Today's positivity | Are we Red-lining our minds at a high RPM?

I know the title of this post makes very little sense.
Allow me to tell you two stories, and maybe you will like to re-visit the title.

Story 1: Jon drives a manual car. As he knows nothing, he presses accelerator to the full while driving in 2nd gear, and never up-shifts the gears beyond. The car has a history of making a lot of noise and vibration. But it does drive and gets Jon from point A to point B.

The tachometer (RPM gauge) is constantly red-lined.

One day the car stalls and the engine gets permanently damaged.

**


Story 2: Jon takes a lot of stress about everything. He is a sincere lad but is always loaded with emotions - high on them. He always pushes to the limit for even mundane things. Everything has to be done in a perfect way (according to him), every goal has to be achieved in the best possible way (according to him), every dumb-bell curl has to be achieved in the best possible way (well, according to his gym trainer!). As Jon knows nothing, he is always motivated and concerned about everything. His ears are always red with blood soaring through his systems.

The blood pressure monitor is always red-lined.

One day, well, let's say that Jon realizes the car could stall and the engine could get permanently damaged.

**

Now, you are an intelligent reader. You don't need to re-visit this post's title. But let's do it anyway, for Jon's sake?

Are we Red-lining our minds at a high RPM?

It looks to me that we are. I personally feel that I had been pushing myself in a lower gear for some-time now. I look around and see that most of us are doing the same. We keep pushing our luck on deadlines - professionally and personally. That's how we have been operating since childhood. While the responsibilities keep on increasing, there is no attempt to up-skill our brains at handling these responsibilities. We are in an ad-hoc trial and error experiment constantly. There is mostly no strengthening of the mind to handle all these, ever-increasing stress pointers.

Now, you'd ask where's the positivity you promised in the 'Today's positivity' blog-series this post is a part of?

I am also about to complete 3 months of daily meditation now. And I am beginning to realize that daily meditation is helping me shift my mind's gears up. I am realizing that daily my mind is getting equipped better to handle these stress points.

It is too early to say anything - too less data.

For the time being, let's just say that I have stumbled upon an interesting analogy:

'Meditation helps us in shifting up our mental gears to handle increasing stress in a better way, just like a car operates at a higher speed smoothly in higher gears'.

Will keep sharing more observations on this analogy as I chug along my life. Please comment if you have any thoughts to share on this.

--
Alok A. Kumar
June 4th 2019

P.S. If I were you, I would have commented : But what if our minds have an automatic transmission instead of a manual one? That's a thought to explore in some other post.

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Today's positivity | My experiences of Isha Kriya

As shared in earlier posts, I have been experimenting with Meditation lately. After reading a few articles on internet, and watching a few Pranayama videos on youtube, I had developed a Pranayama regimen for myself, and was following it daily (More, here.)

It had been a good progress and relief. And then I stumbled across something called Isha Kriya by a gentleman called Sadhguru.

While talking about Isha Kriya, somebody on a meditation forum was saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." Good enough, I said.

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A No-nonsense Guide to Getting your Voter ID Card made | Fast & Easy

✅ You have rode the wings of success and are living the city life, leaving behind your sleepy hometown to its yawning spreads.

✅ You are earning a decent salary in the fast lane and consider yourself a Dilliwallah, Bombaywallih or the wallah-wallih of any metro city of India worth its salt.

✅ You take pride in it.

But you know you don't belong here. Not just yet.

Because you don't vote. You are 'that' migrant population which confines itself to air-conditioned rooms on the election day, enjoying a holiday when the whole nation is supposed to be on its streets.

You champion political ideologies on social media none the less.

Why? Because you don't have your name in the electoral list of the city you live in, and hence, you choose to not vote.

Guess what, it is time to change all that. It is time to get yourself a voter identity card and time to go vote this election season.

Here's a simple, step by step how-to get your name registered in the electoral list. It is tried and tested for Delhi, in February 2019. 

