Some friends from solitude

As I write this, somewhere, a cloud is being born, as the sun kisses the oceans. It will go through infancy and trials and tribulations all through until it condenses and makes its way back into the soil creating life wherever it flows.

Meanwhile, a seed carried away from its parent by an unforeseen circumstance made its way to a far-off land. It thrives in the company of new friends, much to take and much to give than its thought could have ever anticipated. A tree blooms to reach the sky.

The untouched river flows and ebbs with the seasons. Accepting the season’s abundance as its gifts, accepting its lacks too as its gifts. It inhales and exhales time. Flows and ebbs. Plays and rests.

The wind reaches out to everyone, the primordial and the modern, the colossal and the tiny, in a bid to make friends. All the while being itself. It crushes some and is called wrath, it dances with others is called grace. Still the wind all along it is, not a want to become anything else.

LIVING on your toes

Being ’on one’s toes’ could mean to be alert or ready for any eventuality but in a way also warns us against the dangers of being firmly rooted in the ground.

One of the highest virtues of being human is being able to adapt to the times and the situations. But at times our memories and our conditioning binds us into an inflexible identity. More we relate to this identity lesser we can adapt and in turn we become a slave to our identity, a lesser human.

He not busy being born is busy dying - Bob Dylan (Its alright ma)

Our adaptability is the thing that keeps us alive to ourselves and to the world around us.

Time sculpts everything with its tools, our minds and our bodies and everything around us. How we take each mark on us and how we align ourselves to it and attune is the thrust of our life.

Life doesn't run a clear course It flows through from within It's supposed to take you places And leave markings on your skin And those marks are just a sign of something true You witnessed in your time of something new Like the start of something fine Like morning dew - Poets of the Fall (Love will come to you)

Bloatwares in the mind

Spend more time searching for better information sources. A body filled with junk food struggles to move well. A mind filled with junk thoughts struggles to think well. - James Clear

We were just talking yesterday about how our current age is one of the most taxing on our mental health. Not only do we have the sedentary lifestyle introduced heavily in our earlier generation but while we are sedentary, like a captive audience, our minds are now shoved with a tidal wave of information that our minds find too hard to wade through. As a result we fail to prioritize what is important to us and fail to allocate our limited resources for our important tasks. The FOMO culture has marketed the huge amount of information, most of which is junk, to be seen as something precious or even life changing. There are next to no tools to curate this information into a qualitative stream to which one can just stick to and have a heads up on their areas of interest without being wrapped into an ad.

There are many similarities of our mind in this age to a computer infected with bloatware. Every task that we set out to do, maybe opening a document to read would have millions of processes running in the background to tax the computing and not only that but would also serve out some ads as pop ups. Getting a good heavy chunk of task done at that rate would be impossible. I as an animator would probably animate only 1/10th of what I’m capable of in this scenario, same would go for any other profession. Not only that I would get tremendously tired with the whole ordeal.

Imagine now if that bloatware had circumvented the computer and reached our brains directly. Our minds reach out to do a task and because of the junk it has consumed, it cannot help but process fragments of unrelated information while doing it. Because of the incessant advertisement (of a product or ideology), every shortcoming feels like its triggering a craving to buy into. We are slowed down tremendously, sometimes we don’t even reach our tasks and when we do, we are too tired to perform the task. If we somehow do manage to wade through it all, we are dead tired having achieved very little.

But maybe the similarities don’t end there. What would we do if there was bloatware on our computer or if our computer was slow?

A Computer - Mind equivalent would look something like this:

1- Install an antivirus to get rid off the malware - Get rid of the tools that are the source of junk information in your head. Unfollow people on soc.media, limit your interactions with toxic people, don’t go down the rabbit hole of wikipedia, etc. Each person has a different infection that is getting out of hand in their brains, be aware of it and address it.

2- Defrag the hard disk - Process necessary information (of which there are bound to be a lot as well). Exteriorize them in notes, think through them enough to keep or discard and organize them where they will be found when needed.

3- Check your startup tasks - What are the habits that you’ve internalized that lead you down the polluted lanes of information? Remove them from the start of your day until you are done with your important tasks. Start the day afresh with hand picked, highly curated tasks that will keep your mind away from anything that is not priority.

Unlike a computer there is no way to end a task once its started in your brain, so be aware of what tasks you want to run, as they will keep running in the background for a long time.