Blizzard

Nature is by far the best cure for passing time. Problem in passing time is a common boredom oriented disease. I have met extrovert complain about boredom. Even Issac Asimov said this. I do not have to believe it. It is belief that add weight to visions. It is this belief that converts the unreal to real. Be it the reality distortion field of Steve Jobs of Apple fame, or the incurable boredom mentioned by Asimov, without belief they are nothing. And I believe that nature has that magic to give those timeless moments. Oceanside, raindrops on the window or a nasty blizzard that sweeps snow powders onto the interstate roadway; every interruption to the normal (busy) life bring forth by nature can steal the boredom away from my mind. It supplants such the unbelievable busy-ness of being busy and plants a strong sense of time and in turn timelessness. An insatiable curiosity for the believer.

I was driving through one of those moments. I had to be careful and sober. A bad move and I could be blocking another 100 cars behind me, including myself. This could lead me into potential stagnation in the road thick with snow, gradually leading to a pause in life and imminent boredom of staying on the road, going nowhere. Definitely, I did not want it. Unconsciously, I needed to avoid it. I could be careful. What better way to be serious at the job at hand, to reach in one piece, without getting stuck; drive cautiously. At some turns it the car slid, losing traction, reminding me of the childhood memories of hitting my friends’ electrical car in the amusement park. The jolts that used to follow was missing, the excitement all the same. I am not a child anymore; or am I? Who cares? I could be on the road sliding and driving at 50% of the speed limit, reach home safe and think about this memory.  I was and I am.  I beat boredom and I beat fake confidence. There was no reality distortion; I was in reality and out by timeless thoughts. All the wild whiteness around me, white desert, naked trees, blowing winds at 40 miles per hour, could transform me for some time. Not forever, into the addictive summit of timelessness. I could recall that moment and feel the same, even at the heated comfort of my living room desk. Momentarily, to be immersed in that timelessness. To be mesmerised.

-Sense of Time series-

• Sense of Time - I would wake up everyday. Just like any other day. This was yet another day. Exciting as usual. A running clock adds to the excitement of awaiting adventure. And I start upon a new one. This time it is about time. And it is time. Time changes and now it was forcibly changed. The circadian …
• Vanishing point - An average timeline of  a human can be drawn starting from birth to school, progressing to university and job and marriage and help repeat all the same for the kids. This canned solutions in life is a proven time tested sequence. The authority of which is questioned only by a few. So far, the biggest …
• Wake Up - Work life habits are like rock. I would wake up at 5.30 am. Listen to the soothing sound from my phone. The wake up call with a Native American touch to it, resembling the flute of Carlos Nakai. In the background the birds chirp and the wake up call for a hunter, ready to pick …
• Blizzard - Nature is by far the best cure for passing time. Problem in passing time is a common boredom oriented disease. I have met extrovert complain about boredom. Even Issac Asimov said this. I do not have to believe it. It is belief that add weight to visions. It is this belief that converts the unreal …

Wake Up

Work life habits are like rock. I would wake up at 5.30 am. Listen to the soothing sound from my phone. The wake up call with a Native American touch to it, resembling the flute of Carlos Nakai. In the background the birds chirp and the wake up call for a hunter, ready to pick up the gears and go on a mission. The “Bird’s signature” ends with subtle rise in tempo, the hunter in the mind wake up and starts walking to the wild, on a mission and he can hear his footsteps making slight splashes on the stream that he has to cross, to his mission, to hunt. I wake up. Pull myself out the bed, not sure if I wanted to.

My eyes get adjusted to the ambient light. The creepy shades of tree branches vanish from the side walls. I start staring at the window blankly. Silhouette of trees start to differentiate with the overall darkness. It starts to color itself. The habit has been built,  the hue of dark violet imbue the sky while the uncertainty of the day fills me. And into the colorful life I turn my consciousness.

What does this day promise. An empty uncertainty ? A wish for more hangs in the air. Like a jacket ready to be worn, to head out onto the snowy day,  to be held together so the winds may not snatch. To keep it close to me, is it the jacket which holds me together, or is it me? Nevertheless, we make an inseparable pair. One is lifeless , other full of life, covered by the dead. The dead cells that protect the life inside. The past is not haunting, through the dead it shields the live, the alive, which gradually join the dead, making the future covered with the past. Some of the past , like the nails I clip them, file them to make them look good. Some of the dead cells are rubbed off, pulled away, far from life and washed down the drain with the shower. And some more which still clings to the new and young, sometime, very rarely fail to protect as an accidental gash splits the live and dead and the upcoming. Then some future cells are lost in bleeding, a lost future, and a hurried action by the dead to cover up what is alive, somehow resembling a shame that is to be hidden from the public, though not perfect, leaving a scar, as a mark of history, a point to remember.

