Letter on Focus

 I often wake up with a head full of thoughts. I have thoughts on everything. Out of my waking 16 hours, I am probably thinking something or other 15.9 of it. My mind is like a high school classroom when the teacher is not there. Or a turbulent flow out of a tap. Impossible to control and impossible to predict. With a mind like that, it often becomes impossible to do anything. Everything you want to do, get in a queue of thoughts. And You never know if it will come to you again.

Writing changes this. You have to pick a lane and stick to it. You cannot ramble for lines without an end. Writing is order. Thinking is chaos. It should come as no surprise to me, but yet, I am still chaotic. My mind still ends up going for a late night circus cruise whenever it finds time to. It’s like a kid in that regard.

It has always been a problem for me to focus on things. In my childhood I was notoriously poor at studying, my handwriting was like noodle soup on the notebook, and my marks were like a stall of an egg vendor. Overtime, while still loosely focusing on things, I realised that I actually like to learn things. And that’s when my marksheet started looking better.

As far as traditional education was concerned, my liking and thirst for knowledge has saved me from my lack of focus. But with a job, this has been a problem. Waking up everyday to do a non interesting thing, I am always confused, always unfocused. There are times when I am required to solve a good problem, and I feel that is the best part of my job. But they are far and few in between. So, yeah, that’s been the case for 3 years now. 

My hopes for the future would include a little more control over work. It would be good to focus on things as I deem fit, rather than at the mercy of the topic. The issue with the latter is, without focus, projects, life, everything becomes subpar. No matter the amount of time you spend to optimise it.

I travel frequently as it gives me a sense of change in my life that sustains me for some more days. Travelling comes naturally. Being at different places, meeting different people and living a more dynamic life. I long for home after a tiring trip, but it’s not home I long, it’s the comfort of knowing I have everything I need.

There are some strategies that I have started to use. Meditations seems like a good option. Once in a while, I decide that it's time to meditate. I have also been trying to wake up in morning, which sounds silly, but something I haven't been able to do for a decade. Maintaining a rough idea of what to achieve in a single day also seems like reasonable advice. This is one thing that has been make sense of passage of time.

But till then, the tides are high, and the storm is tough. And I have strapped together a raft to help me sail. And when the raft finally set sails, I wish to explore the islands of life.