Food For “Thought”

Imagine that it’s a weekend and you are at your home or someplace quiet with no one to disturb you and no activity planned for the day. The only noises you hear are the ones made by nature be it the passing of cooling breeze or the chirping of birds. Even amidst this silence and peace have you ever experienced a rush of thoughts or feelings? Imaginary scenes, conversations or day dreams which just fly by in quick succession right in front of your eyes or some ground breaking ideas and innovations that can change the world? This rapid construction and destruction of feelings and thoughts keep us occupied even when we have nothing to do.

If you could visualize or relate to this situation then you would also know that we generally tend to forget most of these things the moment our solace is broken or we get involved in some other activity. Very rarely (for me it’s never) do we ever keep a track or log of all the things we just thought about or even analyse them to find a pattern. I sometimes wonder whether all this information could actually be useful. I mean all these things in some way or the other relate to how we are. It must be an impression of our personality, upbringing, thought process, state of mind, recent events or even creativity which has been shaped or has developed in a certain pattern. I wonder if we could just stop and look at this data we will actually get to know a lot about us. It can help us identify things which we may have not known or deliberately chose to ignore to be the person we all wish to be. This kind of information could be immensely helpful for self-development. This is probably what the wise saints and philosophers meant when they said “Look within you”.

These quiet moments and the thoughts within them are the natural source of inspiration. We all know that many of the greatest scientific inventions have been conceptualized this way; we have heard many stories about the same. Some of the greatest minds ever to have existed had such moments and they used the ideas from them to achieve success. So why don’t we take a leaf out of their books and start doing the same? Why can’t we do what they do? Probably more than half the people never actually thought about it and never realized that it could actually be useful. The majority of the remaining half just have these moments but haven’t achieved expertise or are simply not willing to try for it. No one became successful with just an idea. It requires lot of hard work and dedication before and after the moment of EUREKA….For the smallest portion of the people who have the expertise, knowledge and determination it’s the lack of belief which holds them back. Even though they might have come across a great idea they might just consider it too good to be true or doable or they might just simply forget about it. Then sometime later they find that someone has built the same thing they had imagined a long time ago and get filled with regret. Only if he/she had utilized the data from these sources of inspiration, and had given a genuine thought and effort for the same, he/she would have been the one enjoying all the name and fame.

This is not at all limited to professional success in fact these moments are of highest importance for emotional well being of an individual since not all people think about gravity or time travelling machines. Most of the time people would imagine themselves in their dream world, have a virtual friend with whom they can share their pain or feelings or think about things or activities they love or the places they would like to visit or combination of many such things which is unique at different point in time. We just need some way to tap into this source of information and analyse the patterns in them. It would have been so nice to have some sort of smart device attached to the head with a stylish headband (with great design and multiple colors to choose from that suit the style and panache of the individuals) that would record and store our thoughts so that we can then view and analyse them later. Who knows with rapid advancements in technology and start of the “Big Data” era, the day when we will have such devices may not be so far as it seems.

Until then, to identify what we can do for the same, I attended an “Emotional Intelligence” session. It also works around the concept of identifying the true self by analyzing our thoughts. As part of the session we were given 15 mins to just sit and observe our thoughts. We were told to let the thoughts in and not be judgmental about them. We had to let them flow naturally. Then after 15 mins we were told to recollect our thoughts and categorize them into positive, negative, inspiring or any other category we saw fit for it. Then finally we were asked to count the number of thoughts in each category to identify the primary pattern of thoughts and take necessary actions against them. The result was really helpful for some but as per me I found it difficult to naturally let the thoughts in with so many other people doing the same thing, looking at me and some making weird noises (trust me you don’t want to know the details). But I believe the true results of the technique can be achieved in real life scenarios with the actual thoughts we have in those little moments. So let’s try not to discard all those countless emotions and thoughts and try to use them to identify our true self.

Do share your thoughts about this along with any technique you follow or aware of that will help us all.