Start talking

Have you ever felt like you want to talk it out, but no one is there to listen.

I mean there are people around you, but you are not sure that they can understand, or that they will understand your perspective. May be they have enough trouble themselves that you dont feel like troubling them with your problems. May be they are too busy with their lives that they assume that everything is ok with you. May be you dont want to get knocked off, with a comment saying that “this is ur problem! this is what you wanted to talk about!!”

Everyones world is teeming with their problems galore. While growing up, there were people around us to solve our problems or help us solve them. As you grow older, and hence wiser, you are expected to solve your own problems.

Its almost similar to the case when some one, an individual contributor is promoted as a manager responsible for several people. He is not really trained to get into those shoes, somewhere he just gets into it and does it. The similarity is in the sense that you dont always realize that ‘you’ are to solve the problem, specifically if you have got used to taking opinions and advice before taking any action.

Have you ever felt like you would even move the earth, if only ‘a word’ was said.

There are lot of people telling you all kinds of things, but that is not exactly what you wanted to hear. They are not the people whom your ears would love listening to. There are problems that we can solve, but there are problems that are ours, but we cannot solve. Specifically because our ‘circle of influence’ doesnt encompass the problem completely.

Communication is the essense of companionship in ones life. Problems can be created or problems can be solved by it. It is the way to set your stand, make the other person(s) understand your perspective, express your feelings, set limits, open boundaries and so on. It is expected that the other person does a similar thing and both can see the middle ground where they agree and understand what they disagree about.

But this is not as simple as it sounds, doesnt always happen too. We tend to mix up so many things into the words. Emotions, feelings and misinterpretations everything nicely mixed and served on the face. A communication breakdown has typical symptoms we talked about.

The human brain works by associating and indexing. Expressions, words and feelings are associated, intrepreted without regard to if they are right or wrong and then indexed inside the brain. One word fetches the entire episode, one expression breaks you down…. Thats the way brain is supposed to work. but this doesnt help in anyway.

Communication is not only verbal, it happens in gestures, body language and even the way one looks. There are several modes of communication. By modes, I mean direct face to face, over the phone, writing letters, emails, smses. A face to face communication is the best method. It allows the entire components to be seen at the same time.

Some times direct face to face is not possible and other means of communication take over. Unlike a face to face conversation, none of the other methods convey actually the implicit parameters. Written format specifically doesnt convey anything about the emotions involved. If you re-read a letter over a dozen times it might convey something that the sender never intended to. This doesnt seem to help either.

There are several levels of communication. A conversation requires atleast 2 people, any communication requires both parties to talk. If one does all the talking, or if one doesnt speak out anything, there is incongruity.

Levels of communication could vary in intensity, for instance, studded with emotions such as anger, could vary in depth, for instance, upto to what point one goes with the catch line, “my rabbit has 3 legs (hehehe, translated literally from tamil)”, how much time it takes for the other person to see a different point of view. Such variations dont always help.

How does one get out of a communication breakdown. Unless there is an attempt from either side there is no possiblity of the breakdown ending. First step is to behave as computer programmers do. Accept that there is a problem. Accept that it could have been caused by you. Accept that it needs to be solved. Accept that you need to work on it.

The world we live is not ours to keep, the family we were blessed with, the friends we grew with, none of them are ours to keep. There are only your memories that stick with you. There are somethings very rare on this earth, human life and affection is one such thing. Let not a breakdown in communication defeat you and your memories.

Science says humans took close to 10000 years to quantify verbal sounds into sentence and thereby to express oneself. Start talking…

Sometimes all it takes is just a single word to set things right, Sometimes all it takes is a simple smile to set things right.

 

A book whose shelf life has expired

I have heard about it at 3rd level, often dismissed them as romours. I felt this will never come to my circle. But it came and how.

Boy, I should not take names, I dont mean to hurt anybody, but I cannot stand it. My Chennai friends used to tease saying that its bangalore culture, and that the “times of india” feeds it. The media will refute saying we are telling whats happening.

So I confronted him. He was not like this. His was a love marriage too. I cant believe he did it. He takes it so casually that I cant digest it. He says casual flings and extra martial affairs are the norm of the day. How can the love he had for her die out. What made him seek outside, and what was he seeking? I cant understand it.

He said, “Your ideas of marriage and love has expired man. Look at you, what were you searching for. You gave that bullshit soul-mate lecture and you said you found her. But look at what has happened, she gives a damn about you”.

