Everyone Is On A Different Journey, So Stop ComparingWhy life is different for every person & why it doesn’t follow a designated timeline or path
 This article is an extension of a chapter in my book Make Your Own Waves, which you can check out at the link here: https://amzn.eu/d/b5sgIuG It’s another rainy afternoon in Mumbai city, the city I call home & the city where I’ve spent the largest chunk of my life. I’ve always harboured the wish to live in a different country & different city. But life just hasn’t panned out that way. I’ve been wanting to do my Master’s degree for years now; I’ve had that target for most of my early thirties. Most of my peers did their Master’s degree early in their twenties (early or slightly later) & I kept blaming myself for missing the bus. But after deciding to do it late, I wanted to do a Master’s that amalgamated my Bachelor’s degree in Engineering with my work experience as a music producer. So after honing in on the subject I wanted to study for my Master’s, i.e. Music Technology, I applied to a few colleges that were within my budget. Most of the colleges I found in my searches online were too expensive, and only about a handful fit within my budget. And I specifically wanted to study in the EU because colleges in the UK & US had exorbitant fees & living expenses & I had fallen in love with Europe & European culture on my visit there for an exchange program in my teenage years: the cobblestone streets with cafes & pubs at every corner, the nature, landscape & city planning, the food, the art, the weather & the people & a month living with them being home-hosted, made me covet living in Europe again. However, despite my compelling, detailed & well-conceived & well-written applications, which I poured a lot of thought & effort into, I was rejected on the grounds that my application was “too technical” for a degree that was titled a Master’s in Music “Technology”. While I won’t name the college, they sent me two rejections for two separate intakes, deeming that my proposal was “too technical”. I mean, a college offering a Master’s in Music “Technology” saying it was “too technical” was rather preposterous… “technology” is “technical”!!!
I was aghast at the rejections because I was prepared for and really wanted to study again and live in a country in the EU. But that’s life for you. Some doors open, some doors close & we have to really just adapt & flow with life. I blamed myself & berated myself for trying to start two businesses in my twenties while my peers were all studying & for missing the bus for higher studies at the “right time”. I thought, at the time, that I would be ahead of them eventually if my business ventures were successful. But I failed. I blew my savings and was grounded in Mumbai & had to start a career (or two separate careers in writing and music) from scratch. But that was life propelling me in another direction. That was life laying out a different path for me. It was leading me down another road, a road that would take time but give me fulfilment & fit into who I was as a person. As a writer, I tend to overthink, over-analyse, over-philosophise and quantify life; I guess we all do to a certain degree. But life is its own free being. It doesn’t work within systems and whims. It is, for the most part, a random thing that you cannot assert control over. And it most certainly doesn’t go as planned. I’ve always had the notion that certain milestones in life must be achieved at specific ages. But I’ve found out the hard way that life doesn’t work that way. That’s the thing about life. People take different roads: some roads are different & go against the grain, some are just what that particular person needs at the time, and some roads reveal themselves after a long time. We all take different roads, some early and some late, but we arrive in the place that we’re supposed to be, or I guess you just have to believe that. Most of my peers graduated from their Master’s courses and found jobs abroad. They’re now well settled there. They’ve found a life partner & had kids & everything looks to me, the outsider, that it’s all going according to plan and smoothly for them. But life isn’t like that. Everyone is on their own different path & journey. To others like me, from the outside looking in, it may seem like everyone is getting ahead & their life is going smoothly, but we don’t see the setbacks, the failures, & the struggles they’ve faced behind the scenes. We tend to look, judge and compare our lives & the timelines of our lives to others with just a snapshot in view, i.e. a few text message conversations or calls, their posts on social media of vacations & kids & date nights & proposing to their partners. But we don’t see the full picture. Some people had to leave the countries where they studied their Master’s. Some worked for some time there & had to come back to India for varied reasons. Some went there with a job secured, but their employers’ company eventually couldn’t stay afloat & they had to return. Others got divorced & had to contend with legal battles over their children. Others got rejected by the love of their life and had to start over. Some started startups that were hugely successful. Some sold their startups for a huge chunk of cash but were left unfulfilled in other areas of their lives. Others failed in their startup ventures or had their companies deemed redundant after the passing of a government bill. Others bought Bitcoin early and are sitting pretty on cash, but can’t seem to find fulfilment. Some have achieved their net