Be Lonely, Be Your Best by Santosh Jha - HTML preview

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We All Have The First Right To Be Lonely

To Ruminate About Life-Living Wellness

There is a facility among cattle and many other hoofed mammals, which is so very beneficial for their survival and it is called – Rumination. There is a word called Regurgitation, which means, taking the swallowed food back into the mouth. Then rumination happens, which means, the animals chews again the consumed food slowly and nicely, so that it could be digested well and its beneficial micronutrients could be extracted.

We all understand why evolution endowed this facility of rumination to the hoofed mammals. These animals are always the prime preys of the predator animals, who survive on their flesh. Therefore the hoofed animals are always in a hurry and devour their food in the open, as fast as possible, so that they could not fall prey to predators. However, the food they swallow without chewing cannot be digested and nutritional elements cannot be extracted that fast and that wholly. That is why evolution engendered this unique endowment of providing them with four stomachs and this facility of moving their food back from the stomach to the mouth again, which they chew in leisure and assured peace at a safe place.

For humans, there are loads of things happening all around us and in our drift and fast-paced life; we are just consuming everything, like those hoofed animals. We all need to be empowered to evolve a facility of mental or intellectual Regurgitation and Rumination. Like the hoofed mammals, we humans are also in a fast-paced drift – focusing solely on consumption and possession of life attainments, not ever bothering to chew them well, before stacking them in our life-living time-space stomach.

We all need to either slow down the process of swallowing, chewing them right then and there, which seems almost impossible in our contemporary cultures. Or, settle in a leisure and assured space of lonely being, where we could regurgitate the happenings of the day or the week, and then ruminate mentally and intellectually to chew them to a digestible and healthy state of things.

So many things keep happening around us, which impact us so badly and critically. Still, we seldom understand how and why things happened and what energized this chain of happenings. As we talked earlier, destiny is a causality, which may have many random elements, still it has good many factors, which we can bring in our self-control, thus aligning our destiny the way wish it to be. Being in happy self-awareness and self-control to understand the elements in our ambient milieus, to design a causality of our own liking and shape is empowerment. This empowerment has to be inculcated and nurtured.

This option to avail the facility of being lonely and having a qualitative leisure time for ourselves, gives us this opportunity to sit back, regurgitate the factsheet of happenings to the conscious mind and then ruminate over things in conscious correlation. Evolution has definitively provided us with this facility of conscious rumination in the form of the emotion of desire for solitude. It is our mind’s cultural confusion and conflict that we label this empowering facility as some wrong thing by labelling it as loneliness.

Humanity has already understood the futility of so many populist perceptions we have. The scientists have been warning us that we all have developed a wrong notion of this desirability to be happy all the time. They insist that nobody can be happy all the time and this desire itself is a psychological dysfunction. This obsession to be happy and thrilled all the time leads us to two dangerous situations.

  • First, we start to assign ourselves to multitasking, to maximize the joy and thrill in our lives. This is based on the populist notion that more action means more fun.
  • Secondly, we go on a drive of extreme consumption, without examining the long-term value, worth and utility of the consumption.

Science confirms; the brain cannot handle more than two tasks at a time. Naturally, we become more drifted and conflicted. Also, we tend to clutter our brains and mind consciousnesses more and more, each day we live.

That is why, we all need to stop, pull the car of our lives off the fast-lane expressway drive of populist contemporary culture of overdrive of consumption and mad multitasking. As we stop, move out, find quality leisure time for our self, we begin to understand the 3Cs of life and their importance in our wellness and excellence.

We have a brilliant example of how drift and flux of our lives in contemporary clutter culture is taking a huge toll on our wellness and personal excellence and how we can stop that by just being lonely and sparing time for us to ruminate over things intelligently. The current data over millions of divorce, all over the globe, especially in developed and highly liberalized cultures brings out two very critical points for rumination. The data says, two top reasons for growing cases of divorces are –

  1. Even just before marriage, so many people are not sure, why exactly they are marrying. In many cases, even when the rings and vows are being exchanged, either one of the partners or both already have doubts about the real and true ‘utility and worth’ of the union taking place. They are confused as what exactly they want out of the marriage.
  2. Many people actually are not sure what they want out of their lives. In that state of flux, they enter the institution of marriage and they are naturally not sure, what they wish out of the marriage.

