Pace of Life .... :)

I read this great article by Nandu - Pace of life and this blog is in response to some of the queries he has posted there. ( My answers turned out to be too long !!! )

The main topic .. is pace of life and how we seem to be rats in a spin wheel. Not a new topic ... but .. :))

The psychological/medical explanation of why we are addicted to searching, tweeting etc is given in this article . For those of you who have a short attention span - this is a long read but you can directly read the first para and last 3 paras to get the gist !!

First I must say I don't believe in balanced life. :)) I don't believe any generation ever really had it. We might think looking from a perspective of 15-20 yrs that they were happy - but they faced their own challenges. Plus we were kids !! :) It may make more sense to see what the adults were doing.

If we see; our parents spent a lot of time in physical work ... I don't remember a time when my mom / grand mom really goofed off. May be only when they visited their maternal homes !! :) My grand mom would do patchwork quilts when she was free ... !!!! Otherwise she was cooking, working in the fields, winnowing, running behind us kids , making butter, tidying the house etc etc etc. No cleaned rice, wheat , ready made butter etc off the shelves for her !!! My granddad was busy in the fields or with his photography .... He was engaged most of the day .. and night time was good for his photography work ..... Similar story for my Mom and Dad - Mom worked too ...

Yes the pace of life was slower I think - but then that generation had its own stresses to cope with.

Now for us a quite a few our stresses are self-inflicted. This is not to say that there is no compulsion to be better, faster and more efficient on a daily basis. It is there ... and I don't see it getting less any time in the near future. What we can do is instead is stream-line the areas that we have to focus on and eliminate the chaff.

Here are few of my observations -

First I think - we should forget the 5 day week and 2 day weekend concept. It is a 7 day work / weekend. That means pockets of leisure have to be taken during the week itself. You may think - Not during the working hours ... but I knew people who would go for a jog in the afternoon which worked as a stress buster and helped them get their exercise. It also made them come back to work with a fresh mind !!! Some would go to their patch gardens near the office - to do half an hour of weed pulling !

We have to choose what our stress buster is - be it 2 min meditation, slow deep breathing, going to a comics website , reading a few inspirational thoughts, watching a movie , a walk in nature etc ... It is a fact that there is no longer a clean divide between work and leisure time.

Secondly I think it is easy to get lost in the thick of thin things. ( Borrowing from Stephen Covey's - First things First ). How many times have we found that just googling on one topic leads to another and then another and you have ended up spending 3 hours ... almost doing nothing ? Personally I can be online all day and all night ... and still feel that I can continue ! :)

Yes technologies are addictive no doubt but much of the online experience also comes from
what we decide to look for. Being online itself is not the main thing - it is what we do online that matters. Mere zombie browsing is obviously a time waster.

RSS feeds, Twitter updates, iTunes podcast subscriptions, Online university material, News updates - how many times do we prune this to get only material is important and relevant to us ? Undoubtedly we have some searching to do to get the best out of the net but we forget this involves deleting too ! I personally unsubscribe/unfollow blogs/people that I don't feel are adding value to my online experience. Yes it may mean that I might miss that fantastic article on the perfect way to blog ....but if I have to hunt through 200 articles for that one ... I am better off without it !! :)

Same goes for the need to know the latest news asap. C'mon - current news is old news tomorrow. Lots of days we can live without reading the newspapers / news updates too !! :)) You just have to go and browse for top 10 news of last week / month to get the relevant details when you get back online ! :)

Another thing is ... time taken for a few tasks - especially the mundane ones !! We can limit them - fixing a time may ensure we do not squander time on non-essentials.

On the whole awareness is what will help .... being online cannot make us efficient unless we evaluate what we do - all the time ! :)) There are lots of books and tips on how to be more productive and I will not get into that but the bottom line is that it all fails if we do not tailor it to our needs.

Mind you - these are my inputs and a lot of you may think it is easy for me to say this since I am not working and juggling home life and office life. But the addiction to being online all the time affects me too ! :)

May be though; sometimes nothing but cold turkey works - so get off the net / twitter / facebook etc for a couple of days - the earth will still revolve around the sun !!!! :))

And sadly may be nobody will miss you ! ;)

Thinking about thinking ... :)

I read in the book "The monk who sold his Ferrari" that for most people, 80% of the thoughts they think are same as that of the day before .... I was astounded ... somehow .... it seemed too fantastic a figure ... and then just the other day I came across this "People don't seem to realize that thinking is skilled work . We believe it is a natural process like breathing and eating."

Made me wonder ... how much do we think about the process of thinking itself ? How original or independent is our thinking ? And what, is original thinking ?