Step 1: Go to National Voters' Service Portal by clicking here.

Step 2: Be sure to check your name in the electoral roll first, for your constituency. It is an option on the left side of the NVSP homepage. Lazy bums like me could click here.


Step 3: Back on the homepage of NVSP, there are 6 options - you need to click on the link that applies to you the most.

There are two scenarios:

Scenario A. You are applying afresh (you don't have an EPIC number in any other constituency) - Click on the first option (Form 6)

Scenario B. You are not applying afresh (you do have an EPIC number in any other constituency) - Guess what, still click on the first option (Form 6)

Scenarios don't matter. Your vote matters.

(Note: In form 6 itself, there is a field where you can enter your old EPIC number. Election commission is supposed to delete the old EPIC ID after successful verification and issuance of your new EPIC Id in the new constituency.)

Fill up Form 6. All the data fields are self- explanatory. If you have any doubt, please feel free to comment below. we will try to answer all the queries (till the elections are over. post that, see you in the next elections!)

Step 4: Now comes the most gratifying and yet the most useless part: Tracking your status!

One the NVSP homepage, there is an option called 'Track Application Status'. Click on that link and enter your reference number (the one you got after successful submission of form 6 in step 3), and you will see a real-time process completion chart. I was impressed with this!

Author's note: I had submitted my application on January 27th, and the whole process got completed within a month (On Feb 26th). I received the Voter Identity card on March 18th, by post.

Step 5: Once the status shows accepted (which it should, if you have submitted all the legit documents), your BLO would call you and schedule a visit to your home to check the documents. Once he/she has done that, your name will be added to the electoral list and you will be issued a nice voter Identity card which you can use as a valid identity document everywhere.

Step 6:  Say 'Yay'! You are a legit voter now.


So there, you have it! You still have some time and a handy step-by-step note on getting your name included in the electoral list of your constituency.

Go ahead and gear yourself up for the national festival of the biggest democracy of this world!

--
Alok
March 19th, 2019

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Today's Positivity | Some Beautiful Quotes On Gardening

Day #7. So I have been meditating everyday for some days now in the mornings. And each day I look forward to a few positive thoughts while meditating.

I hope to share these experiences with the readers of arbitSpecs. (You can read my earlier experiences here and here).

Today, like everyday, I completed my meditation and opened the eyes slowly to this:

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Today's Positivity | The Anxiety Chest

Day#5. So I have been meditating everyday for some days now in the mornings.

Each day after I complete the pranayamas (to find out more about what I do in those 15 mins, click here), I sit for some time in meditation and observe my thoughts, accepting everything that comes along.

I have decided to blog about some of the positive thoughts that come to my mind. This is an experiment to spread some more positivity in and around my life. You're welcome in this experiment. :)

So today while meditating, a thought came which I like to call 'The anxiety chest'.

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Confessions Of a Corporate Guy Who Never Meditated

So I have been one of those corporate people who have thought meditation is for broken people. I have thought, "It is a good thing. May be a great thing, but I don't need it. Like I don't need that organic cold pressed fruit juice those crazy people sell to health freaks. May be the juice is great, but I don't need it."

I mostly confused meditation with medication, and like they said  नीम हक़ीम  खतरे जान.

So I mostly stayed clear of people who talked about Dhyan and my idea of getting closer to spirituality at most was listening to good sufi songs by AR Rahman ( and others. More on that in some other post)

But boy, I was wrong!

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Poets of Masai Mara

A short business trip to Kenya extended to the lovely African Savannahs of Masai Mara. You can figure the camera was bad. But the experience is undesribable. Poetry and musings may better elaborate the heaven I've been through. I would urge everyone of you reading this to plan a trip to the Masai soon. You'll come back a changed person.

Oh, heaven is a place on Earth.

The Perkin's Tent from Harry Potter

The shaky small ride

The mud runway in the middle of the jungle

Read on :)

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