Once, in the Mahabharata, Guru Dronacharya asked his students a question while teaching archery: “When aiming at the bird on the tree, what do you see?”
Most students gave answers like seeing the tree, its leaves, and flowers. However, Arjuna replied that he could only see the bird’s eye. We all know this story, but what do we learn from it?
Lately, I’ve noticed something about myself — my mood changes a lot, and it’s affecting my daily life.
Some days, I’m very focused. I work seriously and think about what I need to achieve, not just for the day but for the whole year. On such days, I feel motivated and clear about my goals.
But there are days when I feel completely unmotivated and meaningless. Even office work feels like a burden, and I end up sitting idle, scrolling through my phone for hours, wasting the entire day.
Then there are a few days when I keep listening to songs or some Urdu poetry. I spend hours on YouTube, listening to anything I can find and thinking deeply about it. On these days, I manage to do some work, but not much.
At times, I binge-watch movies or series, one after another, and lose one or two days completely. These kinds of mood swings aren’t helpful at all.
A few months ago, I made a plan to start exercising. Surprisingly, I went to the gym consistently for three months without breaking the momentum. There were days when I skipped it but I made sure that the flow of the workout would not get disturbed over the weeks. Despite work and other responsibilities, I never got tired or skipped a session. I felt proud of myself for staying so disciplined.
Through this, I realized something important: no matter what happens in life, we shouldn’t let it affect us too much. It means there can be a lot of things that might happen at the professional and personal level. There can be days of excitement and boredom or some frustrations and depression but you should keep a balance of that particular emotion very clearly.
If we decide to reset our minds daily and stay committed, we can achieve our goals.
If you truly want to do something, you have to keep other things in control and not let them overwhelm you. That’s the key to maintaining balance, and when you do that, everything starts falling into place.
This might be another sign of maturity that people hold while growing old. I have seen my parents or some people who react very normally to moments of frustration and have never seen their breakdown. This doesn’t mean that they never did, but their threshold was very high.
So the bottom line is to forget the world and just focus on that one single thing which you want the most. If you do it, then everything else will work out. The reward of that one thing will be much higher than the rest of the scrap. So you have to figure out every other thing that’s draining your energy is the ONE or Its just the odd one for you. I hope it makes sense.