Athletics of mental advancement

It is a complicated line of thought to write about. The growth chart of an individual is definitely subjective. But the goal of maturity must remain in everyone’s minds. Or at least I hope that it hasn’t lost its meaning in this day and age when randomness is cool. Losing entropy has always been a physical reality and will always be, but the rate of randomness seems to be exponential in social culture these days, and that too at a rate that it becoming increasingly difficult to process for a normal person.

If this introduction seemed exceedingly difficult or “random”, welcome to the new world, where things are happening in the world and people are living, but nobody really knows what, why, how and when of it, and neither do they realize where it is leading us as a world community, as a society or even as an individual. This year has definitely been crazy, no doubt. But did the craziness begin only now? I don’t think so. This form of off-the-charts conduct in the society has been in the development for years now and at the juncture of a boom, a pandemic has sent the world for a spin in a way that has made everyone forget what their baseline is in reality. In order to test that, simply ask yourself a question – “What exactly are you trying to achieve by doing the activity that you think is productive for you, and where will it take you in the future?” If you can answer that, then great going and I hope you continue on the quest of the path of your life you have chosen for you. If not, then is time to think about it. This question does not intend to question whether you have chosen the path of your life. It questions whether you have awareness of the consequences of your decisions.

All decisions have consequences, which can be good or bad. But the two important things are confidence of decisions and ownership of consequences. Unfortunately, people confuse the two and end up with ownership of decisions and confidence of consequences. Allow me to explain the difference. When you have confidence in your decisions, you are already motivated to achieve your goal, but owning your decisions will only put you in self doubt if things don’t go as planned. Similarly, when you have ownership of consequences, you have already started out with the belief that you will bear whatever consequences of your decision are and be mentally prepared, but confidence in your consequences will again put you in self doubt if things don’t go as planned because you being so confident in the consequences of your decisions, did not consider the flip scenario. Hence, a crucial part of growing up is to stop cursing disappointments in your life. They are a part of the consequences that got you where you are in life right now, based on your own decisions.

I am not an authority on growth, and nobody can be one. But as I am moving on the ahead path of it, the discrepancies I see in other people’s definition of growth becomes more and more glaringly visible. My explanation to this is as simple as the fact that a person having even say, double PhDs in phycological sciences can’t survive in adverse personal crisis unless that person has grown from the inside. Growth matters to conduct yourself at every point of time in life. It is important to note here that being aged or elder does not necessarily imply a grown up person, which you would recognize that I reiterate in several of my articles if you have followed them. A ninety year old can be far more stunted in personal growth than a ten year old, only because the ten year old opened their mind to learning and bowed to knowledge, but the ninety year old stopped the learning curve once they were adults. So, being an adult is only a physical truth and not the intellectual reality. I say this because as I move ahead on my path of growth, I see adamancy in people to not recognize any valuable advice given by youngsters because elders still confuse age with knowledge.

Adamancy aside, you should accept that you have stunted your own growth when a youngster ends up teaching you the right logic.

This is when you open yourself to the existence of knowledge beyond yourself which you aim to learn. It is never too late to begin the growth curve. A simple example will explain the connection between randomness and growth. If you remember as a child, or if you have observed a child, say you were crossing a road while holding an elder’s hand. They ask you to hurry, but as a child, your mind doesn’t ask you to run. You hop and run, then you run but also hop. Why does a child do that? It is only because a child’s brain is instinctively trying to figure out what to do in order to hurry because it was told to hurry and not run, and is trying out random acts to see which is the fastest way. But when you become adults, you have figured it out already that in order to hurry on the street, you got to run. The same logic extends to every other aspect of growth. You are trying out random activities because you are still trying to find growth in your life. Randomness will open new horizons in the ocean of life for you, but will never give you the stability to come out and learn what is required to be learnt.

Another simple example demonstrates the difference between randomness and order. You may sleep in the kitchen, eat in the bedroom, study in the loo and wash your face in the sink. Exciting, but does that serve any purpose at all? An order is established in the house so that you can carry out these basic survival tasks as a schedule so that you can free your mind to carry out other intellectual tasks. But randomness has busied everyone’s minds to only carry out basics and be happy that you survived, thereby closing yourself to your own growth curve. Unfortunately, coolness is not flaunting the breaking of order. You survive, but you have failed to live. Hence it is actually important to build schedule in life, and it wasn’t just the “nagging” of your parents.

On the other hand, if you are happy just surviving, I suppose you lose the right to complain about discomfort only because you are unwilling to leave your comfort zone. I think the takeaway here is to realize that you are part of this world; the world is not part of your life. Point to ponder?

Stay inspired! Stay detoxified! Stay mystified! Stay Priya-fied!