The not-so-good moments
Imagine yourself caught up in the midst of one of your daily work — studying, dining, cleaning your room, or even spending the same fixed set of minutes on your mobile phone. You know for a fact that there’s something other than what you’re physically involved in — the abstract tug-of-war between your mind and that something which isn’t quite attainable at the moment.
You’re intermittently throttling your brain over a thing the occurrence possibility of which is next to impossible. Every time you try to immerse yourself into the actual physical activity, the intrusive thoughts come in, assume authority and take over. Consequently, you end up skimping on the quality of the task. Your cognitive pathways become so jammed and constricted that you almost want to run away from this all at once.
Why shouldn’t this happen when you’re doing permutations and combinations, working out all the tons of potential outcomes of what you’re so desperately yearning for? Notwithstanding its limitations, your brain is still just one brain and not a multi-core processor! You need to learn to time the influx of such thoughts, which otherwise would whirl you away like a hurricane uprooting a firmly anchored tree. You need to accept and conform to what’s reality, setting aside what’s fantasy. It’s all about purging your mind of things that matter the least to you.
Another nasty aspect of falling prey to such a disease is the outright shutdown of your brain’s attention systems. Your hands might be writing, or say dishwashing at the moment, but they’re definitely not in sync with your mind. And this feels so overwhelming that you end up draining your energy in a matter of just a few moments. It’s more like a force trying to push on a block across a bumpy rough track, which obviously hardly does any work. Therefore, It wouldn’t be wrong to call it a mental friction of sorts. And this friction doesn’t just transform your good, docile brain into one that’s stubborn, but also paves the way for an even bigger calamity — the loss of Peace of mind. The whole world craves for the dollars and euros, while the only antidote that exists is the peace of mind. You can’t make a lion crave white truffle risotto, not because it isn’t tasty — in which case it also holds the record for being the most luxurious vegetarian dish — but because the lion has no appetite for it.
Mohammad Aazim Kaboo, UG Student at NIT, Kashmir
