Find a home for your thoughts

The one thing that we do in abundance in daily life is thinking.

Thinking about ourselves, about others, about life around us, about life away from us…..we almost never ever stop thinking.

What if instead of forcing our thoughts to stop, we start looking for good homes for them. A thought can find a home in a personal diary, a blog, a story or an article. A thought can also find a home in a piece of architecture, a film, a dress, an automobile or a painting. What we need is to find them a place they can call home. A place where they find their purpose.

Just like ‘human resource’, thought is a resource and we need to employ it in a place where it feels like it is contributing to something bigger. We can do much more with our thoughts than to while them away over futile conversations or blurt them out in a tweet.

Choices define life and vice-versa

At the core of many of us we have decided to believe in one of the two

1- Our choices define our life - We like to believe that the choices that we make, makes up for the life we live. We question our choices and understand its potential of cause and effect on our quality and direction of life.

2- Our life defines our choices - We like to believe that our life has been pre-defined to be a certain way and our choices can only be in the realm of this pre-defined life. No life changing choices can be made. Life can surprise it through its own doing but our choices matter less as a whole .

The former is an active approach to life and allows for living life more intensely as one questions every aspect of the choices one (or the others around them) makes. It allows for possibilities in oneself to change the outcome of their life.The latter is a passive approach that limits the choices one has and awaits for miracles to take one into a better state of being.

As always, the problem lies when we are on the extreme end of any of those beliefs. Our choices can define our life but not always. The factors that we are born in cannot always be bypassed by intelligent choices. On the other hand if we only rely on our life to define our choices, those very choices will reaffirm and imprison the definition of life we have for ourselves.

Believing in a healthy amount of both is the key. Adapting our own agency as per the situation and allowing the situations to take their own course when required.

Shut yourself in joyful creation

So much of what we do is walled into pigeonholes by societal expectations.

We start our creative journeys for the joy they bring to us and slowly realize there are many more that are doing the same thing. The way we are trained in our military based, authoritarian education, is then, to not find happiness and company in our interest sharing kins and learning from them but feeling competitive and constantly lacking in our abilities.

Its not easy, but also very important to protect our initial joy and expand on it. Disallow others to judge your connect with your crafts and passions. Don’t allow them to pitch you against a ’pro’ or anyone doing a better job. Don’t even allow anyone to make you feel better from someone they consider doing a lesser job. Just focus on the joy your craft brings you. The dialogues you have with your tools are the ones that allow you to understand yourself more deeply, and through yourself, the whole of humanity. Don’t let these voices be polluted by other’s concerns of where they should place you in their value spectrum.