The Focus of things.....!!

I think I will write today about focus. It is something that I don't possess so it becomes quite natural that I write about it. What is focus? And where should we have one or desire one?

There is a lot of talk about life having a focus and what not. I believe that I have not reached the stage where I can ponder over the focus of something as big as my life. Maybe I should better start with a moment or a thought or an action.

Lets start at something even more basic. What is focus? Focus is when actions, thoughts or events converge on a point. That point can be a goal or an object or thing. The idea here is that the focus of the actions, thoughts or events should always be clear before beginning for only then can we ensure that we will reduce redundancies and progress in the wrong direction. This piece began without a focus but is gathering some semblance of a focus now. Perhaps the focus of it from the very beginning was to find focus.

Can we say then that the focus validates the actions, thoughts or events that converge on it. A random burst of   actions, thoughts or events can never accomplish anything. One instance of them cancels out another. Any shift due to their effect is possibly as random as the origin of these instances. So basically they result only in chaos. On the other hand if effort is made in aligning these thoughts, actions or events or picking and choosing the right instances of thoughts, actions and events according to the given focus then there is a greater chance that a shift in circumstances can be made in the pre-desired direction. It is important here that a random shift maybe result in a desirable change but it will seldom be the one that was pre-desired.

Our life consists of mostly these unfocused actions, thoughts and events. We are happy one instant and sad the other because we surrender to these random shifts of circumstances caused by the random bursts of actions, thoughts and events. And we end up calling them chance and fate and find relief in the acceptance that we were helpless.

Lets do an experiment. What if we spend the next moment with a focus. The first focus will be to find a focus and the next focus will be to gather targets for focus and so on. But all these actions will have a common focus to find some semblance of focus. So herein we discover that these actions, thoughts and events have multiple focuses. We are already making headway. We just found out a particularly interesting fact about focus and we had not pre-desired to find it. Yet we found it and we find this fact desirable. Where can this lead?

What if we try and keep finding focus in our work? We keep seconding those actions, thoughts, events that are not important to our focus. I am sure we will soon find a number of different focuses. Some more important than the others. Some immediate and some which can be deferred. Will all this result into something?

Lets find out.

Balance is essential

I was out partying for a couple of days. It was more like party one day and then recover from it the other day. And I deserved it. I had been working non stop for I don't know how long and even though there was a decent amount of play involved, I was really looking forward to some long and rejuvenating bit of rest. That was what happened the last two days and now I feel most unbalanced and completely reluctant to go back to work. It is as if I have just been through two extremes and I don't feel comfortable going to either of them now. So what went wrong? I lost balance.

And not only did I over do one thing, I over did the reverse to make the problem worse. The right course of action was to slow down and not give it up completely. You can always modulate the speed in which you work but shutting down and then starting up again can really sap you! So here I am, unrested but gearing up to work from tomorrow on. Sigh!!!! 

Later...!!

I haven't started living...!!

That's what I have been told. That's what I have been proved.

I have yet to start living. And here is why:

Whatever we do in our early lives is something that is decided by other people. They decide how we should dress and how we should speak. They even decide our early choices of clothes we wear and the people we like. Why are we supposed to like someone. If we don't we are told we are naughty and that we must respect some people but why we must respect them is never explained. At some time during our teenage we start to fight back and ask questions. This starts the age of rebellion. We start fighting against the rules that our parents and our guardians made but what do we start following instead??? We follow what the world starts telling us. Jeans are cool!! Body piercing is cool!!! Having a girlfriend is cool!! It is never that we start liking these things. We are told that we will not fit in if we don't like doing these things. Rock music and bikes....these are the new rules. And the ones without it are outcasts. They are the naughty ones.....the blacklisted ones...coz they don't follow the rules....the rules of the world.

The same rules change as we grow older. This is where lines like - "Act your age" come from. What do they mean by "Act your age"? Where is it written how you should act in a particular age? and why should we believe that? They are after all rules...!!

Till the time we have rules and till the time we have deadlines...we are not really alive. Why? I will tel you why.

