Saturday, September 7, 2013

A weekday wish for a thoughtful world

Friday evenings are sweet. Monday mornings, not quite.

Hobbies are energizing. Work, not quite.

Then there is this term, 'compensation package'.  As if compensating for putting up with drudgery.  It is amazing how we have unconsciously inherited several insane maladies as a part of social transactions.  The phenomenon is universal.

What really is bothersome is how we walk into such social patterns unconsciously and remain oblivious of the damage it does to us.

We then ask, "How else? Isn't it natural?".  This is another part of the problem.  We seem to be constantly in need of instructions as if life comes with an instruction manual.

The challenge for us is to find for oneself how one can break free from this weekly cycle of weekday routines and weekend ecstasy and start living fully.

There are several social patterns that contribute to this insanity.  For instance, let us investigate what drives us to be right all the time? Why do we want to prove we are right always? In most cultures, 'failure is taboo'.  The moment failure happens to an individual, he or she is supposed to feel bad. If it happens to a team, a blame game begins as to who caused it.  This pattern pushes people to defend failures with stupid logic rather than change for the better.

Let us take another example.  How do we view formal authority?  How is it related to leadership?  We mix concepts of leadership and formal authority so much that we begin to depend on structures and systems to correct problems that our egos create.  We tend to think, "what worked for X should work for Y".  Really?  It depends on what we know about what worked for X. Doesn't it? How do we know that we know all that needs to be known?

Our knowledge is always limited.  Any concept that we learn depends on our previous learning. Our previous learning are influenced by all learning prior to that.  This goes on into value system as well.

These are just a few examples. Bottom-line remains we have been force-fed prescriptions of what we should fear, what we should like, what we should hate, what we should respect, what is considered taboo, what is acceptable and what is not.  These are passed on to us as the gospel, often without adequate reasoning.  Thus we walk into traps of thought flows and patterns that society has created by default.

To break free of these is a personal challenge for each one of us.

Weekdays are as energizing as weekends when the old prescriptions are filtered out reasonably in what we see and do today... every other day.

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