Slow Beginning…..
By: Raghav Sharma
Tags: Journal, Diary, Motivation, Blog, Storytelling

Life is not a race, it is a marathon and the distance we can go depends, not only on the speed but the consistency and the ability to maintain it in the longer distance. As a generalist, I don't want to dive too deep into any technicalities too much so that its harder to see the overall general picture but I also don't want to miss the details in certain things, and sometimes it's hard in life as you cannot have it both ways. When you want to also travel at a speed of a speedboat, you cannot also enjoy the moment you would have while slowly pedaling in a small boat or the moment you would have had enjoying the moment sitting by the shore of the lake. Yes, it depends on the perspective and our decisions that lead us to a certain moment looking at the overall decision tree of life and therefore it dictates the pathways we take in our life but sometimes you cannot also fully be happy by living in the moment or going with the flow. At least that's what the case is for me sometimes. I do, however, also sometimes ponder about the alternate realities that could come up with my choices and the alternate life that could have spurred on with my decisions. But mostly, I still live by my motto of “Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero”. However, as a futurist, my intelligent self tries to think about the best pathways for a better future and ways to get to my vision and my dream and it gets me sometimes to the edge, to worry, to be impatient and to be dissatisfied. All in all, a slow Monday finally kicked off with me signing up and starting a bunch of online classes. I have finally fully accepted that life is a relentlessly dynamic process where very few things will be constant. So, I have to learn continuously and offload some of the older jargon, upgrade myself and update my software, and in many cases do a lot of debugging and evolve continually as a result. I have accepted that being in the moment with one eye on your long term vision would help me take baby steps. As mentioned in the podcast I was listening to last night titled “It Takes Time” a Ted Talk by NPR, the things that will take us the furthest are not that are most short-lived. The path to long term success and happiness is about working on things that take time. I think I fell asleep in the midway but I typically remember the comparison made about Sloth and it was very interesting to listen to going to sleep. Upon many realizations I have had about myself, I have noticed that however much I try, I have a natural influx of energy level as the day progresses, so despite me trying to start my day early and power through it, I am naturally more adapted to spend hours reading comfortably late in the day (evening/night) and instead of trying to change it, I will try to accept it, embrace it and do both. Slowly things are looking good for a fresh start, slowly but surely I will reach there, the idea is to build this new pattern of habits as a muscle memory in my brain and the new sets of habits will surely help me with the influx of changes I want to make in my life. It is also considered very healthy in terms of our brain’s health to embrace neuroplasticity, learn new things, try newer ways, try different things, and make new neuro-synaptic connections in the brain. However, it sounds way easier on paper than in practice. Some yoga sessions late in the night surely helped with the energy level followed by me trying to compose some riffs on my guitar. Sometimes I feel like my brain is too scattered and so are my interests and thoughts but that's just how I am. After all, you cannot control your mind, at least not all aspects of it, like David Eagleman says in his book Incognito, it is a thing of its own, running mostly in an incognito mode, conscious decision making can at least help us drive ourselves to the right direction by trying to understand what it wants and thereby trying to understand ourselves. It was a good start to the week and the idea is to do it again today. Signing off for now….

Feb 09, 2021

Raghav Sharma.