Time for some philosophy?

*Philosophy alert* :/

Life, it appears to me, is like a lego box full of lego bricks! The bricks come in various hues and shapes and can be put together, step by step to build anything that suits our imagination! Let me explain how, to me it appears a lot like life itself!

The goal. When we start off, we have some idea about the final structure in our mind. We start off arranging the blocks with that end goal in mind.

In life, this is our ambition, our dream. The exact steps to get there are not very clear, but we go through life trying to re-create that vision which appears in our dreams.

Taking chances. More often than not, when there are a lot of choices and very few constraints, all we can really do is to make a selection, place a brick and hope that it would hold strong for things to come.

Same is true about life. All of us have taken calculated risks at some point, based on our analysis at that given point of time, or just blind intuition. This is especially true in youth, when faced with a lot of options and have the liberty of time and vitality. It is impossible to know the exact final outcome of each course of action. So all we can do is take a jump and see if we land safe!

One try only. Once placed in a position and attached to a second brick, it is not advisable to revert back. Sometimes we make weak links, where the base is not stable enough. These might falter when the design expands and too many blocks pile up on top. If we decide to work back and rebuild things again, we might run out of time. So most often, we just end up giving reinforcements where possible and improvise on our design to move forward, while keeping what we have built.

This is similar to making decisions in life. Once made, there is usually no re-take option. If we do want to go back and start afresh, there is no way to regain the lost time and energy, so re-building is usually more arduous. The other option is to just stick to the decisions already made, even though they may seem un-wise in retrospect. We simply try to turn life around in a way that we can still somehow attain our goal.

Messing it up: Sometimes we may decide to just have fun piling up the bricks, randomly forming hap-hazard structures. The fun ends sooner or later with the entire structure collapsing even before we are done, because the foundation was never strong enough.

So also, in life, we could go fooling around and take thoughtless risks for fun, but an overdose of these generally makes the correction process all the more difficult. Life may give up on us by the time realization about the mistakes hits home.

Playing it safe: Yet another way of playing the game is to play it safe. We could borrow ideas from existing designs and patterns that we have seen and follow a similar approach. That way, there is only a limited chance to go wrong. And we resign from the game at the first stable structure that we build, even though we may have more pieces left to play with.

In life, this is like saying that we had the same vision as any X,Y or Z, from whom our decisions were inspired. Yes, there are less chances of getting hurt that way, but are we really doing justice to ourselves? Are we really utilizing all the abilities that we have been bestowed with? The pattern we saw could have been someone else’s dream, but is it ours? A lot of times, due to obligations and sacrificial tendencies, we consciously choose to ignore our own dreams, thinking that it would be too complex/painful to achieve. We end up playing it safe, but never realizing our full potential and achieving what could have been.

So you see, I am convinced that just about in any way, leading our lives is like playing this puzzle. I can only wish that at the end of the game, I would be left with a creation I will be proud of and no more pieces to play. Then, I will call my life successful and gratifying!

Writing and me

And theres my first step(read line) in the blog world !

It has taken me quite a lot of time to get down to it. I was skeptical at first about sharing my thoughts in a public space, but once I overcame that inhibition a few years back, it was solely due to laziness.

I want to blog and be regular about it, just because I love writing. Immensely. And it is a habit that I've lost over the last few years and desperately want to get back to.
I used to write poems as a kid. I used to find it very easy to express more with fewer words. I used to pen down short rhyming poems to bid relatives good bye after a visit, or general poems about the rain, the sun and my favourite one, about the common cold!
Some of them have been published in my school magazines.

That phase passed though and later I found myself able to write a poem only when really motivated or moved by something. I still do that though and my most recent one was to my sister on her birthday last year. But clearly, a career as a poet was out of the question :)

In the later half of my teenage I took to keeping a semi-diary, a writing pad actually, on which I started scribbling out all my world's worries and thoughts when I was 15. That has been updated 4 times since at roughly 2 year intervals. But each update would be at least 25 long pages in ength.

Going back and reading those records is always an insightful experience and I invariably catch something that had not struck me before. I am either jostled by the naivety in some of the thoughts, or am astounded at the amount of thought and processing that was going on in my mind at that time. The conclusion has always been the same though . I havent changed .....well, not much...

I wish I had continued writing on that precious writing pad. Because after the last update on it, theres a long gap of 6 years. 6 years where I learnt so many valuable lessons in life, where I experienced so much, traveled so extensively and have made so many decisions. I so wish there was an account of what my thoughts were during all of this!

I guess I got led away from it with the advent of the "Personal Computer". When I finally got a PC to call my own and protected it with a password, there was a feeling of safety that I could write down whatever I wanted and save it in there and it would work as well as my old writing pad.
But sadly, that did not turn out to be true, at least for me.

3 different work computers over 2 different jobs and a total of 5 different "PC"s later, its been a whole bunch of random notepad documents, word documents, saved at random locations. I have no track of most of them now, either because of the system getting corrupted, virus attacks, accidental cleanups, and what not.

So now, determined to put an end to that, here I am with my online blog space!
Not all thoughts or writings of mine are/were private so to speak. Sure they are my views, but they arent views I dont want others to hear, they are usually not about particular people or incidents. When I read other's blogs, there has been many a time where I have come across views similar to mine on various topics, as also comments which provide a completely different point of view.

I guess thats where the charm lies.

Not only do you have the freedom of expressing yourself freely, but you get to get across to scores of people round the globe and get their inputs too on what you have to say!

Well, heres to a lasting relationship with my writing in this new space!