mind – minutes of my heart

Freedom of thoughts- your thoughts are your assets. Even the private ones. In fact it is our completely private and secret thoughts that keep us sane. Appropriate behaviour, subscription to certain morals in public for the society, appropriate language etc. are often argued to be nothing more than methods of controlling people in a manner that is soft and subtle but has far reaching consequences in actual social life.

One of the most common conundrums: How many times do you feel like you shouldn’t say something humorous because it may be grossly misunderstood to an extreme?

There’s no hard and fast rule to that. You could say something reckless and not in tune with modern social sensibilities- (said with the purest of intents)- and then face rebuke but as long as your own head space is fortified there’s a high chance your mental health won’t be affected.

How do you take responsibility though? What you say is an extension of yourself, and that “image” of yours can be crafted by you and then becomes open to the public to be scrutinised and painted upon. Responsible behaviour is part self-awareness and part knowledge of sensibilities. Both these fronts will never be a 100% correct for any individual.

Responsible behaviour would involve an adherence to not inflicting on others what you would never want inflicted upon yourself. Personal sensibilities vary with time and thus self-awareness kicks in. What you said in the past is not necessarily a true reflection of your present. But you don’t have to “delete” those expressions. Time and context.

So I revert back to the privacy of thoughts. To maintain your peace you may project an image but in the privacy of your thoughts you may choose to live completely contrary to what you said. And that is allowed. Your private thoughts aren’t policed yet and you should use them to their maximum potential for mental comfort, peace and learning.

This is a short summary of my thoughts on the matter. There are more facets involved to thoughts and thinking. We shall explore them slowly as we go along.

-Tanmay

Sometimes I don’t understand the origin of the pain that seeps into my poems. The knowledge that there have been terrible experiences is not enough to explain why there is pain still. Why is there hurt hidden beneath, or is it in the air around me?

I attribute it to a subconscious that is still screaming. It is still reeling from the jolts that erupted years ago. The subconscious is screaming because it has no one to talk to- but only me to talk through. Manifesting its active pain into my passive actions. The silence that I prefer hides the screams of the void within.

The pain is too romantic to go away. It’ll cling for as long as it can. It’s a struggle to get it off and whether you like it or not there’s going to be a lot of self correction and learning then unlearning and learning again. But it’s a harder struggle per se, so I resorted to numbing myself, and making myself immune to the world, keeping my pain guarded closely in my arms, feeding its ego and nurturing it further. Till life itself became unsustainable and I was on the brink of losing a lot of what wasn’t mine to lose. I had to take charge of myself through the loneliness and the tough nights and work on my mind.

Taming the mind is a long process requiring practice and discipline, repeated a million times only to reach a point much below any semblance of excellence. Life itself is that process. The way you navigate your life is your process, and that navigation is in your hands only when you’re aware of yourself. Deciphering the meaning of the world and the purpose of existence is nothing but an attempt to understand your own life. The process requires many attributes- such as controlling impulses. I react too quickly to impulses rather than analysing how they might affect my time ahead. Reactions might trigger a fall of a long chain dominos that is nothing but a recipe for disaster. Analysing choices offers insight that will add to better judgment in the future. It sounds easy to say all of this, but the truth is we as human beings falter too much for our own good. Sometimes it’s not under our control either; but if you adopt an attitude of servitude to yourself you might lessen the negatives.

Your mind should work for you.

-Tanmay

Tag: mind

screaming subconscious