Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Being in the present

Although "Being in the present" is prescribed as the source of happiness, it's very hard to follow that. Maybe meditation helps, but I am not sure as I haven't given it a try. 

Another approach that is often suggested is to be totally involved in the activity that you are currently doing, whether it's simple things like bathing, cooking, listening to music, working etc. But the monkey mind keeps hopping onto from one thought to the next and gets distracted very easily. I have failed at this miserably. I don't know if I have tried enough though. 

But I do observe that my daughter very often gets deeply involved in the activity that she is currently doing. Sometimes she gets so involved for a couple of hours in doing one thing that she isn't thinking of anything else during that time. 

As a kid, she doesn't have a good sense of time. She doesn't have to take care of common chores or do something based on a given schedule. Although she has an end-goal for that activity, she does not have a timeline associated with it i.e that she does not think that I need to get this activity done by this time. And she enjoys doing it. Maybe all these things help her remain focused at what she is doing. There is not a big WHY/REASON for doing that activity. She has nowhere to go. She enjoys the journey more than the destination. She just does it.

I am pretty sure most kids are like that. And I was probably like that when I was a kid. As we grow up we have tasks to do, run per schedules and live by some external assessments and then now there is social media, which make you live a life of pursuit, distractions, anxiety. Maybe as UG Krishnamurthy says, thought is the cause for all this, a thought of a better state, a thought which compares/evaluates/judges/reasons.... But without thought there is no life. 

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