Tuesday 1 July 2008

Now, experience

Now, this is going to be a boring post; but this is just one of those things that I need to put to pen, if only to make myself think it thru and make sense of it.

There are things that a twenty year old knows that a ten year old cannot; and yet we have many a twenty year olds who know just as much and behave just like a ten year old. I am talking about experience, and value of all sorts of experiences. I am trying to figure out what if I go thru all my experiences of joy, sorrow, pain, beauty and more and then at the end of it find that in spite of all of that, I still haven’t grown. What if I have hypnotised myself to see things only in one way, and no matter what happens I never see things for what they are? Is that necessarily a bad thing? If I believe in something and everything I experience reinforces that belief. What’s the harm in living like that?

Leaving the previous question – of the loop of experience and belief -for a bit; there is another thing I am thinking about.

To learn from experience, we have to live fully. I did not learn much from my previous job, or at least not as much as I’d have liked to. That is because somewhere down the line, I cut myself slack. I am not sure why I did that; because the tasks were monotonous, or if the tasks were monotonous because I did not work hard enough? Had I tried my best to do the best job I could, I would have come face to face with a few facts about myself. It is something like this, had I tried and analysed why wasn’t I performing as well as I’d like to, I would have come up with an hypothesis (for example, I tend to work best on Saturday afternoons) Then, had I tried working Saturday afternoons, I would have either confirmed that yes Saturday afternoons is the time for me; or would have realised that the problem was actually something else. And then the next time I would have had to get results, I would have known exactly what to do to get them.
I am going to live my entire life with myself, and I know so little about me – all these half baked hypothesis, is sometimes all I know about me.
And the difference between the ten year old and the twenty year old is that the latter has had 10 years more of opportunity to test their hypothesis – about themselves and about their world. The world should make a lot more sense to the 20 year old – a 20 year old should be so much in control of his/her world, because he/ she knows how it works.

Hopping back to the previous idea – of loop between what you expect to see and what you end up seeing, because you are hypnotised… I think the question boils down to what really is; and while we are at it, what is the point of life? Is it to (a) know what is; or is it (b) to be happy and if it is to be happy then isn’t it possible that some people be happier when they know just what to expect – immaterial of if it is or it isn’t?

Ah, well... but to end, can I please quote from my recent favourite movie – “I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth.” (It’s from Into the Wild – go watch it!!)

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Un related to the above post - This seems like an interesting stack of pages.

1 comment:

VB said...

Parul once told me this - If you are twenty but you still think the way you did when you were ten, then what did you learn in ten years? :)

I think our values, our beliefs, our confidence etc make us a little rigid. And then our sense of superiority and self-esteem makes those beliefs still more rigid.

“I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth.”

Life does exactly that. Doesn't it.