Focus

It wasn't pleasant outside, although, it was oddly satisfying to hear the rain thumping down on the window panes of his room. Focus is a fickle friend, who once angered, takes a long time to be appeased. He knows, somewhere at the back of his mind, that he occasionally wanders to while looking on at the torrent of little fat drops of water that lash against his window unceasingly, quite unnervingly looking like an army of little liquid soldiers committing hara kiri against the window pane in an unceasing effort to break the glass and expose him to the hoards of little water soldiers that wait outside, that he must focus. In fact, he isn't quite sure anymore what it is he is supposed to focus on. Is he supposed to focus for the the sake of focusing?  Does he have a purpose? Or is the purpose going to show itself only once he has learnt how to focus?

Why does anybody need to focus? One of the fifty people talking inside his brain asks suddenly? Now , no matter how many people are inside your brain, there is one among them who knows what it's all about. He is the rightful occupant of the abstract space inside the brain, and is sensible enough, but alas, there are too many voices to drown him out. So he starts to answer, because this is after all a valid question. Why on earth would anybody want to focus? After all, trying to focus when your brain doesn't want to , like trying to empty one's bowel when the bowel doesn't agree with being emptied at that moment, can be extremely uncomfortable. Anyone will try to undertake such an odious task only when one needs to, so it is important to understand why one needs to, So he starts to answer, making a certain amount of sense.

But then another question, this time, another of those fifty voices asks, who cares why one needs to? All that is important that we know that it is important, unless we actually believe that this nugget of knowledge that has been distilled from thousands of years of human experience is actually false? And that would be preposterous to think. There are certain notions that one should never entertain. There is usually a pattern to generate all these notions. Take any statement that you have heard from almost everybody, of the form "doing x is good for you". If it is something you have heard from everybody, then never entertain the notion that "doing x is bad for you". Hence even entertaining the notion that there is a way to possibly live happily without actually having to focus is a dangerous path to tread. It is a path that would undoubtedly culminate in a nudist colony. Smoking weed all day, and hugging trees. In a jungle. And nobody really wants that, concluded this voice.

The rightful owner of the brain might be sensible, but that doesn't necessarily translate to anything as long as his voice isn't strong. Only when his voice is strong enough to drown out the surrounding din emanating from the various confused little demons whose sole aim seems to be to increase the disorderliness of the thought process, does the owner of the brain in which all these abstract beings reside get anywhere. The rest of the body is like a zombie that the brain, being the sole proprietor of sentience among all the organs of the body, is the master of . The body does what the brain commands. So when controls in the main control room of the brain passes around randomly in a large set of voices, all but one of whom have any idea what is going on, the body behaves like a drunk. Well, not really, because the motor skills are mostly unaffected,  each muscle of the body mostly communicates with brain well enough to know that the next step that has been decided is in such and such direction, and hence muscle no.s 453 , 455, 467, 469 will execute complicated procedure code 389 which will result in the body making a net movement of one step in the predecided direction BUT, there is mostly no correlation between one step and the next. There is no coherence, unless when food or any other basic need is involved, when the spinal cord overrides the dysfunctional brain and executes a series of precisely calculated actions that culminates in fulfilling the basic need that forced it to come into action in the first place. So how does a man with a power struggle in his brain look like?

He looks like this : He looks out the window, the rain has stopped. Seems pleasant enough outside. Like some badly drawn caricature of a blood thirsty zombie with foul fluid oozing down his mouth, he rises from his chair, and with a mad lack of purpose in his eyes, walks out to get some fresh air.

Unstructured thoughts on structured writing

It is hard to get back to writing.Why did I give up writing? Maybe because I have nothing more to say? Probably not. I think it is more likely that I stopped writing here because writing here became a chore. Its always like that. You start doing something (referred to as "the thing" henceforth, at least in this paragraph, because using too many pronouns isn't polite) because its fun. You do it for a while, then perhaps you get better at it. After sometime , you notice that you have been doing the thing pretty regularly, and also, you seem to be improving at it. So you make a mental note, that you should keep doing the thing with the same frequency. Sooner or later, this resolution becomes a burden, because you no longer are doing the thing when you want to, you are doing it when your calender tells you its time to.

Of course, with writing, it is important to make sense. To have something to say. I have often wrote in the past when I had nothing to say. I think I read something about stream of consciousness writing, and I often tried to let my thoughts flow out on this blog. Except, that thoughts do not flow freely when you are trying to record them. I can imagine that someone somewhere would have painted a picture of a seated author bent over a piece of paper, and the painting would depict thoughts (which would perhaps be painted as a blueish haze) flowing straight from his head onto the paper through the pen and the hand holding the pen. But it doesn't quite work that way. Because writing must make sense, and thoughts don't in general. There is no structure to the stream of thoughts. It flits around from idea to idea to idea, unless you are trying to focus it on a particular idea (then again, people like me find it hard to shut out the noise even when we are trying to think of a specific thing).In fact, I am not even sure that at any given time the stream of thoughts is actually representable by the act of writing. What if you actually had a way of thinking undisturbed and actually recording your thoughts in a continuous fashion, as an external observer would if he could witness your thoughts. But say you were thinking of two things at the same time. True stream of consciousness writing would  be when the very word I am typing at a given instant exactly represents the thought passing through my brain at that instant. So if you had two thoughts passing through your brain simultaneously, you would have no way of completely representing your stream of thoughts at that moment. Of course, whether the brain can actually process two thoughts simultaneously is moot.

So I guess true stream of consciousness writing would be a cool thing, but I haven't quite figured out a way to record my undisturbed thoughts without disturbing them. Maybe I am too self conscious. I think that is why I believe that writing must have structure. Unstructured thoughts are dangerous. Cannot let them flow out for all to see. Cannot even let them flow out for me to see. But yes, it really helps if one knows what he wants to write about before sitting down to write. But if one has to write regularly, and has to know what he is going to be writing about each time he sits down to write, he must have views.

Yes. Views. This is why I stopped writing. I have no views. I have no views about most things. And most views I have about the very few things I deem worthy enough of my attention (so that I at least know enough about them to have views) are not views that can be made public. They are better kept as private views. Was I forming views all these years? Maybe. I have to think about it. Or maybe not. After all, this blog post wasn't really about anything when it started off, because I didn't have something I definitely wished to write about. But not having enough views (or at least, enough views that can be shared publicly) does make maintaining a regular blogging habit quite a chore. One cannot rely on rantings and ramblings to keep writing. One has to have stuff. material. views etc. Of course, once in a while, its fun to just write whatever comes to one's mind, whether it is a true representation of thoughts at that time, or merely a failed attempt. But can't do it regularly.

But there is a beautiful thing about writing, that is that writing invariably forces thoughts to converge onto a steady flow along a straight line. I have experienced this quite often, where I start writing a post about nothing in particular, and it leads to some conclusion, something definite, or if nothing, resolution to some vague half formed question in my brain. After all, that is why we are told the importance of writing while we study. It helps focus the beam of thoughts. Maybe I will write more often. Its fun, as long as I don't overdo it again. But of course, I am older. But then again, I am still me.