worth targets, others post on LinkedIn saying they’ve been laid off & are looking for a job and have been unemployed for over a year because of AI & automation causing layoffs. Others have become social media influencers, or some have become philosophers & travel, giving TED Talks & visiting monasteries regularly. Others are still trying to figure things out, are unmarried & have quit their jobs to find what they truly want to do. It’s a vast myriad landscape of different lives unfolding in their own ways. No one has it all figured out. And nobody’s life goes according to plan. It’s all subjective & varies from person to person. To others who look at my life, based on my social media or blog posts, they think that I’m living out my passions, i.e. writing about football as a football journalist for over ten years, writing about music & film as well, and releasing books as a writer, and learning instruments & putting out music as a musician/music producer & artist & composing music for film. Some of my friends who are even more passionate about football than me have told me they want to start a career in the industry too & they wish they could “monetise their passion for the game”, and that I’m “lucky” to be writing about the sport for a living and working remotely. But they don’t see my personal setbacks and what I’m searching & yearning for. Looking back, it was life’s way of pointing me towards writing & music as my path in life. It wouldn’t have happened had I gone abroad for my Master’s degree in my twenties. It was just what I needed to grow in my own life. When you look at just the snapshot of people’s lives on social media or in your interactions with them, you don’t see the whole picture. Life is subjective from person to person. You might covet what others have & others might covet what you have. I’ve learned that life is different for everybody. Everybody is on their own unique journey and path. So it doesn’t make sense to try to aggregate other people’s lives and compare them to your own. It’s not just you or me; this happens to everybody. This article by another Medium writer, titled “Life doesn’t care who started early or late”, echoes the same thing. Furthermore, reading this book, written by a Zen monk named Jikisai Minami, which I wrote an earlier post about, echoed the broader message that: Life isn’t a race. It’s meant to be lived. Whether you achieve your goals, ambitions & targets or not. Life really is strange in that sense. It’s random. But that’s just part of the process of being human. Life unfolds differently for everybody, and you just have to believe that it will unfold in the ways that’s best for you. It’s perhaps imperative, however, not to fall into the vicious cycle of comparing your life to other people’s. This can lead to a lot of unhappiness and unfulfilment. You can’t control the timing of events in your life & neither can they. In the end, we’re all here to live life to the fullest, and learn, grow, adapt & keep moving forward. Life is too short to fall into the chasms of comparison & beat yourself up about it. Although in this age of social media, it’s easier said than done. Nobody's life is perfect & complete, despite seeming that way based on our snapshot view of their lives. Everyone has their own share of struggles & setbacks, which you know nothing about. And everyone is on their own unique journey. So keep that in mind the next time you fall into the trap of comparing your life to others. We must appreciate & be grateful for what we have, and trust in the process of living & figuring out our lives for ourselves. We tend to live by giving prime importance to our achievements & our goals, ambitions & targets, but they don’t always work out or take their own time to happen. And that’s okay! It helps to not primarily focus on the achievements of your own life or those of others. But rather, to focus on the richness of your days and how you spend your time on a day-to-day basis & the process of living life. In the end, how we live out our lives in the day-to-day & how we learn and grow & live it to the fullest, matter the most in this brief timeframe of existence. We need to acknowledge that life is short — roughly 4000 weeks — as I’ve mentioned in the opening chapter of my book, based on author Oliver Burkeman’s analysis. So stop comparing and start living. Just relax, take a breath. And trust in your journey & process. Thanks for taking the time to read this article… This article is an extension of a chapter in my book Make Your Own Waves, which you can buy at the link: https://amzn.eu/d/dZaX8Dr If you’re in India, you can buy it here: https://amzn.in/d/fA4iDgb
This article was originally published on my Medium. Thank you for being a valuable subscriber to my newsletter, Light Years! If you liked this post & found it informative, feel free to share this publication with your network by clicking the button below… I hope you found this post informative & it helped you in some way. As always, feel free to subscribe to my publication Light Years & support it & also share it if you’d like. Get it in your inbox by filling up the space below! You can find me on Medium on my Medium profile covering a plethora of topics (there’s a bit of difference between the posts here & there): https://medium.com/@gaurav_krishnan If you’d like to thank me for this post, if you found value in it, you can buy me a coffee instead of, or alongside subscribing to my publications, by clicking the button below so that I can sip my next brew of coffee, all thanks to you! :) You're currently a free subscriber to Light Years by Gaurav Krishnan. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Sunday, 31 August 2025
