Transcriber: Alla Omelchenko Reviewer: Hanna Leliv
(Applause)
Good evening.
My name is Vaishali.
It was right after my thirty-fourth birthday
that I was forced to take a career break for 18 months in my life.
I was a trailing spouse and I moved to Hong Kong.
I was nervous.
Incredibly nervous. My nervousness
came not from the fact that I would have no source of income
but from the fact that
what was I supposed to do with my time
when I woke up in the morning,
when I didn't have a job to go to for the next 18 months?
And I need to rewind a little bit at this stage.
Like every typical Indian middle class family in the 1970s
I grew up in an intensely academic background
where success was:
getting good grades in school,
getting into a great college,
getting a good job, getting a big bonus,
getting a big increment.
Success was also finding a suitable boy
and getting married at the right time, yes.
And somewhere down the line the assumption was
that if you were successful in these two aspects of your life
you would find happiness.
We were raised to live life in two dimensions.
You know, do not get me wrong
I'm not trying to mock the tried and tested theory in life.
All that I'm trying to ask you is that
what if you woke up one morning and found
either or both of these dimensions snatched away from you.
What would be your source of joy?
What would be your sense for?
It was about that time that I started my journey.
I was in Hong Kong.
I had a lot of free time at my hands,
so I said,
"You know what? This is the first time that
I actually have the time to think about
what I'm going to do with my time."
So, at that time I began my experiment.
And I tried cooking,
I took tennis classes,
I tried playing bridge,
every possible thing that the idle expat wife
could possibly do with her time.
But I failed.
I repeatedly failed.
I miserably failed at every activity I took up outside of my world.
It was possibly because I guess I wasn't enjoying it.
I didn't know it didn't make me happy.
So I said, "Ok, let me move on."
And it was that time of the year,
New Year's,
when most people wake up and say,
"You know what? This is it!"
"I'm gonna get fit."
"I'm gonna hit the gym."
"I'm gonna lose weight."
"I'm gonna look good."
So, I followed them all.
And the next thing I know is that
I'm at the gym
and I get this little instruction card from my trainer
which says, "1-2 kilometers on the treadmill six days a week."
I said, "Ok, I can do that."
So, I got on the treadmill,
put it on top speed or whatever it was supposed to be
and I started running.
And you know what?
I hated every single minute on that treadmill.
I didn't like it at all.
You know, like I'm doing this and I'm going nowhere.
That was a feeling I had.
And it was about that time that
a very dear friend of mine, Mokun Santana,
visited me in Hong Kong for a marathon!
And, you know, a marathon is like the whole forty-two point two kilometers.
Yeah, that's what most crazy people run.
And what was funny was that
he had signed me up unknowingly for a ten kilometer race.
Yeah, the whole ten kilometers!
Now, if you've been following my story so far,
I came from a very non-athletic background.
I had precious little to do with the outdoors.
But I told my friend, "You know, Mokun,
you've signed me up, I don't want to let you down.
So, no matter what I'm going to run, walk, crawl if I have to,
but I am going to see you there,
at the finish line."
Come race day, I woke up bright and early,
really scared, as I made my way through the thousands of people
to kind of go towards the front to start the race.
And I said, "This is possibly the most physically challenging thing
I have ever done in my life."
I haven't done anything besides using my brain
and my heart most of my life.
And I was going to try use my whole body to finish this ten kilometer race.
The gun shot went off,
and I slowly started my run.
Five hundred meters,
one kilometer,
two kilometers.
And I noticed that something really interesting
was beginning to happen here.
I was actually beginning to enjoy the feeling.
I felt like my heart rate was getting into the zone,
it was beginning to stabilize.
I was feeling happy. Insanely happy!
I felt calm, it felt peaceful, I felt different.
And before I could realize it, I was standing
at the end of the ten kilometer race.
That's my picture with my buddy from ten years ago.
I found myself at the the end of that race thinking
for someone who has never even run
a hundred meter race in their life
to be standing there at the finish of a ten kilometer race
was simply beautiful.
And what's important is that I enjoyed every bit of it -
the sweat on my face, the dirt on my clothes,
the grime on my shoes.
And I felt for the first time in my life like a million bucks on the inside.
And it had nothing, absolutely nothing to do
with either my family or my work.
And a little voice immediately went off in my head, which said,
"You know what, Vaishali? Maybe you should do this again."
And so I did. Over the last ten years
I've run an excess of twenty thousand kilometers,
(Applause)
which is practically half-way around the equator
and across four continents and ten countries.
And I have proofs.
(Applause)
Now, you know, I kind of fell in love with the whole concept of running.
I felt like so far in my life I had been living in two dimensions -
work and family.
And I have found my third dimension.
It's like you are watching a movie
and you put on your 3d glasses,
and suddenly the whole world looks so different. It looks so good.
Finding your third dimension is important
because there are times in your thirties, forties, fifties,
I don't know when,
but some time in your life you will come across this moment
when you feel dull, you feel jaded,
you feel cynical or simply overwhelmed
about what you're supposed to do with the problems you have in your life.
And your third dimension will be your ultimate faith healer,
restoring belief not only in yourself, but in life's possibilities.
Now, to find your third dimension you must take some time and reflect
on what are your truest moments of joy, and where did they come from.
It has to be a sphere outside of work and your family.
And if you come up with a blank, it's time to start your journey.
What the third dimension will do is it will make you resilient,
it will make you bounce back to work,
it will make you love your Monday mornings,
it will make you look forward to your weekends,
it will enrich the other two dimensions of your life.
So, sometimes in your life you will feel that you don't have control
over what's happening possibly at work or at home,
but your third dimension
you own, you control it.
It's yours forever.
So go find it!
Thank you.
(Applause)