Hello, how are you doing?
Nowadays I am doing nothing ordinary, the corporate goals have taken a lot of time in my life, and I am also putting an honest effort there, to move things forward, and to learn. At the same time, I am going crazy over luxury cars and fast bikes. Though I know I am going to own a lot of them one day, it is testing my patience when that fucking day is going to come.
On top of that, this lockdown is making things worse. Please don’t take this as cribbing, I am sure we all are getting tested. Hard days, and harder nights. The biggest blessing, for now, should be that we are alive at least, and hence there is hope for those good old days to come back. But honestly, these words look good at places like this, blogs, motivations memes, blah, and blah.
The two parts of us.
I hope you have heard about the narrative self and experience self. If you have not, great. I’ll tell you now.
So, you can read it in detail in the psychology-related literature, but our mind has two states, one that is present in this moment, the one that makes us aware of what we are feeling right now, the physical sensations of course but also our current mood, the experience we are going through at this moment. You might be lying nude on your bed with your GF/BF who is gently playing with all the delicate corners of your body, while you are reading this blog, and at the same time there are thoughts running in your mind.
It is also a possibility that you might just have gone through a trauma recently, and you are feeling down and depressed, desperately looking for something to keep yourself going. I mean when we are living in this moment there are certain physical things we are experiencing, the reason could be anything from the obvious rush of various chemicals/hormones or something external. So, there is an experiencing self that is connected to all our sense organs and reinforcing this feeling in us that we are alive, feeling pain and pleasure.
Ok, enough of the explanation, I hope you got it. Now, there is the second part of us, the narrating self. All those stories that keep going in us, the planning of the future, the rejoice of the past, the lessons of our history that keep coming back to haunt us, it is something completely different. That someone that keeps talking in us, with us, it could be us or maybe definitely us. People say, just before we die, our whole story runs past in front of us. There is a part of our brain that connects all the dots that it can remember in its cache and keep morphing into the reality that we live in. The reality of each one of us.
I always say that we all experience a different reality, and the reason is the varied experiences and memories that we have and our reactions towards it. Along with this the various chemical reactions that keep going in us, tuning how we experience the environment we all share. We all live and reinforce liberalism, as we value that it is our personal experiences that shape our outlook towards life and give meaning to it.
Is it possible for us to play with our chemical reactions? The Experiencing self.
I think modern medicine is trying to do the same? In it, not only the emphasis is on the fight against depression that many of us go through, but there is also a push to elevate the normal day-to-day experience we all go through, how to make this experience elevated all the time. And, if in future we are indeed able to do that, would we able to ever come back, a normal person cannot be happy all the time, it is a momentary secretion that passes like a phase, but if there is a possibility that it can be continued for a longer period, or maybe eternally, would that be great or bad. In either case, would we be the normal human anymore?
The things and feelings we experience are there from the natural evolution that took place in millions of years through careful experimenting of mother nature, but if humans want to take the matter into their hands, what would be the limit to it. In our pursuit to escape reality, would we go too far, or are we meant to do just the same. I wonder.
In any case, we know that the feel-good or bad comes and goes like a phase, that gives us the will to keep going in bad times and keep us grounded in the good times as well. The current situation is a menace that each one of us wants to get past ASAP.
I wish you a healthy corona times, with a hope that we all will keep ourselves together and keep going, the times are meant to change as they are designed like this. Like a sinusoidal wave, like a distribution curve, a few worst times, a few awesome times, and rest the average moments in which life passes. I wish you luck with the unfavorable tail of your normal distribution, and congratulations to the other half. About the middle part, we all are in it together.
Thank you.
~R
An Observer 