With wakeful times, dreams become day-dream. Day which is repellent for dreary eyed ghosts of memory with dream that keep us alive and awake. Ready to take on challenges, come what may. Warmth of blood activating the muscles, thoughts of actions being pumped into them in preparation. There is no time for the drag, the unwanted pull of the past, a burden on the go  I wash them all away with the morning shower with a feeling, of timelessness creating a veil enclosing me, in tiny drops of water.

 

-Sense of Time series-

• Sense of Time - I would wake up everyday. Just like any other day. This was yet another day. Exciting as usual. A running clock adds to the excitement of awaiting adventure. And I start upon a new one. This time it is about time. And it is time. Time changes and now it was forcibly changed. The circadian …
• Vanishing point - An average timeline of  a human can be drawn starting from birth to school, progressing to university and job and marriage and help repeat all the same for the kids. This canned solutions in life is a proven time tested sequence. The authority of which is questioned only by a few. So far, the biggest …
• Wake Up - Work life habits are like rock. I would wake up at 5.30 am. Listen to the soothing sound from my phone. The wake up call with a Native American touch to it, resembling the flute of Carlos Nakai. In the background the birds chirp and the wake up call for a hunter, ready to pick …
• Blizzard - Nature is by far the best cure for passing time. Problem in passing time is a common boredom oriented disease. I have met extrovert complain about boredom. Even Issac Asimov said this. I do not have to believe it. It is belief that add weight to visions. It is this belief that converts the unreal …

Vanishing point

An average timeline of  a human can be drawn starting from birth to school, progressing to university and job and marriage and help repeat all the same for the kids. This canned solutions in life is a proven time tested sequence. The authority of which is questioned only by a few. So far, the biggest joke has been, people who do PhDs become researchers and award winners, Masters degree holders assist the higher level tasks and assume a better position in relation to a Bachelors holders who can offset the difference in relation by experience. And Lo comes a business graduate with some idea, and good communication skills but unable to create anything depend on professional Masters , Engineers and Accountants to help surround him so the idea can be fruitful and s/he will manage, who in turn is controlled by Government regulations and to top it off politicians who have virtually no clue on what to do except get votes and keep their chair ( Indian context). And there have been people , Ministers who have hardly been to proper schooling but control whole education department of state. Nothing bad about them not being canned, or dressed like the preparation of a law student to be a judge. Nothing offensive. People are people and we accept them in that way. Who are you and me to change people and attitude. We can help build solutions, bring it to people, enabling them with technologies, but not force people to change their attitude. Attitude is developed from within. In relation to the learning, if someone does not have that attitude to learn. Why force it ? They may be more than happy in the position they are in. Hey, that is why they are in that situation , right ? Then why worry. No news is good news. If there is no news of worry on their part that is good. And as time progress , we have accomplished various things among a truckload of failures. We keep failing, falling, rising up, one step, success, among hundred falls, sometimes hurting, sometimes breaking bones, we never stopped. We keep moving. The act of brownian motion ( Shiva tandavam) or universal vibration. I am happy to have introduced to this relation between physics, spiritual idea and practicality by a Chemistry professor. That was mind-blowing. And that is exactly why I remember it even now after 10+ years of hearing it first, and only once. This sounded great.

 

Zooming back to reality, some 8 years back I was talking to my friend in one of the huge classrooms that we had. He was apparently struggling with his courses, while I crossed the bar every time by luck. There was struggle, but it did not hurt much. I took it easy.  The last bench was unoccupied. Rare. Compared to the mayhem that is generally associated with backbenchers who create ruckus even when the class is in progress. They had gone to in pursuit of whatever fantasizes them. We were left in the dust. Yes, though we have good amount of greenery and excellent climate the classrooms were dusty. I believe it was more of the dust in the mind. There was no clarity. What are people going to do. It was global recession, American trend is that whatever they do is global and international. There are massive impacts because of nations in general and USA is a heavy weight champion in this regard. And we were in dust, because someone lied. And a group of people lied. That lie was taken to be truth, democracy is crazy. And here we were sitting in this classroom, not sure were things were headed. About job search and direction of life. These are times that I feel timelessness. The time simply stops. And the clock grinds to halt so I can easily take pictures of these moments without worrying about the shutter speed. Our classrooms were very well ventilated and had natural sunlight to work with. The day was bright but future was not. Time simply stopped. My classmate asked me about the examinations in general. I wanted to help him. I let him ask. How can I force myself to help him. I waited. He asked me something that no one ever asked me, no classmates ever discussed, no professor mentioned this in class or in personal interaction. That was one question that still haunts sometimes. The implications was beyond classes. He asked me to give him a relation on learning. How the courses in our syllabus were connected  ? How does one course in first semester connect with a course on third semester. Just like the canned life , I mentioned before our syllabus in University of Calicut was also canned. There is a syllabus to follow. Common for all applied electronics and instrumentation engineers from first semester to sixth semester and few electives offered for 7th and the 8th semester. In total it was 3 electives for the whole 8 semesters which amounted to 4 years of engineering study. And therefore, it must be pretty easy to link the canned courses. I sat with him, listed the courses on paper. Tried to link related courses in group. And yeah! it made sense. It was someone sensible who made the course. We missed the forest for the tree. We were taking one course at once without a thought about how they all were the building blocks of electrical and instrumentation systems. That was a moment of revelation. Here was something I could learn, thanks to him, because he asked such a thoughtful question. And then the pieces came together. We divide to conquer and unite them for strength. We needed to hold both the bigger picture and individual segments in relation to the larger perspective. And there a peripheral course called Engineering Graphics made sense, though the professor had mentioned in the first year that this course has no direct application in our program, he did not connect or link it to applications of electrical engineering for us. It was for us to discover, to connect , to learn, to paint the bigger picture one section at a time. Now, that was learning at a different level.

