EPO: EMOTIONAL PROCESS OUTSOURCING

A few days back, while explaining a ‘Business Studies’ lesson to my cousin, I learned a life lesson myself. I was explaining to her what does the term ‘Outsourcing’ means in a business and how does it work. Outsourcing is a common practice where a company hires an outside party to perform certain services or jobs to improve their efficiency and reduce costs. One of the basic principles is that they rarely hire an outside party to perform a business’s core or primary function.

I could not help but think how this outsourcing is also attached to our emotions, thoughts, and feelings. Humans are social creatures and we need strong support to fulfil our social, economic, and psychological needs. These covid times have taught us the importance of the strength our family and friends can give us, even if it’s from the other side of the screens. But the other most important lesson we have realized is that the quality of our life is largely determined by the quality of relationship that we share with ourselves.

Just how a business performs its core function by itself and this core function determines its level of success, we humans also need to nourish our equation with our body, mind, and soul. If we don’t do that, our other relationships will never grow in their full glory. Something will always be missing and no matter how far we wander away, we will never be able to find the missing piece. (This reminds me of the plot of Imtiaz Ali films, but I can’t help with giving filmy references😉)

Putting pressure on others to process our emotions is a perfect recipe for disaster. They can help and support us wholeheartedly but they can’t do the processing part because such out-of-the-world technology is yet to be invented. The concept of being gentle to our thoughts and feelings is very alien to us. The moment we are forced to be alone with them is the moment they start haunting us. In such a situation, the mind becomes a battleground and we often end up losing.

We all know that in this journey of life, we spend most of our time with ourselves, then why not try to be friends with the constant companion, i.e., ourselves. Being friends does not mean that it will always be a smooth ride, instead, it means that we will be able to travel on the bumpy road better.

Today the conversations around self-love, self-care, and self-acceptance are happening more than ever. And if we treat them not only as Social Media concepts, then they can transform our lives. These are not merely fancy words limited to our Instagram lives but they should be a way of living our real lives. We all know that being loving, kind, and empathetic to each other works like magic, we all have experienced that in our lives. Just a sweet good morning or a random act of kindness from a stranger holds the power to transform a bad day into a hopeful day, then just imagine what being loving and kind to ourselves can do. And it will not only transform our own lives but also every life that we come in contact with.

We, humans, are a complete puzzle in ourselves and yet at the same time a very tiny piece in the puzzle of this Universe. We all will always need to come together and be there for each other to complete the puzzle of the Universe. But what you are being asked by the Universe is to take care of your part, and when the other parts will come together, a marvel will occur!

You will listen to the Universe, won’t you?

UN-WEAVING THE THREADS

One fine evening, while chatting with my Grandmother and observing her knit beautiful woolen patterns, I realized an interesting fact about life. She was busy knitting, but today instead of creating something she was unraveling the wool threads. I asked her what she was doing and with all the calmness, she replied,

“Pattern galat ja raha tha toh aage badhne se pehle use theek kar rahi hoon”

(The pattern was going wrong so I am fixing it before moving ahead)

This very sentence made me revisit my old friend, the ‘deep-thinking mode’! Our thoughts, actions, and even reactions are nothing but a series of patterns that we are knitting together to create our lives. The wool threads are available in different colors and we have a choice to mix a variety of colors and weave the pattern which will provide us warmth!

But is weaving blindly our only job? Isn’t unraveling the threads when necessary, equally important?

We are so busy running this race (God knows where the finish line is) that we tend to ignore the finer details. I agree that it’s difficult to slow down in the age where we are expected to work and grow at the speed of a bullet train. Our systems are continuously fed with the feeling that even if we stop for a second, we will be left behind in this race of maniacs. But what’s the use of running this marathon at the cost of losing what’s truly important? What will you do of the reward that comes at the price of your well-being?

There’s no harm in taking a pause and observing where we have gone wrong. It requires great strength to admit our mistakes and an even greater inner strength to amend them. To err is human and what’s equally human is the fact that we have the power to learn from those mistakes or to recognize the patterns that push us in committing the same errors over and over again. I read somewhere that the Universe keeps on creating the same situations for us until we learn what it’s trying to teach us. Dear mortal beings! Even the Universe is asking us to pay attention but we are too busy being rebels, even if it’s without a cause.

When the threads are tangled, we can easily lose the sight of our purpose and a feeling of doubt blocks our perspective. In times like these, we realize the importance of letting go of the baggage that is weighing us down.

