Swimming through life

Maybe its because I learnt Swimming much later in life that I somehow go back to the swimming analogy time and again. Coz I so strikingly remember everything about the process of learning through it.

I started swimming when I was about 24 as that's when I really got to spend time after work hours. It was beautiful to see people swimming but the thought of swimming intimidated me crazy. Over the course of a month, I went on from pretty much not being able to float in water without support, to breast stroking across the pool diagonally (and doing a reasonable freestyle and dive). And I also discovered that I had just learnt to Learn, anew.

So whenever I approach learning I have a swimming analogy going on in my head. It translates as follows.

1. Like swimming, its important to get knee-deep into your topic of choice. Things will always look intimidating if you’re standing at the edge of a pool.

2. Once in it recognize that, whenever learning something new, our brain fights with the new idea left, right, center. Its a good thing, it tries to cope up hard until it finds the thing that works perfectly for the challenge.

3. Expect to be really tired during the initial days of Learning. You can and will be extremely tired either physically and / or mentally depending on the task at hand. In swimming there have been instances where I’ve had to swim with cramps in my legs from the middle of the pool only using the hands as the body over-engaged in the wrong muscles.

4. Once a new thing is learnt one can perform it with minimal exhaustion as the body + mind duo optimize their settings. Even swimming diagonally in the pool about 35-40 laps didn’t feel much like a workout. Expect the same ease to be at work once through this phase.

5. Last but not the least. Swimming can become boring after a while, don’t leave it yet. Your mind needs to be stimulated with the next achievable challenge to keep it busy. Keep learning incrementally, new advances, refining your existing process, new styles, etc.

Well, I had to leave swimming shortly after a year as I went further for studies, but I keep swimming through the large unpredictable pool of life, reminding myself of the lessons I learnt when I learnt swimming.

Consume to Create

I wrote these lines somewhere in my journals:

Its so important to consume what one desires to create. Books come from other books, films come from other films and music comes from other music. One needs to be a good consumer or connoisseur of these things and the kind of books, films, movies or music you like will be your guide to what you would love to create. This is a simple but very important rule to life.

Expanding on it I also feel that at times one can’t help but create what they consume. So one also has to be quite careful about mentally consuming junk the same way as physically consuming something nasty (I’ve read this idea somewhere but can’t recollect where). If one eats junk food they will have problems with their body and if one consumes junk content the same with the mind.

For us creators though sometimes we are bound by the quality of content that we are exposed to. Eg: Animation in India is not a big scene and that can severely restrict the things one consumes from their peers. When faced with this we need to earnestly find things that we relate deeply with, be it writings or films or art, no matter how hard we have to look for them. Love it, collect it, consume it and you might end up creating things you love too.

Some notes on journaling

I’ve been journaling daily, right from the first day of 2021 and going strong now 8 months down. I recently came across a video on daily journaling by Matt D’Avella and found it to be a really shallow and misleading exercise in guiding someone towards the benefits of journaling and I journaled some ideas I thought were important to my habits.

I tend to journal daily keeping a few learnings in mind that I’ve understood from reading ‘The Artist’s Way’ by Julia Cameron, excerpts of ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen and from Stephen King’s phenomenal ‘On Writing’

The idea I borrow from GTD is to get everything that is on your mind out there on paper. This clears the mind for better things. Our mind is not a storehouse it is made to process data. So its not a hard disk, its bad at being one, its a processor with some RAM. Given that so much happens in everyday life, family and work and ambitions and thoughts, on TV series, on other people, on the news, on a million other things. The mind is storing that. And then if and when we sit to meditate we wonder why we are feeling so distracted. Our processor doesnt know the priorities of what to process first and what later. Writing on the journal daily, doesn’t solve entirely this problem, nothing can, but it gives tangibility to thoughts and feelings and constructs them in neat packets called words on a page. There is a certain calming order to doing this and journaling provides that. It can also help sort from whats important and whats not and prioritize your tasks accordingly.

The Artist’s way part that I think of is only limited to doing the morning pages first thing in the morning. It helps coz if theres something still in your head after your brain has consolidated it in your sleep, it might just be better to get it out than let it be in. Its like taking a morning dump and sure enough many people call it that. For me, its the equivalent to not taking a good dump in the morning and carrying on with my day with varied levels of uneasiness in the brain throughout. Bonus is when you have very little to write but you still force yourself to every morning, maybe starting with auto-writing and then things just churn out from air bringing you stories, clarity on previous thoughts, thoughts you’ve long ignored but need to address etc. These I’ve gathered are invaluable.

The King part is where its absolutely necessary for me, atleast it was in the initial days and still is to a large extent that no one else is in the room. Do it while others are sleeping, do it in a place where you have solitude. You are talking to yourself on the page, you are sharing some really deep secrets that you can share only with this trusted friend at times. Even if no one is looking, psychologically our sub-conscious presumes its content written for public when people are around in the room. You connect deeply with yourself, enter your own world and harmonize with yourself much better if you write alone. Don’t let reality flow into this world as much as you can.