Engage

Too many of us confuse our thoughts with our beliefs. They are not the same. Our minds are fed with thousands of pieces of Information every day, most of which result in a certain mental response to them. They're thoughts. But we often mistake them for our beliefs and keep peddling them mindlessly. In fact, we let them shape our ideologies, mistaking them to be our beliefs. We realize their real nature when they fall apart in the face of vehement opposition and we fail to defend them with conviction. The lack of conviction is a result of our inability to engage with those thoughts. We allow hundreds and thousands of stray thoughts lay unattended in our minds. If and when we take that stray thought out and put it in our mental labs to scrutiny, we observe so many hues and shades to it that were hitherto invisible. The end result of this engagement is a belief. It's much like sharpening of a pencil. The sharpened tip which can write with so much clarity is the belief, which has a strong basis in the process of its sharpening i.e assessing and rejecting thoughts that flow from that one stray thought.

Stray thoughts, as stray they may be, also come attached with several strings of uncomfortable questions, more so when we are young and beginning to experience the good, the bad and the ugly of the world. But our younger selves often don't sit back and reflect and instead opt for the easier ways out, the quick fixes, because ignorance is bliss while knowing (especially knowing oneself) is a difficult process. So many times, we encounter the same questions later in life, only to realize that the time to search for the answers is behind us now.

With changing times, the spaces to reflect and engage with thoughts have shrunk. Lives have become busier and stress has taken up much of our mental space. Whatever little is left, we use it to binge on entertainment to unwind. In fact, today we have so much entertainment beamed to us from every angle that we lose ourselves and our thinking selves to an unending consumption cycle which leaves us comfortably numb. There is very less thinking and even lesser engaging with thoughts as a result. We tend to project half baked thoughts on to the world and develop an understanding of the world around us that has a lot of scope to be better. In this age of too much information and too much entertainment, we are surrounded by the best ingredients to make us number and dumber as a society. Sometimes, I wonder whether it's by chance or by design, for a number and dumber society is a dream come true for a political class that wants to hold on to power. Whether it's by design or by chance, we also happen to be the society that has Donald Trump as the elected President of the most powerful nation in the world.

Dive deep in. I don't know what do the saints of the world mean when they say look inside and you'll have the answers but as I have grown up, I have interpreted it as the need of engaging with one's thoughts regularly to do away with the brain fog formed by thousands of obsolete thoughts lying unattended.