Make a difference

Wake up every morning and say, thank you. One more day. Let me use this day, let me put something into the world that wasn't there before

Greg David Roberts, author of Shantaram, The Mountain Shadow, and The Spiritual Path. Musician and artist

The delicate orange hue of Shantaram’s cover blends with the memory of my first trip to Indonesia. The book has recently resurfaced from my library in Italy and its folded bottom corners prove that it’s a well-travelled one, albeit inside a backpack. Mine was emerald green with blue straps and I remember leaning against its soft body with the book in my hands, while I waited for a flight, a ferry, or a toy-sized wood trimaran. It was the year when I learned to dive. The sky turned into the sea when I backward-rolled into the silent liquid world. Sinking gently and weightless towards the bottom, I noticed microscopic particles of sand glittering in cones of light. Looking up, instead, the sun spread its ray on the sea surface, like a giant spider-like creature. Sea turtles were the queens of the show, but what took my heart was a lonely transparent squid, a barely-there mystery with a thin veil of wings dancing along its body. 

Back on land, I walked alone through rice paddies on late afternoons and then sat in a wooden coffee shop, looking at dragonflies whirling outside the veranda. The memory of this vacation, that tastes of a freshly pressed ginger tea and clinks like the ice cubes inside the glass, is intimately connected with Shantaram. My physical journey and the literary one are intertwined like a dream. It was that type of unplanned vacation that one can take in careless years only. With my companions, we retraced our steps more than once. In the quest for the perfect island, the perfect spot, we enjoyed being carried by the whims of the moment while marveling at the generosity of the local nature. 

It is said that reading a book is like having a conversation with its author. As fervid as my imagination can be, I would have never expected to actually be having one with Gregory David Roberts. It makes me smile that with every word he wrote he unknowingly participated in my erratic wandering on and under the shores of Indonesia. Now, almost twenty years later, with every word he spoke, he revealed just how much power we could have imagined we have in weaving the subtle texture of our existence at any age. 

Starting from your experience now at 69, what is the meaning of our journey from where we are little to where we grow older? What have you learned?

I think that purpose gives life meaning. Purpose gives anything meaning. Meaning itself, is - in a sense, inverted commas - a meaningless term. When we ask what is the meaning of life, what we really are asking is what purpose will give my life meaning. Life has intrinsic value, it has intrinsic worth, but it doesn't have intrinsic meaning. The meaning is supplied by us when we give our lives purpose. Every time we purpose ourselves and repurpose ourselves, we reinvent the meaning of what we're doing and the meaning of our lives.

Does this mean that, when it comes to aging, we have to take a stance, we are not simply spectators of our aging process?

Yes. I mean, we have an inevitability curve. First thing, if we're aging, we're lucky. In the past, infant mortality was much higher so many people didn't make it through childhood. So many died in childbirth, so many women died in childbirth and this gave us a low life expectancy average. Aging is a natural thing; it is an inevitability curve. If we are aging, we're among the lucky ones who made it this far. If we make it further, we're even luckier being in an ever luckier group that gets to live longer and experience more of life. For many, that longevity is not a guarantee, it's not something you can expect as you go forward. In many parts of the world, it is unreachable. 

So you can live into your 80s and 90s, and still have a vigorous lifestyle and so forth, and a vigorous life. We had people who lived into their 90s, we had centenarians throughout our history. I think that is one of the things that is happening at the moment. But, one of the main things that's happened is that we've had an increasingly youth-focused and youth-oriented society, starting from the late 1950s and into the 1960s. And from that time onwards, there has been a constant focus on youth. There used to be a saying, when I was a child, which I would hear from grandparents and aunties and uncles: children should be seen and not heard. Today, that expression has been reversed: the elderly should be seen and not heard. 

In a recent interview, Dr Connie Zweig pointed out that aging slows us down to give us time to reflect, to move from doing to being. What is your take?