With time the picture gets bigger, revealing only little sense overall. Nevertheless, I keep working at a corner here or somewhere dis-contiguous elsewhere. My site of work appears random. Clock keeps ticking. My picture has more color and more figures in it now. How are they related ? Though, I am not cent percent sure I keep working at it. And the sense of time vanishes. Recalling my Engineering Graphics lessons reminds me of the concept of vanishing point, will that vanishing point be my point of convergence ?

 

 

-Sense of Time series-

• Sense of Time - I would wake up everyday. Just like any other day. This was yet another day. Exciting as usual. A running clock adds to the excitement of awaiting adventure. And I start upon a new one. This time it is about time. And it is time. Time changes and now it was forcibly changed. The circadian …
• Vanishing point - An average timeline of  a human can be drawn starting from birth to school, progressing to university and job and marriage and help repeat all the same for the kids. This canned solutions in life is a proven time tested sequence. The authority of which is questioned only by a few. So far, the biggest …
• Wake Up - Work life habits are like rock. I would wake up at 5.30 am. Listen to the soothing sound from my phone. The wake up call with a Native American touch to it, resembling the flute of Carlos Nakai. In the background the birds chirp and the wake up call for a hunter, ready to pick …
• Blizzard - Nature is by far the best cure for passing time. Problem in passing time is a common boredom oriented disease. I have met extrovert complain about boredom. Even Issac Asimov said this. I do not have to believe it. It is belief that add weight to visions. It is this belief that converts the unreal …

Sense of Time

I would wake up everyday. Just like any other day. This was yet another day. Exciting as usual. A running clock adds to the excitement of awaiting adventure. And I start upon a new one. This time it is about time. And it is time. Time changes and now it was forcibly changed. The circadian rhythm of the human mammal with all its intestinal fortitude could not hold the time. The norm of life in this part of the world. Fall back and change back from daylight savings to normal time. For whom, I asked ? I received replies of various tones, repeating the old farmer’s story who wanted to save time in the form of daylight savings, invariably the justification reassure that farmer’s depend directly on the daylight and sunrise, not the artificial clock. A farmer’s life is not a “9 to 5” joke with coffee breaks meant for gossip and lunch time focused on chitchat and not on satisfying the imminent hunger. A sense of time does not exist for such frivolous activities. Any real work accomplished in this way is really an achievement. Focus on the work than the focus on making work look like it is not work, can turn cumbersome. Why not get the work out the way, within the realms of time allotted? Free the rest of time and really enjoy the daylight and save time with a sense of time. Now, I am lucky to have a work where the sense of time is based upon the priority of work and work-at-hand rather than the hours-requirement. In this way focus brings in a sense of time and vice versa. Quality-time put in work releases dependency of work on time. In turn removing the sense of time. Focus, plan and a target goal within a time framework helps save time. And when next time someone says about daylight saving time and how it affects their daily routine and public in general, it will make no sense. Because, no one really saved any time by turning the clock hands. As an environmentally conscious human one may try to save the tube light time in office. Use the daylight time, keep the blinds open and let the natural light help us light up our workspace. Yes. A Tube-light Saving Time (TST) instead of Daylight Saving Time (DST) . In this way, time attains another dimension. A dimension of sense, or should I call time as another sense in addition to basic senses of humans?

-Sense of Time series-

• Sense of Time - I would wake up everyday. Just like any other day. This was yet another day. Exciting as usual. A running clock adds to the excitement of awaiting adventure. And I start upon a new one. This time it is about time. And it is time. Time changes and now it was forcibly changed. The circadian …
• Vanishing point - An average timeline of  a human can be drawn starting from birth to school, progressing to university and job and marriage and help repeat all the same for the kids. This canned solutions in life is a proven time tested sequence. The authority of which is questioned only by a few. So far, the biggest …
• Wake Up - Work life habits are like rock. I would wake up at 5.30 am. Listen to the soothing sound from my phone. The wake up call with a Native American touch to it, resembling the flute of Carlos Nakai. In the background the birds chirp and the wake up call for a hunter, ready to pick …
• Blizzard - Nature is by far the best cure for passing time. Problem in passing time is a common boredom oriented disease. I have met extrovert complain about boredom. Even Issac Asimov said this. I do not have to believe it. It is belief that add weight to visions. It is this belief that converts the unreal …