I apologize for this long delay in producing this episode.
I moved to China to start a new job.
I used to be a freelancer, but now I have to work around a schedule that revolves around
normal office hours.
This is a new territory for me.
But life is getting back to normal, and I am figuring out a way to keep producing these stories
But I have to say, I am so overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who reached out
to ask me about the next episode, and my well-being.
Thank you for all the support.
So, I want to talk about something that happened to me last month.
I was not feeling all that well.
To be a bit specific, I should say I was a prisoner in the world of thoughts.
I know it sounds dramatic, but it was every bit intense as it sounds.
What did I think about?
That’s the problem.
See, I didn’t feel like I thought anything.
It felt like the thoughts were an independent agent, imposing itself upon me.
Some thoughts, I agreed with, seemed like they were mine, but some thoughts I had to
shake it out of my system.
But the more I tried to shake it off, more of them sprang into action.
As a result of this constant battle, I was getting tired and somewhat depressed.
The outside world looked dreamy and surreal.
But everything changed one day.
Once in a month, I make day trips to Hong Kong to work from the office there.
I was tired after finishing my day’s work, and my ferry back to China was not for another
couple of hours.
I was aimlessly wandering through Kowloon Park, a large, incredibly serene and green
park in the middle of the concrete jungle, called Hong Kong.
It was almost dark, around 7pm.
The park was filled with joggers, walkers and couples sitting in the bench looking at flamingos
And then, there was this old man, doing Tai Chi near the pond.
I thought nothing of him at the first glance.
But at a closer look, it seemed like he was just there, completely in the moment.
I’ve never seen anything like it before.
I just sat there looking at him, completely mesmerized.
I began registering every sound.
The rustle of the trees, calm breeze and the distant city sounds.
I saw the Tai Chi man as part of that environment.
He was just as natural as the trees and the flamingos, and the best part was, so was I.
This incredible peace rushed over me, that everything, is exactly as it meant to be.
Including my thoughts.
They have their place, even my resistance to them has its place.
The feeling of peace continued long after I came home.
To be accurate, it continued for another three days.
I am back in the game now, but one thing that stood out from that experience was, the fact
that in those three days, I didn’t go completely thoughtless.
It is just that I didn’t judge the thoughts.
I didn’t agree or disagree with them, they were irrelevant yet they had their place.
Even now, whenever the inner world gets intense, I find myself to be focusing on the sounds.
Sounds are a constant.
Focusing on them gives me a solid ground to stand; be it the hum of the air conditioner
or people chatting somewhere in the distant night.
Once I had an anxiety attack while sitting in a car, so I closed my eyes and began focusing
on the sounds of the rain outside and the back and forth of the windshield wiper.
It’s as if I could latch on to those sounds to stay on the ground.
It seems like much of my anxiety comes from thinking.
There’s this entity that’s constantly narrating inside.
It tries to build a story around what I observe.
For example, the other day I walked into my office.
I saw my colleague sitting there.
She didn’t say anything.
Usually she would say Good Morning or at least smile.
Immediately the narrator inside me began building a story.
Why didn’t she say hi.
It’s because of our conversation yesterday.
Did you say the wrong thing?
Do we have a problem?
It’s because you don’t know how to be social and say the right thing.
You always do this.
I don’t know if this is the case with most humans, but the narrator inside me, always
knows to highlight my weakness and build a story around it.
So, what happened with my co-worker?
Turns out she was in a skype meeting, and didn’t notice me walking in.
The observation was the only fact, rest everything was built by my thoughts, which most of the
times I take it as fact, without any careful inquiry.
We could go on our whole lives, thinking something is true, just because the narrator built a
compelling story.
I rarely question or confront the narrator.
Much of my life I’ve never questioned my thoughts.
I’ve always accepted them as the most natural thing in the world, like my hands or legs,
thoughts were a part of me.
But only when I begin to question the inner narrator, I realized, how bizarre and utterly
incomprehensible of a phenomenon they actually are.
Even now, as a reflex I’ve always identify myself with my thoughts,
I find that even physicality plays a huge part in how we feel.
The line between the physical state and the mental state is often blurred.
I think external environment helps in the pursuit of being present as well.
The city I am living in is a perfect example.
I’ve never seen green integrated into a city like this before.
The weather is always somewhere around 20 degrees and the landscape is filled with mountains,
woods, rivers and all-around tropical greenery.
As a result, I often find myself getting lost in the present.
But it does take an immense amount of energy to be conscious enough to separate what I
observe, and the story the narrator is constantly building around it.
Once in a while, something like the Tai Chi man happens, or I am in a specific environment,
when I am slapped into seeing what really is, just observing and simply being.
Whenever I am in that state, it always feels like I’ve taken the invisible tainted glasses off
A feeling of
‘oh this is how it feels like, to be present’.