person who has ever mattered to you falls away at some point on the climb and you keep walking.
Alone and lonely are two different things, and I spent most of my life unable to tell them apart.
Once you can, everything changes shape. The relationships change. You stop asking people to complete something, because there is nothing to complete and they were never going to manage it anyway. So it stops mattering who comes, or how they appear, or how long they stay.
Something walks the distance with you. You will probably not recognise it either.
Not a Bad Place to Be Standing
So here I am. Another birthday in Pushkar. An hour on this verandah in the dark waiting for the light, and the steps at the water after that. Nobody physically here, and somehow that is not the story this year.
The book is written. I stood on a stage I had no business being ready for and sang songs I had no business knowing, badly, in front of a hundred and fifty people. I sat in a room with my children and their mother and my mother and nobody had to perform anything for anybody. An old client handed me a piece of software to build and reminded me that I never actually left the world, I only stopped fighting with it.
"We are divine but imperfect beings who exist in two worlds, material and spiritual. It is our destiny to shuttle back and forth between their universes through space and time while we learn to master ourselves and acquire knowledge. We must trust in this process with patience and determination." Michael Newton, Journey of Souls
Shuttle back and forth. That is the householder's whole job description. Not choosing the temple over the office. Being the same person in both, asking the same four word question in both.
Whatever birthday you are standing inside right now, whatever number arrives with it and everything you have been told it should mean by now, the inventory does not have to be finished for the morning to be good. Nothing has to be resolved. The money does not have to be sorted. Nobody has to be sitting across the table.
You just have to be able to hear something underneath the list for a while.
I am sitting where I sat last year, under the same arches, drinking coffee I carried here myself because I knew I would want it.
Not a bad place to be standing.
References & Further Reading
On embracing what already happened:
Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. Goodreads
On the lesson mattering more than the path:
Robert Schwartz, Your Soul's Plan. Goodreads
On what the difficulty makes of you:
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You. Goodreads
On living in two worlds at once:
Michael Newton, Journey of Souls. Goodreads
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