In-flight announcements

Most of us would have taken a commercial flight at least a few times and heard their in-flight safety announcements (or heard other similar announcements in life- at a traffic signal, railway station, etc)

Now if you remember your first few times taking a flight, you were very attentive to these announcements. You understood what you needed to know- where to look for an exit in an emergency or where the oxygen masks will fly out from and what to do with them. But as time passed, you started to pay barely any attention to what the flight attendants were saying during their safety demo.

I will not comment on whether this practice is safe or not. I borrow this analogy to make a different case. I want to suggest we begin to give the same kind of low attention we give to subsequent in-flight announcements to the incessant chatter in our minds. Let it make noise in the background. Do not feed it any more of your limited attention. Use it to go through your mental checklist to make sure you’re on top of things but don’t make it a dialogue. Most of the brain’s uncontrollable chatter is done in an effort to keep you protected from every imaginable possible harm. But you don’t need that kind of protection in the sedentary life that we live today.

And therefore you can safely stop paying as much attention to your ‘in-mind announcements’ as you are currently giving and allow yourself to flow a little.

PS: This is the 200th musing that I am sending out- it seems like a big number when I think that I had started this on a whim one December day in 2014. Some of you have been with me from the beginning while most of you joined at different points along the way- today I would like to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of you. I have always said that I write these musings for myself; in that, they are uninfluenced by what I think people may want to hear. However, I would be lying if I said it didn’t mean anything to me that so many of you were reading them and writing back creating a place where we can exchange ideas. Knowing that You are on the other end reading something that I have written and responding to it in your own unique way is what gives my writing purpose. And for that, I deeply thank each of you :)