This process of letting go is just like the annual Diwali Cleaning when every nook and corner of the house is cleaned, all the junk is discarded and a room is made for the bigger and better things to come. Our lives also demand a cleaning session, once in a while. To make a way for greater things, we need to let go of habits and thoughts that are hindering our growth. It’s ironic how we clean our phone’s memory religiously by deleting the extras but when it comes to doing that for ourselves, we hide behind the excuse that it can be done later. And we all know that this ‘later’ never really comes.

We all are reading great articles about how Nature is healing these days. If we give it a thought on what actually initiated this healing, we will come to the conclusion that- it took a bit of slowing down, it took a pause and time to reflect upon on things.

We must keep in mind that Healing is not always a pretty Instagrammable process but it’s important! And it works in different ways for different people. Some do it with the help of a journal, a friend, a therapist, or all of these. But it all starts with ‘Acceptance’. We need to accept the fact that the threads need to be untangled. Even if others don’t see it but if you feel choked by them, the work needs to be done. No one really gets to decide which healing is bigger than others. Our emotions work in different ways and so does the healing process. In fact, that’s the beauty of it! We all are allowed to do this at our own pace and in our own ways. There’s no certified way of doing it. What’s important is feeling a sense of liberation when you do the cleaning! It will only make you stronger and take you to the places you had no idea about. What a joy it is to finally let go of things holding you back and breathing in the air that calms your senses!

We all have a Marie Kondo hidden inside ourselves, it’s only a matter of time when we start decluttering our lives and see it flourishing!

*HAPPY DECLUTTERING AND CREATING THE SPACE THAT TRULY SERVES YOUR PURPOSE* 😊

T(R)APISM

As my college trimester was coming to an end and the pile of assignments was building up (all thanks to the old friend, Procrastination), I realized a big truth about life. Isn’t it funny how all the big and world changing ideas come to us only during exams! So, my great observation of this trimester was that we deal with our emotions in the same way we deal with our assignments. We play our favorite game of PROCRASTINATION with them as well.

Humans are trapped inside their self-created web of complexities. We are afraid to encounter our feelings when they are happening so usually we delay the process! This delay is nothing but an open invitation to more chaos. When did we forget that our biggest gift is the ability to experience a range of emotions? Each of these emotions is like a train which is meant to take us on different connecting stations in the journey of life but we are always in a rush to carry the next train that we miss out on the purpose of why we landed on a particular station! (P.S. Just discovered that living in Mumbai teaches you to bring train references in all conversations)

Do you all remember the story of a lion who gets trapped in a hunter’s net? Now just think of yourself in the place of that lion but the catch here is that we have no external hunter! In this human version of this story, we ourselves are allowing our emotions to come, party together and form a net which is invisible but yet feels the heaviest.

Life is not meant to exist only in one color. This roller coaster ride will always be accompanied by different shades and moods. And the truth is that we can’t run away from any of them. Surely, we are allowed to decorate our lives with happy shades but what about the dark, sad ones? Since when did running away from them and unknowingly weaving a trap for yourself became a millennial trend? Running away from your unsettled emotions is probably like a never-ending marathon. No matter how fast and far you run, the demons will continue to follow you. Instead we need to accept them and gather the courage to face or destroy them but don’t run away otherwise they’ll keep showing up like unwanted guests on a Sunday noon.

O Human! Stop and introspect. Allow yourself to ACCEPT and understand what you are going through, tell your heart it’s okay to feel and please know that if you look out for help then this world is blessed with empathetic listeners but it all starts with you accepting the situation! Don’t forget that you are meant to go places and live your beautiful life but that extra baggage of a trapped box really needs to be dropped!

HAVE A HAPPY JOURNEY 🙂

 

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

A front-page news headline read-

“Humans will hear from the intelligent aliens this decade.”

But in the small corner of the paper, a neglected headline shouted,

“Surviving the age of Mass Distraction, lonelier than ever before.”

The above irony is the sad truth we all are breathing. We are living in the times where we are working day and night to establish a connection with the outer space but totally missing out on the real human connection present on our beloved Earth. Why? May be because the realm of human interaction is out of Google’s reach!

Rabindranath Tagore’s famous saying ‘A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it’ has become the modern-day lifestyle mantra. We, homo sapiens, have lost the address of compassion, empathy and humanity in the busy lanes of technological developments.

Let’s rewind back in time. When the process of human evolution began, our ancestors realized that if we want to survive and flourish then we can’t do it alone. They decided to fight the elements which posed danger to humans, together! They ultimately developed the art of making weapons for safety purposes but still the greatest weapon in the time of adversity was collective team efforts! They made a number of inventions but never tried to use those as a substitute to human skills. They created a balance between their logical and emotional brain and witnessed a revolution!

