A Conscious Decision

Possibly THE most powerful tool at one's disposal.

Choosing to pursue something, choosing to try something, choosing to stick to something. Or someone.

By this I don't mean your best decisions are the ones made with your head alone. Sometimes they're the ones your heart prompted you to make and hello, things turn out brilliantly! So was that gut instinct? Perhaps. Fluke? Just as likely. And that holds good for split second decisions as well as those long thought out. But that's not the point of post at all. No, don't suggest Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It's been done. Respect.

Your heart tells you to go after something - it's this want, strong and irrational; very Nike, very Just Do It. And then your head enters the picture and says - "You know what, I want you to go after this; it makes sense in a way I can't claim to understand completely, it's not because there's a selfish, calculated 'something in it for me' in the equation, but this is what I choose for you to go after".

Do you see the difference? By identifying and acknowledging that that thing or person is what clicks with your mind and your heart you're actually upping its worth in your life. Bhav badh raha hai.

I know I often say something "makes sense" to me or doesn't. This is what I'm talking about. It needs to click with my mind. Corny, but sometimes voices from the heart need to agree with voices from the mind.

I don't have a foolproof explanation for this. At least, not yet. But I think it's better to say I don't know than to make something up to keep the cynics happy. What I do know is that this makes sense to me.

I'm gonna go back to The Sound Of Music. Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and the whole jingbang, yep. There's this line from a song Andrews sings a young girl of 16, previously her charge and now her step-daughter -

You are sixteen going on seventeen 

Waiting for life to start 

Somebody kind who touches your mind 

Will suddenly touch your heart 

That's what I'm talking about.

Ain't No Sunshine

I want to write. Pen and paper, oldschool through and through. Okay, not quite. I'd be using a ball pen on a book that's tucked away deep inside my closet, that's hardly oldschool. Perhaps the smooth paper encased in hardback makes up for that oversight. I'd like that.

I haven't written for the pleasure of writing in far too long. Just thinking about it makes me feel like a traitor to the practice. The pen and paper routine usually happened when I wanted to vent furiously about things I chose not to discuss with another. Unhealthy? Possibly. And yet that curiously elegant way of bottling things up made me happy. More than I realized at the time. Damn right hindsight is a beautiful thing.

Today, even as I have someone to talk to about absolutely everything under the sun, the issue is not that I have nothing to vent about. Or even something to get all excited about. Hardly that. Having a sounding board does not mean you run out of noise to transmit. But the motions of putting a pen to fresh, lined paper that smelt the way only refined stationery can, of sliding the nib across the faded, dated page to form words that held the promise of release, of not knowing what the next line would be but knowing I needed to see it on paper, of having muddled thoughts sort themselves into distinct, expressible words as I read what I'd just written.. it was all just so cathartic. 

I miss that simple joy. I yearn for it. I think I've lost it.

Disjoint X.

Found a new blog that keeps me reading.

Talked about labels and assurances.

Damn. Lost in the first set itself. The idea is to put down ten comments/observations/opinions that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The two sentences up there, the link was Blogs and Labels, see? Right. Let's do this again.

My cell phone's a Lib. It aborts calls.

My aunt leads a lonely life.

Faaaaaaaaack. I suck at this. Let's try it one more time.

I love a guy; said guy loves me back.

I ought to write more often, getting rusty.

Photography is beginning to scare the shit out of me.

I'd like to throw out all my jeans and stock up on shorts.

I need you to airdrop a serious hobby on my head.

Five lines and two glaringly obvious links. There's a reason the post title ends with an X. Mission bombed.