It has to be accepted that the data may not be truthfully representing the state of mind consciousnesses of so many people involved in marriages, across different cultures and geographical areas, as generalizing such deep and intense emotions and feelings of so many people involved in divorce in different circumstances may not be that precise to be quantified in such singular bracket.

Still, it is accepted by most analysts and psychologists that not only in marriages, in other key aspects of life too, like family relationships, friendships, jobs, careers, sex, passion, etc, people show this gradually rising tendency of wavering and general attitudinal volatility. This surely is the drift, which the contemporary culture of modernism is engendering. We do loads of things, as probably everyone is doing, or it is just pop thing to do. Yet, we are not definitively sure, why exactly we are doing what we are doing!

That is the crucial point of conscious rumination. As we talked earlier, destiny is a mix of random elements of happenings as well as conscious and self-controlled efforts of an individual. If this mix loses its judicious poise, if random and uncontrolled elements outbalance the mix, all causalities go out of our hands and we land ourselves in the deep ocean of flux and drift.

It is a growing realism that often, even in core life-living choices like – marriage, choice of food, lifestyle priorities, sex, intimacy, careers, growing number of people are either very casual, while making choices or they are not categorically decisive. A survey shows, one third Americans accept that it is tougher to know what is the right food to eat than file their complex tax returns. This lack of exactness and definitiveness in so many important life-living choices adds to the drift and flux of consciousness. Naturally, this leads to affected cognition and causality about righteousness and appropriateness of life-living realism.

Psychologists say that this casual approach or indecisiveness should never be judged as some dysfunctional behaviour or psychosis. There are so many reasons for such a state of drift in life, which is growingly being accepted as normal. The troubles unfold here.

Some believe, this is an attitudinal issue as many people in liberal modern cultures never stop for a moment to ponder over the issue of appropriateness or righteousness of an action or behaviour. Usually, people are scared of being lonely and alone. Everyone loves to be part of the crowd – inseparable part of the crowd behaviour of the collective consciousness, which feels happy and thrilled in doing whatever the celebrities do or what the markets and media portray as the whole world as doing.

It is always easy knowledge to know what others are doing than knowing what exactly the right thing to do is!

May be, there is this revolting attitude towards all things in cultures, which have traditionally been labelled as appropriate. This contemporary celebrity culture also adds to this trend as the pop belief is – being a celebrity means not doing things the way all do but doing those things and that way, which is definitively not appropriate and commonplace. So, a girl or a boy may never blink an eye, before dressing up in a way, not even thinking about appropriateness of the dress. This everything is okay and not worth thinking twice, has become a habit and part of subconscious mind. Rather, more inappropriate it sounds, more chic it becomes in celebrity driven pop culture.

There can be so many reasons. But the reality is that most of us are not even stopping a moment, not willing to be lonely enough to let our higher consciousness question and check the utility, worth and value of whatever we are doing. It is rather very clichéd and un-ceremonially boring to stop and ruminate. Going with the wind and being with the drift suits fine to average people in the contemporary pop culture.

May be, we are not very lucky like the hoofed mammals, who have this rumination facility biologically, still important it is that we use this idea of rumination for our wellness. We need to do it, at least mentally and ideationally. We have this intellectual faculty and facility to regurgitate and ruminate about the trends happening all around us and the precious data available to chew in leisure about what we can do to be a better person in future. Thanks to technology, we live in a world, where knowledge is where you sit, just a click away!

It is a humble wish, not only for every individual but for the societies across the world. Let us be wise, let us regurgitate and then ruminate. We need it. We all are better off when we stop and move off the mad mainstream of populist culture and accept the utility of being lonely. If there is something, which empowers us, we should not let it go unused.

This facility is with all humans – we all have the first right to be lonely, to be in a happy individualistic space of ‘I’ alone, and to be in the sanity of solitude, to understand the mechanism and process of 3Cs to empower our consciousnesses for life living wellness and personal excellence.

Yes, no doubt, most of us have this culturally wrong notion about the true meaning and sense of loneliness, which makes us run away from it and accept it as some sort of dysfunctional trait or state of things.

We shall talk about the true meaning and utility of being lonely later.

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