What is your identity?

One's identity emerges from the roots of his thoughts. Your name is nothing but a thought, that took shape in the minds of your creator and people identify you with that name. We feel that the thoughts which make us execute certain actions are unique. But that is not true. The thought which you entertained can degrade or beautify someone else's attitude as well. And when we come across individuals who uphold a sack of similar thoughts, communication escalates and the relationship is surrounded by a protective cloak of love and laughter. 

Identity has a very profound importance in the glamour world. Those celebrities whose stars had no faults emerged like legends and are applauded for having a huge number of fans around the world. Their names are heard, remembered and then told to others with a disapproving look who have no clue about a particular 'legend'. Those who had no clue then start a research project to find out more about the celebrity and if they are impressed, they become a member of the 'fan club'. Their views get strengthened in proportion with an increasing number of members which is also known as 'group polarisation'.

We all like to be identified with a certain group that provides us with an amount of security. It boosts our self-esteem and we are ready to follow the norms set by the group, in order to preserve our identification. We easily conform with the orders and there comes a time wherein we are forced to say yes even when our hearts say no. We then become human beings whose souls have long back converted into puppets. 

This is what exactly happens with the celebrities in the glamour world. They are as ordinary as the common public, whose innocent eyes wished to seek for fame and when they finally enter the world on which they dreamed days and nights to conquer, the same innocent eyes adjust themselves to the darkness deep within. It is then too late to turn back and their lives become like a script whose story is written by somebody else. 

The snapshots of the camera only reveal the smiling faces in expensive robes and the big trophies received during the most awaited events. But no one knows the truth behind the fairy-tale existence wherein an individual fell into the trap of enlarging his identity and later had no control over his own mind and body. Still after receiving all the fame and success, a celebrity or a star is haunted by one single question.

Was it really worth it?

Once the identity and the mind of a being becomes one, then the life turns out into a never ending race. Your mind would provide you with a list of ideas that could feed your ego and enlarge your identity. You would be always competing and would do activities which you would have never loved to do in your wildest dreams. But you still carry on with the task for your so called 'reputation'. From outside you have successfully managed to rise as a tycoon. But from inside you are already destroyed by the inner tycoon. 

If you look at yourself just as a speck of the entire universe, your ego would reduce to the size of a small building that you see though the window pane of an aeroplane. You would then be able to direct and regulate all your thoughts and dreams, not letting yourself be governed by them. This would make you your own master and then you would be capable to give a same reaction to both praise and criticism. 

What indicates the relation's strength?

To gain an insight into the future of your relationship, you must look deeply into the nature of your shared thoughts and feelings. This realisation has dawned upon me, making me question the diverse conversations that I had with many of my comrades.  Life is like a web of stimuli and which one to choose entirely depends upon us. By stimuli I actually mean the words that have an impact on our hearts which are passed on to us by our friends or relatives. 

If one knows his/her concerns well, one would carefully respond only to those stimuli that is important to him/her. In this way, an individual saves a great amount of energy. 

We come across so many people in our lives, some are the ones with whom our ideas match and others are those who practice a unique taste of attitudes. But we all carry inside us a common thirst, no matter to which religion or country you belong to. That thirst is nothing but the thirst of attention. All human beings love to gain attention, we have an urge to be noticed and heard. I feel that the thirst of attention cannot be vanquished completely. 

For instance you meet a particular person of your same age group and that is the time when the thirst starts popping up. You wear the attire of your best behaviour, try to make friends with that person by striking up a conversation. Then suddenly for some reason you two get separated. You then move on in your life and when you meet some other person, the thirst takes birth again and if the other person is good enough to provide you with maximum attention, you quickly forget about the person you met earlier. 

It is a common saying that 'you should be in touch with your old friends'. Friends are considered as a golden essence of life and there are many whose footprints have vanished on the doormats of our minds. They promise that they would stick with us till the end and such sayings soon vanish into thin air. It's then when we realise that such people always had a motive in their minds, once that gets accomplished, they move on to the next person to enjoy the aroma of another plate of wishes. 

