Solitude

Solitude is a very alien concept to contemporary Indian psyche. Its partially due to the sheer size of population that we have and partially due to the innate curiosity to meddle in the affairs of other person. Its a strange contradiction of sorts as we are supposed to be the pioneers of mediation which can be loosely defined as contemplating and focusing in solitude only. On perhaps these are two different aspects co-existing in our society. Even human personality is actually an amalgamation of big five traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Still we are not really new to concept to solitude on mental level thanks to spirituality and meditation. Drawing on my personal experience, my mental state is like a pendulum which swings from one extreme to another depending on various factors some tangible and some intangible. As this multi-variance analysis is beyond my cognitive abilities right now. I'll avoid the temptation of delving into probable causes for my so-called mood swings. But the fact remain that sometimes we really crave solitude (mainly when we have realization that we are running in circles in this rat-race), On the other hands its really difficult to draw the line between solitude and loneliness. On the other extremities we felt lonely even while surrounded by tons and tons of people. The contrast is right there when you look at empirical data and find that being burnt out and depression are two common factors affecting mental health today.

Ironically, one of the major areas for me where I need solitude is the one that I'm focusing on right now, writing. For last few weeks. I have outlined few areas where I'm tying to be more consistent. And reading and writing both figure quite prominently on that list. Out of these two, reading is considering as the easy part more-so if you don't set your expectation too high and compromise a bit on the quality, In other words, searching for good book to read can be quite a challenge. But if you lower your expectation, Than there is no dearth of matter to read. 

Writing on the other hand, is far more complex and demanding endeavor on my part. I do run into the very cliche writer's block. I start writing on something and after first few lines, run out of ideas to explore it further. Also the strains of personal and professional responsibilities is making it tougher and tougher to find solitude as a certain degree of mental piece is required for writing anything worthwhile. Even 5-10 minutes are enough for me to read few pages at least every day. But I need longer slice of me time to articulate my thoughts and put it on paper.

As I have indicated few times already in previous blogs, I'm prone to neurotism aspect of personality types. I'm guilty of indulging in overthinking or day-dreaming in the past. One of the option to keep this tendency in check is to keep yourself busy. But when you are trying to find time for meditation, then there is a risk that you can fall back to these habits.

The other part which is quite pedantic compared to first one is pure laziness or sleepiness. I have a little one a half year old devil in my house who neither sleep herself nor allows others to sleeps. She wants to play with me (and her mother off-course) at 3am in the night. I have prided myself as a early riser for a long time (I even have tried my hand at so-called 4am club for a while). As the body conditioning does not happen overnight and even it does not deteriorate overnight too. I still can wake up early in the morning without much of an issue. But... the cumulative lack of sleep shows after a while and you tend to feel sleepy all the time. So sitting in a relaxed posture and closing your eyes is not a good idea at all when your body is craving sleep.

As I touched earlier too, both physically and mental fitness is required to keep up with an increasingly demanding job and in a way, both of them are actually related to each other.