A,

Too things to note, first I didn’t get the homophone nor the entendre.

I can’t tell if this was one of your typos or some clever meta homophone insertion. As for my entendre, it was some bad joke about S’s and chicanes of a race track.

Anyhow, I agree about how emotions have a way of regressing to the mean. But I had a slightly hard month and a half where I found my mean mood itself dropping. This meant that even when my days were punctuated with happiness (there’s lots for me to be happy about) it eventually regressed to my lowly mean, and I couldn’t figure out why. I also had this absurd way where my sleep constantly got interrupted because I heard my doorbell ringing—except it never did because it’s some auditory hallucination made by my brain while I’m asleep. Lack of sleep compounds into other problems. You already know this.

I have learnt a lot about how to live over the last couple of years. For one, I pulled the internal levers that you referred to in your last letter. I framed my situation as a redemption arc waiting to be finished. I didn’t actually feel all that bad at a meta level about my baseline mood regressing. If that makes any sense. I knew I might some day even write about how I surmounted a hard time. It’s free memoir material. And yes, I’m at much better levels of baseline mood now. I can’t point to what exactly worked, and it seems more art than science at the moment.

I also used my other trick—I followed stupid sounding obvious advice. I started going to sleep early, reduced electronic usage around bedtime and temporarily quit caffeine (not that I was addicted, but it probably wouldn’t assist in recovering my sleep). I instead did some deep-rest type meditations before sleeping. These interventions brought down my fake doorbell sleep interruptions from around five per night to about zero or one in less than a span of a week. The nice thing is that just like bad sleep, the effect of good sleep also compounds. You know this too.

These are just a couple of random tactics that I have picked up in the process of figuring out How To Live. But what’s the strategy? I had a friend recently tell me with an intense earnestness that I matter to them a lot and that they are so glad to have me in their life¹. And that this was a common sentiment among other friends in that group. This was a big deal to me because I’ve been trying to show up a lot more for these group of friends because I like them very much. But I was also being ever so slightly distant till that point because I was not sure if they thought the same of me².

Currently, I feel like the strategy for How To Live is to live wholly and deeply with a big, big heart. Make it as large and open as possible. I almost don’t like this because of how schmaltzy this sounds. But I can explain what living with a big heart means. It’s not all that different from what you heard from Seinfeld. It’s to fall in love with people, cats, lizards, things and places. It’s to be genuinely curious about everything, be honest with everyone (starting with yourself) and welcome the world wholly. I have found it occasionally scary and even risky to live with such earnestness (as evidenced by my anecdote above). But when I do meet the world with that kind of conviction it has been extremely rewarding. One can always make their heart bigger.

I have felt that you’ve also figured this out independently. Your heart as well as zest for the world seems to be getting bigger these days. It’s why I’m excited to meet you soon at NYC. Also that list of fun things slaps.

See you soon, AR

¹Happened at Boiler Room Bangalore, such a great setting for this kind of conversation.

²Just as I wrote the paragraph above, another friend who I think is very cool told me that they’ll miss me when I’m off to NYC and asked me to stay in touch by sending some photos of my trip. I didn’t really think that they considered me like that.