I’m certainly aging myself and I haven't slowed down. If anything, I've accelerated the pace of what I'm doing to a more productive output than I've ever had at any time in my life. I'm working now in multiple fields. Last night, I worked on two music videos with a brilliant Jamaican editor, who's also a filmmaker. Today I’m working on a new track with a brilliant rapper named Scantana. After this, we'll be looking at a new collage that we're putting together and then I’m moving into new writing projects. I have a writing desk set up and I'll spend two hours at the writing desk on that, and then move from there back into music and work on another album that we're producing. My output has increased tremendously. There is one thing with old age. If you still have your energy, your optimism, your enthusiasm, you actually do have more time than you did when you were looking after your kids or trying to hold your job together, developing your career. If you still have the energy, the drive, and the optimism, you can actually do way more than you did at any other time in your life.

Does it all boil down to keeping our optimism alive? Is that the all that matters?

Yes, there's absolutely no doubt. We know all of the statistics from all over the world that people who have a positive outlook on life live longer than those who have a pessimistic outlook on life. It's a simple fact. And that crosses every other demographic, it cuts across everything, it really is the mental attitude of the person that helps them to cope with illness, disease, and to keep their immune system high. There is a clear relationship between the centered optimistic serene self and a highly developed immune system just as there is a correlation between being in a depressed state and having a depressed immune system. 

Keeping an optimistic view does not mean an unrealistically optimistic view. Of course, you have to deal with things every day. There are limitations that come with aging. Can I run as fast as I did, and I used to love running? No. I look at this tree in my garden and I know that even 15 years ago, I would have climbed it onto that particular branch to get the view. Right now, I think, I might fall from that tree and I'm not gonna bounce the way I did when I was 30 or 25. So there are certain limitations to what you are actually doing, but what that does, when you limit those things, you open the horizon for other things. I have way more time now to devote to music, to focus on creating music than I ever did at any time in my life. I've always been involved in music, but I could never give the focus I can now at this time. I think optimism is the key, a positive outlook and an optimistic view. The question is: how do we achieve it?

How do you answer this question?

I think the two most important things in our lives are love and faith. It's why I called the first album I created with beautiful collaborative artists here in Jamaica, “Love and Faith.” If you connect in this material world, if you connect with the people who really love you, and who you really love, and make that the priority in your life, that’s the number one priority. Beyond that, into the spiritual, is to have faith. Even if it's just faith in yourself and faith in your loved ones, that you trust this person or that person completely, that is faith. If we go from attraction to love to trust, when we go beyond trust, what’s beyond love and trust? That’s faith. In this material world, focusing on love and asking myself am I paying sufficient attention to the people who love me, and who I love? Beyond that, if I have more, I'm going to share it with the people who liked me, or the people I like, if you know what I mean. But firstly, love, keep those connections of love intact.  Keep the faith in yourself, in your loved ones, in your ability.  If you can have faith in something beyond, have faith in the Divine, faith in nature, perhaps, if that's what calls you.

Your manuscript got destroyed twice and you wrote it again. We have many new beginnings in life, but sometimes we think they are setbacks. What is the wisdom you can share about starting over?

It all boils down to a mindset. Almost everything in our lives, in a spiritual sense, comes back to our intention. So, if our intention is filled with pessimism or filled with, let's say, recrimination, resentment, that intention is going to manifest a path in front of us. The first thing is to focus on our intention. What is my intention? Am I in control of my intention? Or am I just reacting like an automaton? This happens so I react, that happens so I react to this. Or am I actually looking deep within myself, taking control of my own destiny, and saying, my destiny is in my hands? I can change the course of my life from one day to the next, if my mind is made up, and my intention is clear, and pure. Focusing on a clear intention, getting the intention right. From there, everything else flows, and how do we get our intention right? 

I think, in the spiritual sense, the way to look at your intention and ask yourself, is my intention okay or is my intention likely to cause harm to me and maybe others? It’s to ask two spiritual questions? Am I worthy? And secondly, how much giving is in this intention that I have right now? I'm going to reach out to somebody, I'm going to do this. Is it filled with giving? Is it more about what I can give or more about what I can get? If you can say to yourself: I feel worthy, I'm not perfect, but I feel worthy and I think my intention is at least half filled with giving, it's not just all about what I can get. Then what do you do? You try to be fair, honest, positive, and creative. If you focus in this material world on being fair, being honest, being positive, and being creative, with that clear intention you had in the beginning, you pretty much can't go wrong in what you do. 