No doubt that our generation of millennials is technologically the most advanced! We have managed to achieve wonders which our forefathers didn’t even imagine but the point we have clearly missed here is that- Balance is the key to sustainability. Our scientific inventions will never be a substitute to our emotional intelligence and vice versa.

It is believed that the human brain is not a single working organism. The different parts control different responses which means that mother nature wanted us to work on both the logical as well as the emotional responses of this treasure called ‘brain’. But don’t we, pseudo intellectual beings, have the tendency to disappoint mother nature? We have trained the logical part of the brain so much that it has started to over shadow our emotional well being. The voice of our emotions i.e. our instinct has become an ‘endangered species’. When was the last time you gave your instinct a chance to speak without dressing up it in the logical costume?

This imbalance is slowly and silently eating our lives. It has disturbed both our inter personal as well as intra personal relationships. The human virtues of patience, compassion, empathy and love are missing and instead of digging deeper into ourselves, we are finding an easy way of replacing them with something superficial. We don’t want to make an effort because each individual think that he is the busiest creature on this planet. But O human! Take a pause and breathe, what’s the fun of running the whole day and going to bed with a heavy heart? Instead, let us think where have we gone wrong and how we can brave this war, together!

Otherwise, we will be known as a generation who themselves became ‘robots’ in the process of scientifically creating one. I fear the day when we will wake up and our world will be divided into two robo-zones: Human Robots and Scientific Robots. And who knows who will be the master and who will be the slave. All I know is that it will be a day of ‘Robo Chaos’ where instead of overflow of emotions, we will see a flood of binary codes!

In the words of the great writer Charles Dickens,

“There is a wisdom of the head and there is a wisdom of the heart.”

This statement is nothing but absolute truth. Wisdom of the head is there to create new ideas and develop the never before heard theories but at the same time, the wisdom of the heart is there too. It is the one which will help us strike a balance and will help us go a long way. Let us not forget that. The time has come to ‘Humanize’ this process of revolution!

WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

We, the homo sapiens, are made of stories. No, there is no denying of the great discovery made by Mr. Robert Hooke that ‘cell’ is the basic unit of life. But the other side of the coin says that each cell in our bodies has a story to tell. It is just waiting for us, earthly beings, to pay attention to it.

Right from our childhood, we are introduced to this dynamic world through an entry pass known as ‘Bedtime Stories’. Those characters become our companions, they take us on a ride and end up teaching us life lessons which act as bricks to the foundation of a glorious future! Admit it, we all have wanted a role reversal with our favourite Disney Characters. (I always wanted to be friends with Genie) Why? Because their stories transported us to a world we only dream of. But this can’t be the only reason why such a large part of our growing up years is invested in these fantasy stories! The deep-rooted reason is to introduce us to the fact that there are stories inside us, waiting to take us on a journey of metamorphosis.

As we grow up, we start living inside a bubble of comfort! This bubble doesn’t allow us to pay attention to the purpose that resides inside us. This purpose is nothing but the combination of stories we have accumulated so far.  We become so busy finding it in the outside world that we forget that the magic is inside us. The answers we are searching in the busy lanes of our chaotic life actually reside in the corner of our hearts! The magic is ready to happen but Oh my dear Magician! you are searching for it in the wrong box.

We, the generation of Millennials, are also hit by a new-age ‘story syndrome’ where our ‘Insta Stories’ have managed to become our centre of attraction. Our status updates consume all our time and getting that right profile picture is our biggest concern! Remember that we are the ones who are supposed to manage our beloved social media, vice versa was never meant to be a part of the plan.

No amount of spending time on these advanced gadgets can replace human connection. Just like how everyone has an Internet story to post, similarly we all have real conversations and stories to tell but the tragedy is that the latter part finds 0 listeners! Have we all lost the password to log in to ‘Human Conversation Database’? The answer is simple- we just need to take a step and be ready to embrace our fellow magicians to successfully enter this database.

We all are lost in this maze and the best way to come out of this is to do it together. All our stories are a part of a bigger story that connects us. Once we decide to identify the voice inside us and learn to balance the roles of a narrator and the listener, we all will welcome this new dawn together! We are meant to do wonders, let’s not disappoint Mother Nature on this.

In the words of Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

“But how could you live

and have no story to tell?”

Find your story, your purpose! The world is waiting to experience your kind of unique magic. Don’t devoid it of a once in a lifetime opportunity.