If a person is alive and can make no decision then is he really alive? He is not. There is no difference between his existing or not existing ....even to himself. The same man can have involuntary reflexes...they don't make him alive either. He does not decide to flinch when he is pricked. If he stays calm and does not react - that is a conscious decision and a conscious effort.

So we come to us in real life. What decisions do we make? To get up in the morning? and do our daily business? And then to go to office, work our asses off, scold our kids, tell them to behave, walk the streets, shout at the errant biker who came in your way when you were jumping the red-light....!!
But are these really decisions? No they are not. They are involuntary reactions just as the flinching is when we are pricked. They do not take any decision making power or even thought. They happen on there own. It is only a decision if it takes some deciding to do it. When some thought and some control and some action goes into it which goes against the contrary. That makes it a decision. When is the last time you made a decision?

So I  have been told that I am not yet alive. That I have not done anything worth calling a decision. That everything I have done is only an involuntary action that was the most logical according to the world that we live in. Nothing is really my own creation.

That's what I have been told. I don't like to believe it. But I can't refute it. Can you?

Later.

The meaning of things

When does something mean something? When does an action mean something? When does a person mean something?
An object, person or action means something when its absence means something. Only then does it mean something to actually exist.
Any existence or action or words that make no difference should not be there at all. Because all they do really is take up space.

So why do them? Why say them? Why wear them? Why buy them?

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Now lets say the same damn thing in the way that I usually write -

I was proof reading someone's application for graduate studies to US colleges when I came across a weak passage. I wanted to make it stronger. So I started adding lines. I always write in the same way I speak - in a round-about sing song explanatory way. I was mighty pleased with it and sent it out for a second round of proof reading. This is when I got shouted at. -

When will you grow up? When will you start making sense? When will you stop writing crap?
What is the meaning of this line here? Will it make a difference if I remove it? Will it take away some of the power from this writing piece if someone does that? What??......answer me? Then why did you write it?

There was a time when I let people walk all over me but that is definitely not the situation now, but this guy so gets to me all the time. Worse still.....he makes sense.

He removed the lines and dictated some other ones. Good ones. They were bad constructions and wrong grammatically but they made you sit up and take notice. They made a difference. They were good and my stylish round-about stuff was crap.

It proves one thing - No matter how stylish or correct or fashionable or proper something might be, if its absence does not make a difference, its presence means nothing.
And I have a feeling that the same goes for the things we do in real life as well. The same goes for relationships and our actions and our possessions and our feelings. If any of them did not make a difference by their absence......their presence means nothing.

My wish came true.....Damn!!!!

I haven't written for quite some time and it has been because someone whose opinion I value highly said that I was not writing anything of any value here. So I decided that I will put something in only when I have something that matters. But this post is really out of necessity because I need to send this shout out to the world.

My wish came true.....and I am so screwed because of that.

One crazy day I told myself that I wanted to fall in love. I told myself that it did not matter if there was no way it could come to anything or that I would end up heart broken. I just wanted to feel like it again. Coz I had shut myself up from that emotion for so long.

And then it happened.

It just happened. I am not even sure if it is really the real deal but there is something there and I don't know what it is. I am liking the way I am feeling though. There are butterflies in my stomach and I laugh at myself and at her. She is one weird little girl. And I have nothing common with her. But there is the hope of something. Maybe it truly is nothing that I have. Maybe we aren't really right for each other but there is the hope and really sometimes that alone is good enough.

So what do I feel for her. Honestly, I don't know. But I like the feeling of having a new friend. I know it makes no sense to expect anything from it but why not give in to those stupid feelings inside? Why not let go of reason for a while?

Tell you something? I already feel it going away from me. Even though I know the next time I speak to her I will feel the same way again. If nothing at all maybe it means that there is still hope for me. That I can still feel for someone again. That I can still fall in love. Maybe it is the universe's way of telling me that things are not as fixed as I kept thinking they were.

There is still hope. And there is still me. Lets see what happens....!!!

I really am crazy!!

Later