Where & When?
Cubbon Park, Bengaluru,2009.
It’s been a day since I posted a picture with two lines on peace. But for almost 24 hours I have been looking for a right opening line for this article.Now I am at this place where I am surrounded by people from all walks of life and I hear a multitude of conversations.
One conversation in particular has motivated me to start and finish this article I was planning to post.
There are so many people in the world today who are so distressed about life/career/relationships/financial crises. I often wish there is a magic wand to help them find peace. Well! I know it is foolish to want a magic wand for peace.
Life has taught me this about peace:
Comparison is the worst enemy for any human’s mental peace
Success is relative
And discussing and debating about ‘people’ is the lowest part of a person’s intellectual life.
(Intellectual life in my dictionary means the part of your life when you engage your intellect to work )
As a trained health care professional, I am particularly surprised when people ‘pay’ to start looking for peace.
Yeah! I know you are starting to get a list of organisations and companies that make money on selling common sense to people.🙂 I won’t list them.Like always, the same rule of anonymity I follow.No names please.
It is human to err and it is absolutely human to keep making errors till you correct yourself one fine day.
What results in loss of peace at any stage of adult human life is when you begin the analysis of those errors.According to me,a majority of people who never care to analyse the errors in their life are the ones who are living mediocre. It is because I see that they affect other people’s lives with their errors.It is not wrong to analyse an error. But what variables you choose to include in that analysis will be the ultimate guide for your peace.
The worst picks for analysis of an error would be :
Discussion of people involved in the error
The failure that surrounds the error
(Errors will not always end in failures!)
Rather the right variables to pick would be:
What were your investments?
Was the process well planned?
Were you able to learn from the results that you are currently holding in your hand?
I know in India, this is rarely taught. Most of the times, ‘success’ is equated to ‘victory'( again defined as superiority over your competitors). That is where all the progressive downward spiral in being peaceful starts.
Most of them who know me know that
I am not super wealthy(read money wealthy!)
I don’t wear brands for clothing and accessories
I don’t hang out and eat in expensive restaurants
They still know that
I am courageous in making my decisions
I rarely regret my life
I do often complain but very soon figure out a solution around my problems
I persist in the face of failure despite being teary and burnt out.
According to what life has taught me, if you can be all the above three lines, then you know how to find peace among chaos everyday.
What would it be if you answer all the choices in MCQs of an examination and expect to score full marks?
Anyone would call you a fool. Paying for Peace is very similar to that.
Trying to find peace is all about
Identifying and Isolating the things that disrupt your everyday life. When these two steps become regular variables in your equation to balance life, you will stop trying to find peace🙂 for you are already in peace with yourself.
That’s when you will tell someone,
Do I think this is going to be of use?
Yes. I know there will be atleast a 50 people I know who will benefit out of what I write here.
Last month, when my computer conked I definitely did get upset because all those people whose wonderful smiling images I captured , would have to wait for don’t know how many days for me to publish their images here. Yes, I do have a smart phone which kept me in loop with work emails and messages from family and friends. But I took it as a wonderful opportunity to explore other creative things like crochet, nail art, easter egg painting, handmade bookmarks, greeting cards, thank you notes and working with natural dyes. The list is endless. Apart from work, books got lot of my attention too
When I was a kid, scrap meant useless stuff. Now a days scrap is so important that you could skip your dinner to go read, analyse and scrap back on time.So much for scrap huh!
Walls were meant to protect and surround buildings. Now a days it’s all about, block, clock, filter, highlight and hide.
Tweets were cute chirping of birds and no 140 letters of a language revolving around one person’s temper and tantrums.
If I start quoting examples of all those posts I have seen on my social networking, wordpress would need new servers. But one is particularly worth mentioning.
I was the lucky kid who lived in the nineties something kind of posts did rounds for quite a few days. The irony was that people shared, commented, debated over these posts without almost even understanding what was being said there.
Well I don’t think asking someone to read what they share is a crime these days!
Well, since I am no marriage counselor or family problems related therapist or a psychologist, I have a few requests to make to the people who think they need help.
Unless you are absolutely alone in this world which is a 99.99% impossibility,
Keep your electronic gadgets away.
Hike a hill( will tell you how bad your heart and lungs have got after all the years of networking)
Look at alternative ways to use your time.
Spend time with family(solves half of the disturbances in your life which make you psuedo network so much that you are lost in the network totally).
Depend less on manual labour at home [while (if) you are jabbing away opinions and debates online].
Make a patch of organic kitchen garden in your home. It’s absolutely therapeutic.
Take a membership in a local library. Don’t borrow books to home. Make it a point to sit and read at the library itself.
Look around yourself and clean the mess in your life and room with physical and mental means at all costs.
Have wounded relations and communications around you? Give them ‘you’. Not your social networking/e-mails or messages with weird sounding back ground music.
Having done all that perfectly if you still feel you are addicted, you know whom to scribble to or please feel free to go and seek medical help because it is not perfect to be perfectly addicted to something which is absolutely materialistic and virtual at the same time.
If you feel better keeping ‘networking’ out of your everyday life for a major part, then bingo!