I, The Absolute

It is a well appreciated fact that life is not linear. Life involves too many variables – it mostly operates in the nth space.

Business involves multiple variables too. But to make decision making simpler, it resorts to math and takes help of natural logarithm, which converts non-linear equations to linear equations. This makes understanding of business situations easy and thus manageable.

What about life? Is there such a magic formula to make life simple, comprehensible and manageable? There is no single natural log, which can come to rescue. There are perhaps multiple logs. Each person has to introspect/retrospect and find one’s own logs and logs that are appropriate to particular situations. These can work alone or in combination to make life easier and better. Some of the logs which come to my mind

• Love – for instance, to remind us of the purpose of life when we wander too much in search of power and money. Or even when we get lost amidst the statistics formulae or accounting statements

• Humor – for instance, to de-stress and to prevent some everyday situations from getting nasty

• Booze – for temporary amnesia, when the loved ones themselves don’t understand or when we can’t understand them. Or even when the economic Prof’s equations bother too much

• Positioning and Posturing – to hoodwink others and derive benefit for self

• Patience – for instance, when we can’t make out what the marketing Prof mumbles in class. Or even to make us sit through the classes till we graduate

The above list is not exhaustive. Nor do I want them to sound as shortcuts to getting out of a situation. Some are just useful for a given moment. Some, such as love and humor, are really powerful and can provide sustainable solutions in making life easy to manage. These are the real logs of life.