Bend in the Curve
As one of the most adored fictional character once said,
“ The main part of acting is reacting and that does not just mean acting again.”.
If you dont know who said this, I think this post won’t really touch you in any way. If you connected exactly to the point in time in the episode in the series and may be to some moment in your own life, then I think you might be able to connect with sentiments touched upon in this post. It’s a mindless joke, really, the dialogue mentioned above, but the yin and yang of it is truly the essence of life.
Currently, in a lockdown world, we are working in an unstructured environment where some tasks are easier to accomplish while others take unnaturally longer than usual due to factors not under our control. In a normal setting, we keep our work setting distinguished from our personal setting. Consider whatever task you are currently working on in a work setting and try to correlate to a task in a personal setting that balances the stress of the task in a work setting. To simplify, the hobby to your work, the rest to your workout, the sitting to your standing. May be that was not that much of a simplification. Every action needs to be balanced by equal and opposite action. If we understand that as an important aspect of our physical being, it is exponentially important to value the same concept in our mental space. A thinking mind is always a sign of a healthy mind. Progressively, a always thinking mind is seldom a sign of good health. We have settled into a trend where we obsess about what we put into our body and find curious and diverse ways to control our habits. We need to consider a similar approach and develop a mainstream healthy trend about what our mind consumes.
We are running a race on a belt looping through a machine, taking us no where yet keeping us exhausted, providing an illusion that the next big thing is just round the corner. Recently though, as we are granted a gift of time, which fair to say none of us really know how to spend in an effective way, when granted in excess. It’s not our fault, ever since we managed to make sense of the world, we have been told to be ahead of an imaginary curve, to lead and to work towards having that extra worth, that X-factor which can set us apart from the crowd. We always pushed ourselves to do that much more, spend that much more time in improving ourselves and skillsets so that we can be ahead of our next competition, keeping the belt looping on and on and machine running at full speed. Suddenly for the first time in our lives we are told to slow down, take an account of our actions and really concentrate on our own lives away from the machine. Essentially being told to flatten the curve, stay still, be at once with the crowd, put on a mask so nothing can set you apart from the crowd. When the initial confusion settles down, this unexpected fork in our lifestyle bring a sense of panic and uncertainty to our mindset. We are a generation who are programmed to live in a way , with certain tools, not known if the tools handed to us are the right ones or not , and if the programming is indeed the right way of life. When everything we have known our entire life gets sufficed with a question mark, we have to ask ourselves,
“Am I balanced and buckled up to handle such a major shift in momentum?”
The answer may not be that simple for some, but if we manage to find actions to equally balance this shift in momentum, something to hold onto, we might make through this curving bend in the road smoothly. Just keep in mind —
“Reacting does not mean acting again!”
So on that note,
What is balancing your equation of life?
