The Life Audit: Do You Know How To?

The Life Audit: Do You Know How To?

Tax season is coming up. Are you ready with your papers filed in? I’m sure it’s a yes, because no one is ever late to their evaluations.

However, I will ask you this? Have you considered holding an audit party for your life? The one you live, love and cherish? The one that goes on and on and on. No? Why? A life audit is your period of self-reflection. It can be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually; whenever you find the time (and mate, I sure think you NEED to find time for it!). I am a constant evaluator (also a chronic overthinker), and I keep looking back at every minute of the previous day to know if I could have lived it better, or loved it better.

My family believes in a wholesome amount of planning: finances, education, vacations, dinners, breakfasts, life goals, milestones, the list goes on. We spend half our time making lists, literally. This planning also gets us to achieve goals that sometimes feel like mountains. Sure, it takes time, but we know we have to achieve them. Fine-tuning of your life happens at every step you take, every minute you breathe and every direction you look into. Whether it is when you pick up a book to read, or find a person along the way to help out, or a movie you watch or even a new cuisine you decide to dive into!

So auditing your life is necessary to see where the fine-tuning really happened, and where the glitches came out loud and clear. Tie this in with the planning and list-making. Like a profit and loss balance sheet, we gauge our assets and liabilities by conducting a life audit. We know what qualities work for us, and we know what brings us further away from the goals we want to achieve. Profit, here, is the goal we wish to achieve and how long it takes to do so.

Simply put, the process of your life audit begins with one question only: WHY.

Why do I want a certain achievement to come about?

Why did I not achieve it in time?

Why did I go wrong with what I did to achieve it?

Why did I not know that this activity would harm my path to achievement?

These WHYs will bring you to a standstill. They will bring you to realise what went wrong along the way, how to rectify it and how to make your path better, easier, more productive and more fruitful. Take stock of your life, the inventory is only so much. Life is long, but hard. You never know what you are missing out on, while running after something that may not matter!

Do you know that your achievements in life are not monetary, economic or financial? These achievements are gauged by your accountant, you needn’t worry. However, what you must worry about is:

1. Your mental health
2. Your physical health
3. Your social health
4. Your spiritual health

Health, health, health. It is all we must chant at the end of the day. What good is money, if we are not in the right state of mind to appreciate it? When we speak of assets and liabilities, we speak of good and bad habits. Similar to your gains and your losses, these habits decide whether you are living life the right way or detrimentally. Live life king size can mean a lot of things. I believe it is a balance of every kind of habit (I am partial to my bad traits too). But now that we come to this, what are good qualities? I could list down the entire dictionary for this. But if I have to explain this to a child, or rather if a child has to explain this to me, it would be as easy as this:

Good habits are those that keep you safe, healthy, smiling and happy. Good habits are those that keep your near and dear ones happy with how you live your life, accept that you are building yourself and, in the process, also making them smile on some days. Good habits are those that help, that sustain, that love, that laugh and that help you breathe a little lighter.

Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but that puff from a cigarette helps you breathe lighter for the moment; but does it help you wake up without a heaving chest? No. It counts as a bad habit. Overthinking gives you slamming headaches, stressing gives you shaky hands and nerves. Impatience translates to irritation and indecisiveness translates to helplessness. All these and more, put together eventually make you angry and sad at the same time.

The cure to this? Evaluate. Reflect. Backtrack.

What caused these habits? What made you feel so? What can you do to not make yourself feel so? There are a number of ways. Some of them are:

1. Meditation
2. Spiritual Reading
3. Walking in a garden in the early dewed hours
4. Going for a solo drive
5. Practicing mindfulness
6. Compartmentalizing your life, your emotions
7. Writing about your day in a journal
8. SO MUCH MORE!

Happiness needs to exist without a connection to anything. Love without detachment. Help without expectation. Celebrate without reason and live without worries. Happiness cannot be measured. It needs to be felt, breathed in, experienced. Only after you have achieved a range of good habits, and some ways to balance the bad habits, will you truly be able to audit your life. Because what good are numbers to an accountant without any clarity; similarly, what good is a jumble of emotions and experience without a stable mind to understand them?

So, start now, it’s already fall season. Time to pick up before the cold sets in, right!

Written By Anisha Masand

Week 42, October ’20