Yes he was right, I did give him that lecture. I told him that you need to seek that someone through your mind, trust that you will find her. Once you have found her, everything will move around to bring you together. Ask for it, good things will happen. Ask for it bad thing will happen too. Its like nature is just waiting for you to say it, it happens.  You will laugh, you will cry, but you’ll know the unknown side of you. What ever happens you’ll never be the same again. It is this person that can help you unravel yourself, and understand yourself. This was the summary of what I had told him.

He had shot it down right at that time and said it was bull shit. We agreed to disagree. I was proud that I found her, my soul mate, so many years of seeking never was lost. She did acknowledge, but somewhere things became grey. She had her own ideas about her life, I guess.

I dont know when and how I picked up the concept of soul mates. May be it started quite early. Inspite of being in love for close to seven year before marriage, I felt, my parents were not really meant to be together. They had compromised for the sake of the kids, just as any other family would have done in those days. Divorce and seperation was a pain and society put down such people with unforgiving hands.

I think the fundamental problem is lack of understanding. Not “lack of understanding” of the partner, you can never understand another person, you can only get to a degree of matching external reactions and preferences. You will never know what goes on inside their head. I think the problems stem from the “lack of understanding” of oneself. How can you understand your partner when you have not even understood yourself?

“People change, perception changes, expectations change, opinions change, everything changes” he said.

I thought love was supposed to be strong and not transient. I thought love was as deep as faith, as involuntary as breath, I thought love was supposed to bring harmony and peace of mind.

May be we are lost, may be we dont really know what love is. Butterflies are what matters to some. But then butterflies dont live long. Everybody will have their own definition of love, and we can spend hours and days arguing which or whose perception is correct. But ultimately, its all the same, its just a perception. No wonder it seems transient.

We have so many problems everyday and it seems that we dont have the strength to face them alone. But we were not meant to face them alone, we are to face them together with our partner, standing on the same sides. And that is what I believed love and marriage meant us to do.

Your relationship with another human being is a perception too. The changes people generally see in relationships are changes in the perception. It is this perception that gives you the easiest and surest way of understanding yourself. It is in the company of that someone you can know yourself truly.

The thing to understand is the mental representation of urself, your ego, isnt true. Ego is a huge bifocal lens that we hang infront of our brain. Anything that happens seems bigger that it really is and our reaction to it is usually bigger than what is actually required.

I think marriage is not a bondage. Its the ticket for a life long journey of sharing, caring and fun. Joy multiplies and sorrows are divided in this journey. A journey without ego that is. If you are on this journey, you will agree that love is not transient, you will agree that love brings harmonry and peace of mind, that love is involuntary.
“You are dreaming”, he said.

There is so much clutter around us that we cant tune in and listen with the heart. Earth is just a tiny spec in the ocean of cosmic dust. The mountains so high, the seas so large, the sky so vast, the wind so strong are just elements within this blue dot called earth. Physically we are just a tiny tots, but our egos are bigger than the universe.

Most of us walk around without the slightest inking about death and old age. Remember that death is just sitting on your shoulder and typing your story. Once it finishes, it will get you.

“Nobody gets out alive, so why care about it, live life as you please”, he said.

I agree, “the present” is the only one that you can be sure about. But who is that “you” that you are trying to please? Why is “he” asking to be pleased ? Can you spend a moment and understand who you are? what you really want.

“I just want to be happy in my own way”, he said.

Happiness is just a state of mind. You can be happy anywhere at anytime, all you need is to understand yourself. There is only the memories of us that remain in the minds of people we are related to, nothing else remains after we die. Shouldnt it be our endeavor to make those sweet and not bitter memories worth forgetting. Heaven and hell dont matter, rebirths dont matter, living without hurting, oneself or another is all that matters.

“Your concepts are dated, gone out of print”, he said.

May be thats what I am, a book whose shelf life has expired.

 

Respect for the ego

How many of us really understand ego. Ego is generally treated as a negative trait, and the word ego puts many people on the defensive, hurts the sentiments of many others, irritates and angers some others. But is that correct understanding? Is it how we are to react to this word.

Princeton dictionary defines ego “as an inflated sense of superiority over others”. I think this is the usual sense that people associate with the word ego, however I do not think that this is the correct or accurate meaning.

