Pauses and lulls : How they ail us
History be it of nations, cities or individuals is always a tricky area. We bemoan the loss of a better time if the history was filled with joy which it mostly is, in hindsight.
As individuals, we capture our history in various and stark ways especially with the advent of social media. Each high point of life is captured in filter tampered detail, in hashtag ruined tweets or in likes peppered Facebook posts. This is a huge disservice that we do to ourselves. Now I am not going to rant about how the impeccable social lives of others build in us a deepening sense of insecurity and possibly depression. That is enough discourse on the issue across multiple posts/articles/videos.
What I am going to talk about is how chronicling our own history is a exercise filled with personal peril. The society we live in forces us however to just that, make a CV that captures all your success and make sure it reads like a continuous stream of success with no gaps, no pauses, or post daily on the range of social media sites about that rad party or that corporate lunch or that 10KM run.
However human life is long and full of drama. The average man can easily expect to live till 70 discounting any life threatening diseases or unforeseen danger. Discounting the fist 24 years when parents and the education system make sure we have enough to fill our lives with, that still leaves us with 46 long years. That is just shy of about 400000 hours of life. Also just shy of 24 Mn minutes of life.
So why am I doing all this maths? Is this a lesson of how to utilize each moment of time to distill the proverbial juice out of each second? No. The idea I propose is much to the contrary. Once we are out of school and into jobs, life becomes more tricky especially for the millennials. Jobs these days are unpredictable both in their rhythms and duration. The overarching agenda is to fit each moment with value adding work. Then there are relationships to take care of, about how many special moments you can pack into a day. For a while the whole formula start to fall in place like clockwork. But there are always the twin devils of pauses and lulls lurking in the inevitable shadows of life.
People get laid off from jobs or find them upstaged by peers or pushed into corporate Siberia because of company circumstances or politics. The limelight is suddenly off you as other actors take over and you lurk in the shadows of the curtains.
Love loses its sheen over time and the special moments grow further apart. The late night messaging dwindles between lovers, gone are the long unending walks, the lovely dinners.
It is then that the mind, almost as if on a immunity mechanism to fight the sudden loss, starts to enter the deep crevices where history is hidden. It pulls out sweet memories or brilliant successes. As long as this is played out in our minds with the help of selective recollection it is not tipped over but the mind now goes to social media to dig out those memories in vivid detail. For hours you can scroll through those late night chats, those great photos and videos. It is a beautiful prison that our mind builds shielding itself from the vagaries that the current times brings with it. Our minds have lost their capacity to ride out pauses and lulls with grace. The mind needs the constant surge of adrenaline to keep going. The situation like a self fulfilling prophecy deteriorates further as the prison of the past does not allow you to grab the key to the future that lies in the prison itself. We are truly then the prisoners of our own device.
The inertia our thoughts slip into is difficult to shrug off leading us to find the next job too soon or to end the relationship too prematurely. Pick up any millennial’s CV and you will find that they have switched jobs or how they their relationship status changes so often. It is a malady nobody addresses as every one is building their castle of instant gratification. Good old wise mentors with hardened life stories or brilliant life lessons are more harder to come by and we build in the tendency to not learn from our parents, foregoing their wisdom without a second thought.
Now it is one thing to point out a flaw in the human psyche and another to suggest how to tackle it. I will make a humble attempt to give the latter a shot.
- ) Realize the impermanence of events and experiences but honor their beauty
2. ) Always stockpile what you wish you could do and do this while you are busy. We always tend to forget to plan for the inevitable downtime. Keep an eye on that long lost hobby, that long pending skill you wanted always have, that musical instrument you wanted to learn. make a list and put it on your wall. If you don’t tick of 1 over a year, you are not filling up your free time
3.) Take the risk to explore your relationship more deeply, take a holiday to a new city, try a new restaurant
4.) Take a step back to pursue that long standing goal of improved physical health
5.) Always and always keep reading. It enriches the mind and breaks the history of prison with new thoughts.
Our own thoughts are the most powerful manipulators we will ever encounter and taming the twin beats of pauses and lulls is a key skill to learn.