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.