There is another most important definition of ego, “the “I” or self of any person; a person as thinking, feeling, and willing, and distinguishing itself from the selves of others and from objects of its thought”. Wikipedia based on Sigmund Feurd defines Ego as follows: “The Ego comprises that organised part of the personality structure which includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Conscious awareness resides in the ego, although not all of the operations of the ego are conscious.”

Sigmund feurd defines id, ego and super-ego. The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions. The Super-ego comprises that organised part of the personality structure, mainly but not entirely unconscious, that includes the individual’s ego ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency (commonly called ‘conscience’) that criticizes and prohibits his or her drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions.

There are some who say that Ego is the I sense. True there are 2 ways to look at the this I sense. It can be constructed as attaching yourself to anything that happens and say that that occured because of me, this happened because of me, he agreed because of me, they did it because of me and so on… Here you try to impress a superiority sense into others. There are people who behave so, but most of the population, and “You” in particular do not belong to this category right? I learnt it the hard way that people tend to take this definition of ego, when you refer to ego.

The other form of “I sense”, is when you do or dont do something, say or do not say something, talk or do not talk to someone, agree or do not agree with someone for the only reason that You feel that way. You will not see any logic in anything other than what you feel is logical. “It is” because you said so… Here you are trying to block any other thought/emotion/person, unconsiously or consiously. This is the ego that most of us exhibit.

But is ego required or is this something wrong to have. I was of the opinion that ego is not at all required and it should be suppressed.

But can you eliminate or supress this ego? I think you can, If you start accepting people as they are, watching all the emotions that they generate in you, you eventually will eliminiate both these senses of ego. People are wierd, its the weirdness that makes them unique.

Lets call ego that we talked about till now as negative reaction of the ego. Even though it is not as bad as it sounds, negative ego make you loose your peace of mind. That is the only sense in which I call it negative. Often there are cases where this ego leads to voilent behavior, another reason to mark this as negative ego.

There is another sense of ego, that we will henceforth call as the positive ego or just ego. It is your perceived sense of self worth. It is what allows one to be pampered, it is what allows one do things that we believe will bring happiness, in the face of risks. Flattery or adulation can boost this ego, insults and abuse can hurt this ego.

There is another term that often gets mixed up, self-esteem. Self esteem is your own understanding of your worthiness. May be there are other defintions. What is the relationship between ego and self esteem? Are they the same? Are they related ?

A friend of mine defined these as “If you think that you can do something, it is self-esteem, if you think that only you can do it, it is ego”. I guess he meant negative ego.

There is low-self esteem or the lack of it and self-esteem. We’ll not go into the specifics here. The sublities of self-esteem and ego come into picture when they start playing a role in how you react to something that happens to you, when your defenses come into play.

In my opinion, If you are quick to anger, if you quick to irritation, you can possibly have a negative ego. The size of it is inversely propotional to the time it takes to reach your peak and burst out. Some will claim that when someone hits your self-esteem, you will get angry and irritated, it got nothing to do with ego. Does it mean that you cannot get angry, does it mean that you cannot express? No, getting angry and expressing has got nothing to do with ego, it is only in the way how you carry it forward that ego plays a part.

I believe self-esteem comes into picture in the control and recovery process. Abuse, threats, hurts and insults can hurt your ego, but your self-esteem is what takes you beyond it.

They say that time is a healer. I think self-esteem is the healer. Time just plays along. But what does self-esteem heal, it heals the ego. The ego plays an important role in controlling how far you can go in and deal with emotions that you are not comfortable with. It controls the risk taking ability of an individual.

The ego can pull you to places where it can take hits. The more hits you get, your self esteem takes a dip. This dip controls the ego’s risk taking attitude. But the more successes you face, your self-esteem goes inching up. So self-esteem requires the ego to grow, and the ego requires self-esteem to care for it. Its a love affair between the two. I think Self-esteem is something that you are born with and ego is its creation. A ego is very much essential to living as much as food, air, water and sleep.

May be a low self esteem or the lack of it can create a meek ego, or a voilent ego.

Theories apart, this blog is an affer effect. Somewhere there was a disconnect, I refused to see facts, I refused to accept things, I refused to see my self-esteem taking hits. But what would you do when you believe that something is your destiny, may be you will do the samething that I did. After looking back and seeing everything that has happened, I see that a lesson has been learnt. Class over.

I now respect my ego, and yours too.