Eight Verbs

If money were no object, what would I actually do tomorrow?

I couldn’t sleep last night. Turning one way, then the other.

Somewhere in all that turning, a question arrived. Not a worry, for once — a question. If I were a millionaire, what would I actually do with my day? Not what would I buy. What would I do.

So I started listing verbs.

Play

Play came first, and it came fast. Badminton, mostly.

I am forty-three, and I have been learning something this year that I did not expect: badminton is a genuinely physical sport. Those rallies are only a few seconds long and they take you up and down and up again. It has made me pay attention to my shoulders, my elbows, my knees. The ankles and hips too. The legs that have to move me, the conditioning that decides whether I last past the third game.

The badminton lot, after. Half the point of the game is the sitting down afterwards.

I have also spent a fair part of my working life telling other people to play more — for themselves, for their families. I still think it is one of the better things you can do for a difficult week.

Read

Read came just as fast. It is the other thing I have always done without needing a reason.

The kind of sentence you stop on, and then photograph, and then think about for a year.

Write

Then I realised I need to write.

I think I am one of those people who writes fairly naturally — not brilliantly, but naturally, and with a little effort and practice I could probably write a lot. During Covid I kept morning pages going for a few weeks. Forty minutes a day, most days. I have rarely been that clear about anything since.

Morning pages. Not for anyone. That is exactly why they work.

It does not have to be an essay. Morning pages are fine. Short sentences, simple ideas. As long as I write something, I am happier, and that is really the whole point. I don’t think I can make anyone around me happy if I am not.

Sell

This one surprised me, and then it did not.

I have a real inclination to sell things I actually believe in. A home-style vegetarian cafe in Tiruvannamalai. Memberships for a sports club, fifteen years ago, when that was an unusual thing to sell an Indian household. Art, through the Tiru Art Collective. Now my daughter’s gift for reading, to other children, through the Readathon. And my wife’s deep work with leaders, through the Inner Compass.

One of many. I have made a lot of these. I have never made one for something I did not believe in.

I notice the pattern. I have never once managed to sell something I didn’t rate.

I have also never been much good at being a boss. I am more use as a teacher — someone whose job is to help you get better at a thing, not to make you feel small about where you currently are.

Cook

I want to cook, for about four reasons at once.

To eat what I actually want to eat — spicy, varied, a new recipe when I feel like it. To feed my family. And to cook for my parents, which I get to do again after twenty-odd years away from Chennai.

The reason to cook, laid out.

And the other reason: what a table does to a room full of people.

That last one is not a small thing. I left after college. I am back. I can make my mother lunch.

Workout

Workout is the one that teaches discipline, and I need teaching.

Daily Reps Guy has been a big influence here — twenty minutes a day, anywhere, done daily, no supplements. What I have taken from it is not a programme so much as the argument that consistency beats intensity, and that you can start today with nothing.

Lead by example, they say. Some days the example leads me.

There is a plainer reason too. If I want my family to hike, to travel, to say yes to things, I have to be the one who can do it first. Most of the best experiences are free and available everywhere. All they ask for is a body that can turn up.

Teach and create

These two I would like a few times a week, if not every day.

I have been given a great deal — good parents, good friends, my best friend, my daughter, my son. Somewhere in all that I picked up an unreasonable amount of self-belief. I take real pride in trying to live with integrity and some courage, and in nudging other people to do the same.

Small table, two chairs. Most teaching I have ever done well has looked like this.

Teaching and making things is how I give some of that back.

Walk

Walking is the simplest of the eight. We are built for it.

This one cost nothing. It asked only that I could walk up.

Given how I work, it matters more than it should have to. Movement is medicine, as the saying goes, and sitting is doing us no favours. But the honest reason I walk is that it is where the conversations happen. Long ones. Loud, boisterous work arguments. Quiet family ones. We seem to solve most things on the move.

Eight verbs. Play, read, write, sell, cook, workout, teach or create, walk.

Some days one of them gets ten minutes. Some days one gets three hours. I am not trying to build a system, and I am fairly sure that the moment I make it a system I will stop doing it.

But I would like to hold on to these — for a day, a week, and probably for as long as I get.

What I notice is that none of them are things you do to other people. Every one of them makes something, or feeds someone, or hands something over. If joy and love come out of a day, I suspect that is the mechanism. Not a mood you arrive at, but a by-product of what you spent the hours doing.

I think we could all do with more of that, and rather less of the arrangement where everyone is quietly out for themselves.

Eight verbs. That’s it. That’s the whole plan.