 If you look at fair, honest, positive and creative, where did it come from? It came from our earliest ancestors 250,000 to 300,000 years ago, whose courage and love for one another allowed them to survive in this world, these earliest ancestors, without sharp teeth, without claws, without the ability to outrun the animals. How did we survive? How was it possible? We loved one another. We supported one another, we cared for one another, and we shared with one another. That's how it was. And that's so deep, because for the first 250,000 years of our history, we did that, then we domesticated ourselves. We stayed in one place, we domesticated crops, we domesticated animals, and everything changed from that point. But deep within us, is a sense of fairness, a sense that being honest is the right way to proceed, because without it, the community falls apart. Inside ourselves we have a sense of being positive, because the opposite of that, negativity, drains everything, all of the energy out of everything.  A sense of being creative, because the opposite of being creative is being destructive. And we all know that destruction is easy. 

Building and creating is difficult. But building and creating is what gives us our ongoing movement as a human species, within ourselves and within our communities. It's probably a long answer to your question, but I think you get the intention, right? Am I worthy, and how much giving is in my intention, and then whatever I'm going to do in this world, I'm going to try to be fair, to be honest, to be positive and to be creative. If I can't tick all those four boxes, I'll go back and think about it until I can, because there's no point in proceeding if you're not fair and honest, if you're not positive and creative. So that's the best advice I could give after all these years of struggling myself, with anyone out there to say okay, here's a little formula, put this down on a piece of paper and think it through for yourself and that should help you set your compass.

You know what? That’s true at every age. It still holds true until our last breath. 

It does. It does.

What do we get wrong about aging? What could we do better in the way we deal with aging in our society?

I think the first word is respect. Generally speaking, although we can see some signs of a cultural westernization happening in India, when an elderly person walks down a very crowded pathway filled with thousands of people, scurrying to work and back, everyone makes way for that slow moving elderly person with a cane. Everyone does. Everyone in India, when they're approaching an older person will say, “excuse me uncle,” “excuse me auntie.” They are suggesting just through their language that they are connected with that elderly person. You will not see elderly people pushed out of the way, shoved out of the way. We had this in every culture, respect for the elderly. 

In the West, with this rampant consumerism, the companies discovered in the 1950s and 60s that teenagers, while they had no disposable income, could nag their parents to buy things. The focus of the market went onto teenagers. If you look at all the advertising before the 1950s, all the advertising and all of the movies were aimed at 40 to 50 year olds. Nothing was advertised for children on TV because they had no disposable income. With Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, and all the girls going crazy for The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, people realized, whoa, these kids have no money, but they can nag their parents to buy stuff. So the focus came onto them. Within 20 years, every film being made is made for a 14-year-old boy. The focus moved to youth and away from the wisdom of age, and this led to a general disrespect. 

If we look at television programs from the 1940s, and 50s, older people, grown-ups, mums, dads, and grandparents were portrayed with dignity and respect. That was a part of the culture everywhere, in every program everywhere. You look at the television now, and it's routine comedy fare for younger people to ridicule and be abusive toward older people, their parents, and their grandparents. This is routine now, to say you're so old and so stupid, you don't know what's going on. We also have in this focus on youth culture, now increasingly younger and younger people with no real life experience, who are being put up as spokespeople and people are following them all over the world, following their movements. It has never happened throughout history. We always knew that the people who were older, and who'd been through a lot and had managed to keep their character intact, were decent people and had a lot to teach us, a lot. We learn from them. We knew that they were observing us making the same kinds of mistakes that they made when they were young. We could go to them for their wisdom. 

When Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson created The Elders, they said we have a have a global village, but we have no village elders. This is sort of a symptom of what's happened in our society. So number one, respect.  Number two, cherishing. We forgot that we used to cherish older the people. It was a joy to spend time with them. Now it’s a kind of chore. Then the third thing is, where I'm not saying that there is something intrinsically wrong with euthanasia - there may be circumstances in which a person wants to make this choice and that is their choice to make - but a comedian recently said, ‘I have nothing against euthanasia, I just don't want it to become compulsory.’ We can see a kind of trajectory with Covid here. Many, many people in their 80s and 90s are gone, just wiped out, along with all of the knowledge and wisdom they had. If we had cherished them more, perhaps we would have preserved more of them.

You often mention forgiveness.  Why is it such an important component of our life and our aging?

Forgiveness to me is essential as a step toward personal evolution. At some time in your life, if you have not done it before, you reach that global decision point where you sit down, look at what you've done in your life and own up and accept responsibility for the things you did. That you maybe said it wasn’t my fault, somebody made me do it, or I was born like that. You take personal responsibility. Sooner or later this moment comes and the only way that we can fully move forward and fulfill ourselves as evolved humans during our own individual lifetime is to come to grips with what we've done at a certain point and decide what we're going to do going forward, and what we are not going to do going forward, what from our behavior is going to be discarded, and so on. Now, that global moment requires the honesty to look within yourself and accept responsibility and not shove it onto other people. But once you've done that, it requires forgiveness. You need to be able to seek forgiveness, if it's required. You need to be able to give yourself forgiveness, to find a way to forgive yourself because if you can't, it's impossible to take the next step, which is to have a global change, a transformation. A step that says alright, I'm now ready to take the reins of my life in my own hands. I have freewill. I can change, I'm not just a prisoner of the past, I can define the future. I'm not a prisoner of my present, I can define what I'm going to do going forward. I have the will to do it, I have the capacity within myself and I'm going to take control of my destiny and shape my destiny going forward and be this kind of person, because that's the real me.  If there were these things I've done in the past, they were me, I did them. But is that the real me? Yes. But how do I accept that and move forward? I have to acknowledge what I've done and forgive myself. I have to seek forgiveness as required. So I think that's tremendously important. 

The other aspect of forgiveness, why it's so important, is that we always set you know where forgiveness comes from. Originally, it was a vergeben, forgiving. It was giving in return for something that had happened. So it may have been that someone in your clan died due to an accident caused by someone in another clan. The forgiveness procedure was done with a giving where the people who were the aggrieved party would accept a gift from those who had done it and say, this is now done, the giving has been done. We are now clear. So we have this sort of bury-the-hatchet thing. We've forgotten that forgiveness involves giving. 

Is aging a friend or foe for you?

I would not go back to anywhere in my life. I wouldn't go back for anything. It's funny, I guess a lot of people would like to go back. But maybe there are people who did lots of good stuff in their life and they think, ‘I'd like to go back and do it again.’ I have a lot that I'm ashamed of, that I've done in my life, so it's not that I think yeah, let's go back and enjoy it. But also, I would not want to go back to any period in my life when I had, let's say, a preformed understanding. At the moment, I have a kind of understanding of who I am, where I am, my relationship to my loved ones, my relationship to my art, my relationship to the divine, to nature. I have a sense of balance in that at the moment. It took me my entire life to achieve it. So if I went back I'd be going not just back in time but I'd be back in age. I'd be going back in understanding and back in development. I wouldn't give this up for anything. 

Is there anything you're learning every day? Do you say, Oh, I would have never imagined that!

Of course! So many different things. The spiritual in itself for instance. If you have a relationship with nature, a spiritual relationship with nature, it's constantly exciting and scintillating every time you allow yourself to just immerse yourself in the nature and just be a part of it and not be a spectator, just to be an element within it. It's so exciting and so scintillating, in its reactions and affirmations, and so on. This is a beautiful thing in itself.

What are you plans for the future?