Everyone Is On A Different Journey, So Stop Comparing
spaceX spiders
Dear friends – In working with our Dearly Beloved across the Threshold, as is my daily practice – Today, besides thinking of the painter Matthias Grunewald, a great Christian Initiate – painter of the Isenheim Altar, I am tuned into Elisabeth Vreede, (Vreede’ translates from the Dutch as ‘Peace’) Mathematician, Astronomer & Anthroposophist – who I wrote about last year on her deathday. And here is what came thru:
The spiders from Mars are here - weaving us into their cyberspace web - thru a steady permeation of SpaceX - an anti-space prison-sphere encasing the Earth with satellite junk that links to ground receivers to run a global cobweb round our planet, under the guise of giving us faster, better, stronger internet – while in reality we have unwittingly invited the vampire into our phones & homes - ‘smart’ device spies, dumbing us down, expensive streaming services riddled with commercials from big pharma take an eternity to load, the zoom connection constantly drops conductivity, the search engine doesn’t yield wanted results, only algorithmic sales scams, full of AI lies - to enslave & consume the consumer, while the masses open their veins to nanobots, & 5G fries our DNA… Meanwhile these orbiting robot minions not only create light pollution obstructing our view of the heavens – they also burn up like toxic man-made meteors when entering the atmosphere - Polluting the etheric realm - the aura surrounding Earth -Poisoning with electromagnetic interference, each etheric layer: Warmth, Tone, Light, & Life ethers, in the thermosphere, which connects us to the Cosmic Quintessence & our human ability to bring forth pure Plasmic Etheric Thinking. The lower levels of this layer are where we get ‘aurora’ effects in places where they have never, up till now, occurred – Sure is pretty though right? - Everyone raves with UUU’s & ahh’s - without knowing that this distractive lightshow is being caused by a massive violation of our life-force by sub-nature - affecting not only the 4 elements of our physical existence, but also the spiritual atmosphere of our Mother Earth – interrupting the capacity for spiritual thoughts to ascend, or descend from the heavens.
So how do we respond to this & other industrial bogeys enveloping our Earth in a killing web? 1st - by being fully awake to what is happening & 2nd - by meeting this technological consciousness with spiritual mindfulness – with Christ Consciousness. One way to do this is to realize that the Cosmos is a great realm made up of Spiritual Angelic Beings of ascending ranks, who are poised to participate with humanity in our evolutionary progression - Bringing the will of the Divine into Earth existence – as well as carrying the fruits of Earth life into the Cosmos thru our conscious Speaking with the Stars. This circulating interaction is vital. We can use our Imaginative Cognition to know that the 7 planets – the Wandering Stars, & the Zodiac of Fixed Stars, the 12 Constellations, are spheres of higher consciousness which we can unite ourselves with – not evil aliens, as the fear mongers would have us believe - Then we break thru the web of electronic ahrimanic deception - into the realm of true Being. All the while, we must recognize that yes, there are adversarial forces working thru the puppet whisperers behind the world stage – that need to be unmasked. The Christ aligned ‘ever present help of the Spiritual world’ will never interfere with our human freedom – These progressive Angelic Hierarchies await our conscious union with them as co-creators in building a new Cosmos - born out of our transformative working to spiritualize the Earth. It’s up to us to break thru the death web that promises colonies on Mars like castles in the sky - to stand together instead on the true Foundation Stone of what the Human Being & our Beloved Mother Earth are destined to be: come - Christic Freedom Lovers. ~hag
David Bowie knew: “Making love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind - Like a leper messiah - When the kids had killed the man, I had to break up the band...Ziggy played guitar”
31 August 2025 - “Speaking with the Stars”
Zinniker Farm has harvested Biodynamic Pfeiffer Wheat - If you are interested in signing up to receive a share of the harvest - Contact the Family Farm Initiative – Supplies are limited - CG & I are going to Italy for the month of Sept. so orders made now will be delivered around Michaelmas time.
Víðarr Academy of North America - in the training of Health & Movement
Here’s the link to a compendium of Free Video Presentaions
Michaelmas Festival 2025The Courage of Wisdom in the Light of LoveSunday 28 September 6 pm - 9 pm Potluck, Prep-stir, Bonfire, Festival Circlersvp Hazel@CogRite.com
If you want to support the Spiritualization of the Earth thru the Biodynamic Farming done on Zinniker Farm, you are invited to become a paid subscriber, with all donations going directly to the farm
Greetings Friend, you currently a free subscriber to Cognitive Ritual. Thank you for receiving my workings freely offered. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. ALL donations go to support Zinniker Farm - The oldest Biodynamic Farm in America! Together we can spiritualize the Universe. XOX ~hag
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A Note from Tim Tim here. I'm so glad you're part of this journey. Below, you'll find today...