I traced a few random thoughts .... and felt that some of them were biased due to parents/elders/spouse's influence. A good deal of my thinking pattern has been molded in school - so read the impact of my teachers. Outlook on current affairs, technology trends or any other subject for that matter is shaped with the help of newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, ex-office colleagues, peers - and of course the influences mentioned before.

As for religion - although I have not inherited( ?? :-) ) the belief of my parents - I still have enough traces of their impressions. Especially where religion is concerned I speculate - just how much of our opinions are formed due to the result of reflective thinking and just how much is handed down and blindly absorbed ? Distinctly uncomfortable area but definitely something that augurs contemplation .... :)

And then - thoughts that come out of whatever experience I have gained in life are not unusual - mainly lessons learnt which so many in the world would have also learnt. :) I moved on to nostalgia. Is this in any way novel ? Simply because nobody else can view the past events through my eyes. I rejected this - I think while my frame of reference may be unique it is hardly original or independent.

Does my taste in music constitute any creativeness ? I did not think so .... I mean I listen to a good amount of music on the radio and unless I decide to listen to other songs in the album or movie ... how much can I consider my taste in music my own ? Can I not trace quite a few of the songs I like/hate to being assaulted by them day and night ? :) Some songs are remembered and enjoyed simply due to listening to them with friends ... rarely have I heard a snatch of
music completely on my own and liked/hated it instantly .. I will not say it has not happened ..... but ... I muse ... how much have I been predisposed me to like/dislike specific types of music simply due to confluence of influences ?

This understanding can be extrapolated to taste in movies, art, fashion sense, games, food , handling of finances etc.

In a seminar to illustrate just how different people were - a set of 6 people - were given 6 clues and they were all interpreted in myriad ways - and yet when I googled the interpretations - I found others with the same ideas or conclusions !! :)

So through out our lives we pick up so many prejudices we are not always aware of them ...... nor do we realize when and how we pick them up ....

This is not to say - we can live without influences/biases ... it just makes me think that it is amazing in this plethora of material that is bombarded at us - originality does crop up - like Gandhiji's non violence movement, Picasso's cubist drawings ( I honestly don't get them !!! :) ), music composers, Isaac Newton's theory of gravity , Albert Einstein's relativity , Moon walking ( ;) ), The determination of the Benzene ring ... to name very very few ......

But that does take me back to the basic question : Does original and independent thinking mean it has to be startlingly different from whatever is the prevalent culture at that moment ? Does it have to mean something unheard of before ? Or is the amalgamation of biases/prejudices/influences that give me my perspective on all that I think of - fresh ? That still makes me think I am predominantly a second-hander. ( to use Ayn Rand's terminology ! :) ).

Aargh .... Somehow this thought makes me rebel ... but then being rebellious is not original either ! :)

Colors of Friendship .....

I have been ruminating on this thought for sometime but it may never have made it to the blog but for the serendipity of receiving a perfect friendship message for this post!

Also, I think my sacchariferous post may be more easily tolerated now - post friendship day ! :)

There are numerous odes to lifelong friends and best friends which I need not repeat here and I have no grouse about them. I just wonder why do short-term friends get the short-shrift almost always ?
Reminiscing - There was this friend with whom I concocted schemes to steal unripe and sour mangoes and equally unripe and hard-as-stone guavas from the neighborhood grouch ! :) A roomie who I thought had the weirdest (read worst ! :) ) taste in music and who believed the same of me. And well ...... etc etc etc .... :)
Not all brief friendships were fun either. A painful lesson in self-reliance was learnt because my friend in school dumped me for another girl who was more exciting and glamorous ( sounds crazy right ? :) ) during the summer holidays and I lost my entire crowd of friends ( my school and home friends were the same ... since we all went to the same school ) in one fell swoop. I had to face the sneers and snigger's from being an outcast ! :) Definitely my first heartbreak ! :)

I am sure most would have had different friends at the various stages in life with myriad experiences [ / capers? :) ] shared with them. Some may still be there today ....

Unarguably if were I meet some of these transient friends - I might not ( ok ok most likely not ) remember their names, the meeting might be awkward ( only so much time can be spent reliving old escapades ! ;) ), might not recognize them and some might just ignore me. But this does not diminish what they meant to me at whatever point of life I met them.

I have spent several lifetimes in those moments with them. :) And learnt that it takes all kinds to make the world ! ;)

And that being the case - I think while long term and best friends do have their place .... butterflies, fireworks, shooting stars, aurora borealis and annoying bee stings :) - all make up the kaleidoscope of our lives.

So I would like to say , what my friend said ...... "Friends are like sketch pens. They color our lives. I may not be your favorite color, but you will need me somewhere to complete your picture." :)

Happy Friendship Day ..... Belatedly !!! :)))