There is this very interesting animated video which a friend showed me the other day.
The video featured 13 men, carrying heavy buckets of water from left to right. When the video starts, a warning message appears, "Notice the thirteen men in the video. One of them would drop the bucket. If you notice which one drops, you win".
Being my usual self, I got into my I-will-win-no-matter-what mode within seconds. For the next thirteen minutes, I observed the 13 men, painfully entering the screen from left, carrying the buckets in their hand and exiting from right.
When the video got over, I gave my friend a quizzical look. "Damn, no body dropped their bucket", I exclaimed.
"Wait, the video is not over yet", he said.
A message appeared on screen now. It said, "Did you notice that a bear appeared on the stage during the video, danced around and left?"
"Hell, no! I was watching the video closely. I didn't notice any bear coming on the stage", I exclaimed.
At my insistence, my friend replayed the video again. And there it was, halfway through the video, a white bear appeared on the corner of stage, jiggled around and left. I, on my part, was dumbfounded!
Was I really that stupid to not notice a huge bear? Or wait, maybe I could use a visit to the eye doctor.
"Well, that's not the case. It's all about your focus", my friend explained.
"When you were watching the video, you were too busy trying to find fault with one of the 13 men that you forgot to notice anything else in the video."
The moral of the story is simple - We only see what our eyes want to see and our eyes will not see what our mind does not know.
Maybe, that's what I have been doing for quite some time now. Focusing too hard on certain things while completely ignoring others.When I started writing this blog, it was a way to vent out my feelings and experiences, even if they didn't mean anything to anyone but me.
Sometimes it felt nice to come up with a "good" post which people liked and appreciated. However, I was not trying to become some super talented writer whose pen spewed only thought-provoking words. I was just laying bare my feelings, because sometimes its good to get the word out.
But that's just it!!!!
It gets stupid when you start focusing too hard on something that you used to do effortlessly earlier. Be it writing, drawing, acting, selling, cooking anything!
It becomes more of a distraction than an ease when something which is the source of your catharsis becomes the reason for your distraction. Maybe, that's what I stop need to do. Trying too hard where I don't need to.
This whole time when I did not record my experiences or memories simply seems as it just "flew by". Truth is, I stopped taking time out to appreciate little things, record special experiences My entire focus throughout this time was to make something out of my life. So much so, that I forgot to see what my life has to offer me right now. I looked straight through it. That's precisely when I missed the point. ,
Writing was a distraction. Taking out time to write seemed like a burden. When I would sit down to write, ideas wouldn't come because frankly, I never bothered to look up and notice things around me as they are.
My entire focus was to bring back my original style till the time I sat wondering,"Heck, I don't even know what IS my original style. How can I recreate something I have no fucking idea about."
Truth is, I might miss writing sometimes. But what I miss more is acknowledging and appreciating the day-to-day experiences that life has to offer me. Because my real learnings are from the experiences I had. Not from some lame posts on a virtual platform.
Maybe my original style lies in observing my life from a closer perspective. Documenting it in a blog could only qualify as a formality I do in the end of that process. I don't really miss the writing, I just miss the memories, which could have been!
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self ~ Cyril Connolly
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