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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Sense makes food!

The Varq Restaurant at Taj Mansingh Hotel, Delhi may be defined as my own personal epicurean epicenter, for I crave to visit it any and every chance I'd get. Of course, this is not the only place which brings that epic epiphany relating to the existence of the the mastery in culinary arts, but still, it just served as a good example to start off with this blog post.

We are all aware (I hope) of the nasal role played in our food tasting experience. So, talking about the five senses, we may cross off the olfactory and gustatory ones. 
The tactile one is also of prime importance as can be heard in the phrase "Maa ke haath ka khana" (the food prepared by the mother). The conclusion arrived at from a related cocktail discussion was that there is some sort of an energy that is transferred from your finger tips to your food when you eat with your hands (now, don't blame me for going against table manners).

But I wanted to go beyond the somewhat obvious inferences. 
How far can our visual and auditory senses affect our eating experience?

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What the Surya Namaskar means for my Quarter Life Crisis

 As we welcome International Yoga Day into its third year, I would like to thank the Surya Namaskar for helping me get along with my quarter life crisis with relative ease.

When I was 6 odd years old, some astrologer dude told me to look at the Sun daily and say "Om Surya Namaha" 12 times. Somehow the habit stuck. But it wasn't until recently that I looked up the actual names of the sun, and the meanings and the yoga postures associated with it.

But am I glad I did that during my early 20s. Yes, I know how you, me and we all feel at this age.

Doubtful about what we want, what we just did, and what we're going to do. Where is the impact we were supposed to create? Weren't we supposed to make a difference? Either stuck in a job where the growth seems impossibly harder than we thought or still figuring out what do with our underrated lives.
But the stories we used to read, and our parents, teachers, didn't they always say that we were special? (Heck, my parents even named me विशेष). We can't even compare to our over achiever parents when they were 25, let alone friends of our age!
Should we go for a debt-inviting MBA? Can we just quit and travel the world, hitchhiking? Or should we just go to the Himalayas and settle down as an ascetic? Or let's just take our non-paying passion full time! And passion, where is passion in our ever failing relationships?  Constant questioning if we really want to be with this person long-term — and maybe even debating whether it's too late to find someone else. Failed searches for the right one, failed attempts to sustain the right one.

Being a twenty something is indeed scary. The Depression Alliance estimates that a third of twenty somethings feel depressed.

"If, as we're constantly told, the world is our oyster, it's definitely a dodgy one. Unlike the midlife crisis, the quarter life crisis is not widely recognized. There are no 'experts' to help us. We have no support apart from each other."

Damian Barr, author of the book Get it Together: A Guide to Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis

 So here's my attempt at supporting a troubled fellow.

My perceptions and understandings about this wonderful meditative practice, called the Surya Namaskar; and why we should imbibe them.

And how it can save us.

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