No Agenda Days

Has anyone ever experienced a phase in life when you are in a complete "wait" state; a point you are just waiting for others to take decisions that will shape your life? Yes life moulding decisions. Mind you its not that nothings in your hands, indeed you have given others the very power to play their cards by playing yours. But having played yours, you are in a wait state. For lack of a better phrase I decided to call them the "No agenda days".

From time to time we do wait for things, for exam results, for job interviews, visa decisions..., but when both your professional and your personal life goes into a "wait state", you are left just by yourself. I realised I do not have a creative hobby, powerful enough to carry me at such times. I love reading books, but in a distracted state, its difficult to afford a book the seriousness it deserves. Tomorrow I am planning to return to my guitar, though I wish I had started my lessons earlier and done at least six months instead of the three weeks I was able to.

But the wait may just be over, time when things would fall into or to pieces. Tommorrow may just be the day of reckoning...

P.S. Everytime life has denied me something I really wanted, it has pretty soon given me an equally good alternate. An alternate the world seeks while it keeps alluding the seekers landing in my lap while I never expected it am trying to recover from my loss. I already see the alternates on the horizon, could it be the omen again?

Main shayyar tau nahin (Poeticaly, Though a poet I am not :)

Though a poet I am not, my muse leads me on:) heres the first inspiration :)

I thought I loved freedom,

Freedom to be;

And yet I bowed down to the greatest addiction,

That true friendship tends to be;

Like a drug, companianship gives me a high,

Gives me reason to be;

You may never know what,

Your companianship has meant to me;

Chaos does lead to a stable equilibrium !

The urge to write has returned. The strange experiment that life flung me in, the way it transformed me, had to write about it. Taken all of two years to realise this, but now I know that Chaos does lead to a stronger equilibrium. The law holds true in life too, as much as it does in the scientific realm......

Will greater chaos lead to a stable equilibrium?

When things go wrong they have a habit of going haywire. Or maybe across the multi faceted chaos in ones life, there is one binding force, one unifying idea, one philosophy, one person that keeps things together. When that idea loses its meaning, the person seizes to exist, the unifying cement is gone. Total chaos ensues. Seemingly settled demons start showing their head.

The little science that I have studied tells me that chaos is natural, a necessary pre-cursor for any equilibrium. The greater the chaos, the more stable equilibrium it will lead to (whenever that happens). It just dawned on me that the same principle works in life too. The more distressed you are, the more focused you probably will be when you have weathered the storm. And chaos itself holds great energy. The urge to reach equilibrium is so strong, if only somehow one can manage to channel that energy into any direction, a lot can be achieved. Trouble is to determine what you really want. Trouble is to determine what you ultimately want out of life (apart from transitory successes). The moment you are sure what you want, it will result in the channeling of that enormous energy towards the desired goal and this release will result in peace. Like all hypothesis, empirical evidence will come in a while, when I have experienced the release myself. Though beyond personal life, history of nations hold ample examples. the longer and deadlier a conflict, the more lasting the peace that ensues, whether it be the 30 year old European war or world war II. But I guess any student of history will rip the use of this evidence apart, citing a million other more relevant causes. Guess we will wait for empirical confirmation to see if it works in human life:)

Reason finally prevails :)

As was probably obvious I was going through a rough patch. The predicament lasted for a while, but I am finally over it :)

It was tough while I was going through it, couldn't get the damn thing outta my mind for even a second for even like 10 days. It was a dilemma whether to share it with friends and lighten the load I was carrying, or be a "man" and fare through my troubles on my own. Most people around me didn't have any idea of what I was going through, which I think helped cause they behaved normally. Even blogging helped a bit.

For all the trouble I went through, there were some positives to come out of it too. For two days when I was really low, I wasn’t in the best of moods. The people who work under my supervision regularly miss deadlines, but realizing I was in a bad mood we made really good progress. Perhaps I should try being stern more often :P. I lost appetite and lost like a kilo and a half in a single week :). Then I returned to blogging after a long time, cause didn't have anything better to do, when I would regularly wake up before the alarm clock rang (can you believe that :D). And I have also started writing this article that I had been planning for a long time. Hopefully if I wake up early again tomorrow, will try to completely knock it down.

I did share my troubles with a friend, which helped. In the end just about an hour ago when I was returning home from work, I was like enough is enough. One can't just keep mourning all his life. Shit happens and one's gotta move on. Now I am determined not to slip into that pit of mourning ever again, at least not over the recent event :D

Let reason prevail

I know my recent posts have been a bit on the gloomy side but I guess once I take this break, a trip to India to attend this conflict transformation workshop in Delhi, hopefully followed by a week in Mumbai with friends, I should hopefully get better.

As I mentioned in my comment to Shobha to an earlier post, the next stage in a skeptics struggle with personal loss is the onset of these constant transitions from a state of self control when reason reins supreme to a state of weakness when emotions get the better of him. When ones in control, one feels its not difficult, sure I can overcome it in time. And yet there are moments of weakness when you grieve over your loss, even if you know theres almost nothing you can do to undo it. You wonder if this weaker side is really you.

The biggest dilemma of course is whether to share it and lighten your burden. And you are caught between whether to stay resolute and fight it out yourself, or share it with your friends and lighten yourself. Don't know if its chauvinism, an eastern up-bringing or just your nature that keeps you from sharing it with friends, who are already mad at you for not letting them know whats troubling you. And you argue with yourself, whether your friends have a right to know cause they feel alienated cause they have been sharing all their ups and downs in life with you and you refuse to spit your troubles out.

Theres this other funny aspect to the situation too. You think maybe by keeping it all to yourself, ppl around you not realizing what you are going through, just keeps them normal instead of unusually sympathetic. You hope that this normal behavior will perhaps be better to get back and be yourself.

Funny state and all one can do is hope for reason to prevail soon to get you back to normal :)

And how well do you know yourself?

There is always an assumption that an individual knows himself best. It seems such an inherent truth that the thought never even consciously enters one’s mind. And yet there are times when unexpected circumstances surprise you and you wonder at yourself, have I always been like this?

Take for instance blogging at 7:00 in the morning. As it is waking up just in time to be at work by 9 is a struggle. Keep on snoozing the 7:30 alarm clock till I know that if I don’t wake up now, there is no way in the world I would be at work on time ( not really required cause I am usually the first ones to arrive and amongst the last to leave in my department, but I like that kind of discipline). And here I am bathed, dressed completely ready at 7:00 waiting for a saner hour to return to work. And just as I am writing this I realize maybe that’s cause I want work to distract me of the other thoughts going on in my mind, thoughts I am struggling to get out of my system.

I was always under the illusion that reason would see me through all circumstances and yet now I realize that there are times when emotions do get the better of me. Even when I have reason sound enough to accept what has happened, emotions refuse to give in and accept it for good. And I am left wondering, will reason always be my liberator? I still haven’t lost faith in reason (having little else that I truly believe in), but am waiting for the time when reason will completely prevail and get the better of my emotions and liberate me.