So that's why I feel that it is necessary to listen attentively to what your friends say. Small words or even the body language can tell a lot, but the problem is we often take such small 'hints' for granted. We all have a tendency to talk to and listen to people very superficially. But yes there are handful of some who have learned to implement the skill of active listening. This makes them capable enough to understand the nature of the shared conversation, helping them to have a clarity about the future of their relationship. 

I love this particular quote:

'Big minds discuss ideas

Smaller minds discuss events

Smallest minds discuss about people'.

I feel that it is great to have those friends around you, with whom you can share ideas. Sharing and accepting the ideas nourishes a great deal of understanding, followed by likeness and respect. Gossiping is an art that could be imbibed by anybody. But those who have the courage to move beyond this and hunt for a wider horizon can truly be called your 'best friend'. 

The link between peace and a holiday trip

Satisfaction survives only for a short period of time. After the glorious completion of one task, we find ourselves chasing for another, that when not grasped well could lead to dissatisfaction and unrest. We seldom plant the idea of going out to a peaceful place, where the nature exhibits it's bounty and we could rest in peace, which unfortunately our hectic jobs doesn't offer us. We term this as a 'stress-buster' and when such a plan gets cancelled, it pushes one into a more stressful experience. Peace then becomes like a wild goose chase and at the end we find ourselves back to the square one. How weird is that! 

Going out for a holiday trip increases the triumph and enthusiasm within us. The tickets are booked, reservations in the lavish hotel are taken prior hand and the suitcases gets filled with a complete treasure of clothes, cosmetics and toiletries. Everything goes on very smoothly and the plans decided gets executed at a proper time. The members forget about all the anxieties and the work to be completed as soon as they are done with their small trip. When they finally reach home, they are fresh, relaxed and peace blossoms as a flower that encourages their concentration.

Some families do not experience the fortunate fate as mentioned above. When they reach the desired hotel, they realise that there has been some technical difficulties and they got to wait in the lobby for a certain period of time, no matter how much ever tired and sleepy they are. Some wait patiently while some get furious and quarrel with the receptionist about 'lack of planning and convenience', and the angry person's child looks at him/her with scared eyes. If the frustration persists, it has a direct effect on the plans made and at the end, the trip doesn't take up an enthralling route as it was expected to. 

In both the instances, the ideas for the trip are the same but the situations are different. Variation in the attitude towards the situation led either to happiness or sadness, even though the latter had a great expectation of acquiring 'peace' as they had landed themselves in a beautiful and exotic place. So if such terrible situations do occur, then is a holiday trip a great idea to be implemented to reach the path of ecstasy?

Peace is a feeling that I think anyone can acquire by trying to control the relentless flow of thoughts. A holiday trip to a posh place can help but after reaching there, if one lets the mind to drift towards the image where the colours depict the plentiful pending work or the relationships that could not be mended, then even a glimpse of Taj Mahal or La Tour Eiffel cannot make your heart leap in joy. Even the richest people in the world are devoid of a good-night sleep, even though their bodies rest on a king-sized bed. That is because their hearts are heavy with tensions and fears. There is not even a small room for peace. 

Learning to acquire peace is a very long process, embedded with patient and sincere efforts. Work and career must be given importance to achieve success, but also make some time to thank the Lord for blessing you with opportunities and things that you possess. Success, wealth and power are essential but try not to become their slaves. If that happens then the mind takes one into a great roller-coaster ride, where there would be no turning back and peace would then seem like a mirage. 

 

Do learn the skill of analysing your thoughts and always keep smiling! :)

The essence of adaptability

Four days have passed by. My existence has been confined within the areas of a small village, Chergunnu. It is located in Kerala and is given the title: 'my native place'. The lifestyle is quite diverse than that of a city, the flora and fauna possess their own unique beauty. The thoughts and ideas keep the urban thinking style at the bay. Here the hot climate overpowers the A.C, an invention that spreads comfort sadly has a minimal agreeableness.

As my stay is going to be extended for an entire month, I have to learn some ways to adapt myself to this new environment. As my mind has been conditioned to consider the City of Mumbai as the king of places, the devil roams in my heart to make my mood gloomy and dull. But I have accepted my challenge.

