Often the insights come from random places and at unexpected times. These last few months have been quite a journey. I have met plenty of new people, visited various new places and learned more than I can keep a track of. The overall experience was intense but worth every penny to be fair.
Lack of experience and urgent responsibilities are a bad combination to deal with. But when you are in it, you don't have an option, but to figure a way out. Now when you are finding your way out, this is inherently not an easy job, as its bound to create a ton of frictions among not only the entities that are involved such as partners, employees or coworkers but also people surrounding you such as your friends and family, along the way.
The ups and downs come in everyone's life, and so it did with mine as well. The downs are unpleasant, causes pain and weird discomfort, which often steals the limelight. The mind starts ignoring the ups, as and when its keep imagining and replaying specifically, just the down phases. The intensity of down phases always takes over and clouds the mind in seeing thing clearly. But no clouds stay forever and just as when the sun comes out the darkness disappears, this blog is about sharing one such insight that I recently had.
Frictions that I mentioned above, isn't healthy but it isn't toxic either. The moment there is friction we should try to be more conscious and aware. This is by definition hard. I haven't been able to be aware most of the times but fortunately, I have a habit to reflect on and chew on my past, especially the bad experiences. By analyzing the downs, the unpleasantness, and the frictions, objectively, over and over again, I have had this insight which I will like to name as “99 Checks.”
What is it exactly? Well, imagine this huge whiteboard with 100 checkboxes. Next to each checkbox is written a goal or a destination. The issue here is the closer you are to the whiteboard, the lesser the goals you are able to read. This precisely depicts how we as humans deal with almost any frictions, fights or disagreements among friends, family, business partners or entire human society for that sake. We all are habituated to stand too close to a whiteboard, especially when there is a difference of opinion. Our subjective perspective and lack of consciousness to be aware of it hurts us in many, many shuttle ways, which is one of the reasons that we find it even harder to re-correct this bad habit.
For every person you meet, you have this whiteboard in your mind, which has 100 checkboxes that the two of you together fills out, by either checking or unchecking the listed goals based on mutual agreement. Now as the time passes by, there will be situations where there will be disagreement between you and the other person. Think of this as you are standing close to a whiteboard and one of you is willing to check the box and the other doesn’t. Immediately you observe there is friction and both of you are stuck until this situation is resolved.
The worst thing about disagreement is it starts small but its snowballs into something that has nothing to do with what actually started it. The reason this happens is that the distance between you and the whiteboard is too less. Unless you realized this yourself or something within you, triggers this realization, you will find it hard to get out of this and the situation may turn into resentment or even worse broken relationships.
From what I have observed so far, after analyzing tens of situation that I was stuck in myself, I realized that of 100, there are 99 checkboxes where we had a mutual agreement on. The one where we didn't agree, led to friction, led to arguments, led to anger and unpleasantness. Mind you just one. And the only way to resolve this was communication, lots of it. We need to learn to communicate. In this day and age, we are connected (think internet) more then we should, but on the other hand, we are are getting worse at communicating. We need to learn and practice how to commune, most of our problems will get resolved on it own if we do.
And try to remember this analogy when you face yourself in a similar situation next time. Keep a safe distance from your whiteboards, that you have knowingly or unknowingly ingrained deep in your mind, for every person you are in touch with. Try to remind yourself about the “99 checks” that you agree on and don't let that “one” specific checkbox ruin and cloud your mind and spoil your relationships.
Lack of experience and urgent responsibilities are a bad combination to deal with. But when you are in it, you don't have an option, but to figure a way out. Now when you are finding your way out, this is inherently not an easy job, as its bound to create a ton of frictions among not only the entities that are involved such as partners, employees or coworkers but also people surrounding you such as your friends and family, along the way.
The ups and downs come in everyone's life, and so it did with mine as well. The downs are unpleasant, causes pain and weird discomfort, which often steals the limelight. The mind starts ignoring the ups, as and when its keep imagining and replaying specifically, just the down phases. The intensity of down phases always takes over and clouds the mind in seeing thing clearly. But no clouds stay forever and just as when the sun comes out the darkness disappears, this blog is about sharing one such insight that I recently had.
Frictions that I mentioned above, isn't healthy but it isn't toxic either. The moment there is friction we should try to be more conscious and aware. This is by definition hard. I haven't been able to be aware most of the times but fortunately, I have a habit to reflect on and chew on my past, especially the bad experiences. By analyzing the downs, the unpleasantness, and the frictions, objectively, over and over again, I have had this insight which I will like to name as “99 Checks.”
What is it exactly? Well, imagine this huge whiteboard with 100 checkboxes. Next to each checkbox is written a goal or a destination. The issue here is the closer you are to the whiteboard, the lesser the goals you are able to read. This precisely depicts how we as humans deal with almost any frictions, fights or disagreements among friends, family, business partners or entire human society for that sake. We all are habituated to stand too close to a whiteboard, especially when there is a difference of opinion. Our subjective perspective and lack of consciousness to be aware of it hurts us in many, many shuttle ways, which is one of the reasons that we find it even harder to re-correct this bad habit.
For every person you meet, you have this whiteboard in your mind, which has 100 checkboxes that the two of you together fills out, by either checking or unchecking the listed goals based on mutual agreement. Now as the time passes by, there will be situations where there will be disagreement between you and the other person. Think of this as you are standing close to a whiteboard and one of you is willing to check the box and the other doesn’t. Immediately you observe there is friction and both of you are stuck until this situation is resolved.
The worst thing about disagreement is it starts small but its snowballs into something that has nothing to do with what actually started it. The reason this happens is that the distance between you and the whiteboard is too less. Unless you realized this yourself or something within you, triggers this realization, you will find it hard to get out of this and the situation may turn into resentment or even worse broken relationships.
From what I have observed so far, after analyzing tens of situation that I was stuck in myself, I realized that of 100, there are 99 checkboxes where we had a mutual agreement on. The one where we didn't agree, led to friction, led to arguments, led to anger and unpleasantness. Mind you just one. And the only way to resolve this was communication, lots of it. We need to learn to communicate. In this day and age, we are connected (think internet) more then we should, but on the other hand, we are are getting worse at communicating. We need to learn and practice how to commune, most of our problems will get resolved on it own if we do.
And try to remember this analogy when you face yourself in a similar situation next time. Keep a safe distance from your whiteboards, that you have knowingly or unknowingly ingrained deep in your mind, for every person you are in touch with. Try to remind yourself about the “99 checks” that you agree on and don't let that “one” specific checkbox ruin and cloud your mind and spoil your relationships.
Comments
Post a Comment