I have a beautiful team with me. Very creative, young people and what we're doing is preparing work for the next two years. There are two new albums coming out very soon, three new EPs of music coming out as well. All of it is originally created music, written by me, played by me, and mixed by me. If you liked Shantaram, this is Shantaram in music. This is the same writer who wrote that book who is writing this music, playing it, taking you on a little musical adventure where you just never know what's going to come next. We have a lot of videos, we have a number of new podcasts coming out, because we've had so much response from readers and from book-lovers across the world who were sending us so many questions, which really gives us excellent material for podcasts and to get back to people. We have a little focus on mental health because, you know, it's such a huge issue. It was always big. But now it's much, much bigger with things like disaffection from politics, the worry about fake news, what's true, what's not, and Covid. There's this massive attack on every society in the world, in lockdowns and this sort of thing where the stress has reached a level that I've never seen at any time in my life. I've never seen this much stress right across the entire population. So we're doing a little focus on this. The few small lessons I've learned about trying to keep yourself mentally healthy in a mentally crazy world. What do you do? We do focus on this. We also have some reach-outs that we're doing as part of our community here. And a lot of other projects in terms of artwork and the TV series of Shantaram is in production and will be coming out soon too.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I just want to thank you for this opportunity and for this discussion. It's so timely, it's so important. Thank you very much for inviting me. As a general comment, I'd say two things. The first thing is, when we talk about the stress and strains of aging, we're generally talking about many things, some 90% of it, which can be dealt with, if people have sufficient money. So a lot of the stresses we're talking about are things that can be removed by people who are in a much better situation than most other people are. For instance, we don't have Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch on this program, asking them, “How do you cope with aging?” “How is it working?” Well, we know how they're coping. They have the best doctors, they have the best treatment, they have the best health environment regimes, they have the best support system, and they probably have a lineup of people ready with compatible donor organs in case they need an organ donation, and so on. That's easy for them to do at their level, and why wouldn't they? But for the rest of us, it's not so easy. So many of these problems we talk about with aging are really the same kinds of problems that affect people throughout their lives. It's the unfairness of poverty. That's the essence of it. 

For most of us who don't have that kind of money, the essence is to say thank you. The second thing then is gratitude. I'm grateful for every day. Not necessarily for the same five things every day, but just wake up and say, thank you. One more day, one more day let me use this day, let me do something that wasn't there before. Let me put something into the world that wasn't there before. It might be a flower in the garden that I'm going to tend. It might be a new toy for my cat. Whatever it is, we have to be grateful and say, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for another day. 

I can tell you having woken up in prison cells, woken up on battlefields, woken up in slums, woken up on the footpath when I was living on the pavement in Bombay, I’ve woken up in dens, woken up in rehabilitation, woken up in a hospital bed, chained to the bed. Every single day, I wake up and say, thank you. One more, one more day, I can do something with this, I think I can do something with this. So I think number one, let's not worry too much, because a lot of what we're facing here is stuff that can be easily dealt with with enough money. And secondly, there is other stuff that every person's facing. Let me say, on the other side, just the last point, a number of very wealthy people reached out to me when they read Shantaram, and asked me for spiritual advice, because despite all of their wealth, they were tremendously unhappy. So the other side of that coin, if you know, I mean, you can be very, very wealthy, live long and still be very unhappy. So there's that. Then there is gratitude, to say I'm grateful and see, and this is the thing, what is the essence of gratitude? Gratitude is it. The essence of gratitude is faith and faith is grateful for e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, every bad thing, and every good thing is a test of faith, everything that happens to you, every bad thing, every good thing that happens is just a test of your faith. So each day, when you say thank you, it's an affirmation of your faith in yourself, and in your life and in its value, in its worth, and the importance for you to contribute something because you are unique. That's the essence of it. No two of us are identical. So what we can contribute is ours alone. It may be tiny, maybe a sentence that somebody remembers for the rest of their lives, a little thing you said, a thing you did when you went out in the street. That goes on in that person's life forever, because you were kind, an act of kindness. This is within all of us. It's within all our power to do this. Gratitude, faith. Believe in yourself. Never give up.