As the sweat makes my skin sticky an I watch a mongoose making love with it's mate, the angel within me has presented me with a list of my own limitations. They are the ones which make me crib for comfort and luxury, the ones which make me feel my city life like a dream. This and a few demolished bungalows where my father enjoyed his childhood, aroused a question: what is real in this world?

Maybe the present signifies the reality. All the things that one can see, hear, touch and smell is a part and parcel of a word named 'reality'. When they nurture the significance of the past, the real becomes a dream, which safely flies into the mansion of memories. We recollect them and the loss incurred gives birth to pain, which others can't feel because only the wearer knows where the shoe bites. 

If there are no memories that could haunt us with the immeasurable pain, would we be able to adapt to any situation? I guess it may work. I have been trying to accept my new place as my own home. Home is where the heart is and my heart is still alive, bravely working with my immunity system to keep me fit. I can conclude that the body can adapt to any change in the surrounding, but it's the mind that tends to make us stubborn and resistant to change. Alas! we got to live with it.

I am sure there might be many as me who are trying to adapt to new circumstances. All I can say is let your souls flow like a river which finally meets the sea, no matter however rigid and strong the boulders are. If you know your strength well, the boulders would be crushed underneath you! 

The den of illusions

Who likes to accept a certain amount of change in a loved one? Some would agree and some won't, it actually counts on the nature of change. All of us are living deep in our own world of illusions and most of the time we are not even aware of them. Though we actually call ourselves free, we listen obediently to the thoughts created and they are rarely questioned. Lack of questioning makes us the slaves of our own illusions. 

We enslave ourselves within the realm of our dreams which is not at all a bad thing. Dreams are meant to be pursued but one must be free to act while adapting the most appropriate response towards any situation. Blindly obeying the orders may make you land up nowhere. For avoiding that, one must know to differentiate the soul from the cage of illusions.

I would first like to engage myself in the topic 'change'. We all know what change is and we have read endless articles where it is explained that one must accept change and how we must know to let go the people who have changed, etc, etc. Just as you must have gone through a series of shocking experiences where your loved one is behaving differently, I too have felt the astonishment and wept until the meaning finally settled in. It's so easy to get hurt.

I tried to let myself go into this matter very deeply. To be more specific, I actually started observing my thoughts. When this happened, I witnessed a kind of new awakening where I realised pleasure brings pain at some time but the same pleasure is nothing but an illusion. After all it's just a feeling.

Let me explain it to you more clearly. Imagine those best friends of yours who have now become complete strangers. This incident has happened with most of us and hence is the best example. We make new friends, start to know each other well, things seem to go pretty well at the beginning and our minds create a judgment that 'you have got an ideal friend!' Situations could be equalised with that judgment and we believe it. 

Now where does the problem occur? The mind keeps on replaying (as usual) the traits of your friend which are most likeable and you feel that 'our relation is going to work like this forever!' The word 'forever' makes one quite vulnerable I think. You are gaining pleasure from some one's company but the belief of 'forever' is nothing but an illusion! Each one desires to experience pleasure but when that slowly starts turning into an illusion, you are trapped into the game of your mind. 

This illusion gets shattered by the reality. Reality underlines the fact that the behaviour of anybody is not going to be the same in every situation. If a person has started behaving differently, try to observe the situation. You would get your answer and you would be less shaken. 

But what we do is feel bad about it. The sole reason for this is that the belief which we were carrying all the time has been challenged and we suddenly feel that we were kept in the dark. This greatly hurts our self-esteem and we realise that we have been cheated. Or some feel that they have been taken for granted. 

The best way I feel to come out of such situations is to not to get trapped in an illusion. Mind loves to create fantasies but just listen to them. Don't let them enslave you in their den. That is because there is a huge difference in listening and believing. 

Some of you must have different techniques to tackle drastic changes and I respect them. The write-up of my thought process is not to challenge anyone's belief. But yes, it might be helpful in solving your problem. :)