On the back of a terrific semester and midst an extremely productive vacation, I am back to subject you to more seemingly intelligent drivel. This one's not going to contain technical mumbo-jumbo meaning you have one less excuse to run away.
This one's going to be about idleness. And by that I don't mean being lazy, dormant, inactive or any other synonyms which I would generally use to give an honest account of myself. Idleness in the sense that you are forced to do nothing - absolutely nothing and you are only left with thinking to keep yourself entertained.
Due to circumstances, I was left in such a situation recently where I knew that I had to deal with atleast 30 minutes of this 'idleness'. I had grown used to browsing reddit or watching Seinfeld whenever I had nothing to do or I felt like doing nothing. I was perplexed by this challenge life has presented me. It was new and I didn't like it. It was like encountering an old acquaintance and you try to recollect what you did the last time you hung out together. It's been a very long time since I dealt with such idleness. Once I got hold of the objective - to keep myself entertained(or occupied) with no external help whatsoever, things started to fall in place. The infinitesimal portion of my brain responsible for producing innovative/useful ideas gathered all its courage to put in a strong word and had some jolly time before its wings were cut off. The major portion of my brain which is responsible for making questionable decisions like writing this post won out as usual and led my thought process towards thinking about this forced idleness. I tried to recollect what I did in similar situations previously. I had a hard time remembering the details, and I settled towards the conclusion that random thought might have been the answer to such testing situations in my past life. This time I decided I will control my thought process in a more structured way - kind of like switching to manual from autopilot. When I was thinking along those lines, I had this spark of an idea - the kind of one you wouldn't want to act upon normally. It was to write about this forced idleness and how people react to it.
For some reason, I thought it was a brilliant idea and here I am writing about it - trying to churn out pointless drool. This idleness has become a rare thing with the advent of smartphones, the interwebs and 'busier' lives . I would go as far as saying that this forced idleness is a boon in some way. You have no other way out except to think or plan. I don't know about others but it was a long time before I took a step back and had an honest view of what's going in my life and chalked out some vague plan for the immediate future. Most of our thought process is reactionary. Almost every thought is a response to some stimulus. Idleness allows you to have some seedish thought which is quite rare in the modern urban life. 30 minutes of idle thinking is a long time when compared to 30 minutes of watching a sitcom. It is not unreasonable to assume that during these long periods of random thinking, you are bound to have(not in my case though) some ideas which are worth pondering/acting upon. Whether you act accordingly or not is another matter but the implantation of such precious ideas is important (if the movie Inception rings a bell you would know where I am going). So in such enduring periods of idleness, you can stumble upon something that can lead your life towards a whole new tangent. All this might look a bit obvious, but hey I need to jot down something here. I guess all I want to say that is you rarely find yourself dealing such forced idleness, the next time you encounter it, cherish it.
Thus, I debunk the 'wise' old saying that
An idle mind is the devil's workshop.
If that's the case, you are the devil.
No matter how bad this post turns out to be, I will be proud that I managed to write something about nothing.
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