The alchemist

Just finished reading The Alchemist. It's a nice book...a very quick read, with words as simple as its message. I don't know if you've read it, but it basically says to believe in your dreams and struggle for them to the end. If you reach the end of the rainbow, the journey will have made you a better person, no matter what your pot of gold looks like. This is something I've sort of known all along...I guess it's innate to us...but Coelho summarized it neatly in the life of Santiago the Shephard.

There have been so many times when I really wanted to do something, but held back for some reason or the other. The universe lies in a grain of sand, so I'll give you the most mundane example ever, and this has happened to me a number of times. I'd be sitting in a classroom listening to a professor's lecture, and suddenly, I'd have this irresistible urge to ask a question. But then, this second voice would crop up, telling me that the question is stupid...something a freshman would know. So I'd fold my arms on my chest and sit tight, but I'd always be left with this nasty unease in my chest. The same unease you get when you're about to sneeze, but it never comes. And lo and behold, somebody in the class would often ask a similar question to mine. :)

I guess that unease multiplies as more and more wishes go unfulfilled. The worst realization is that they went unfulfilled simply because one let them.

That's why Coelho says that increasing knowledge requires not just reasoning, but action also. To give a mundane example again, there's an empty can of coke by my side. I can spend the whole day thinking about how I want it to be in the trash can. By the time the sun is bowing its head, I'll be exhausted, my thinking capacity drained, but the can won't have moved an inch. It'll only move when I pick it up and toss it into the garbage. The scenario may be comical in its stupidity, but I think the underlying principle is quite applicable to our daily lives.

The all-seeing eye

Over the years, I've developed - as I'm sure many others do - the habit of observing my surroundings. The original idea was to have this portion of my mind that would only observe and analyze things that happened around me in an unbiased way. I wanted this unbiased insight to ultimately correct my own flaws and make myself a better person. Alas, I was trying to decouple emotion from reason...one of the hardest things that can be done.

And essential too. Because, as the great thinkers have said over and over, we do not act on something unless we're convinced it's okay to do. That applies to everything. To us a robber is a person without scruples who cannot see the distinction between right and wrong. That's because we're judging that distinction from the comfort of our armchairs. To a person who's tottering on the brink of that distinction, who's in the trenches, who's on the field playing, things always look different. Scales always balance differently. Thus at the moment a robber is slipping into a house, he will be logically convinced that what's he's doing is absolutely justified.

And therein lies the fundamental flaw with logical reasoning - no matter how hard we try, our brains aren't just purely thinking machines. Humans have emotions, and those emotions always tend to bias our thinking. That's why some people justify that alcohol is allowed in Islam, and others go out of their way to prove that it isn't. Really, if you put your heart into it, you can justify anything. In the right emotional state, our minds will conveniently belittle the parameters that tend to swing the logical equation against our favor.

In the end, I think I did succeed a little bit. There is this little corner of my mind that just observes, like the motion camera in movies. It just takes in all that's happening around it. But just like a camera, it is ultimately powerless, possessing only the ability to sit and watch as event after event unfolds.

Creaking!

I think I'm officially going nuts. The guy who lives above me has a creaky floor. A really creeky floor. Know what that means for me? Every time he walks across the room, I feel like biting leather.

Actually, during the day it's not bad. But I think he has this habit of waking up around 6am to go to the washroom or something. Which means I'm also promptly awake at 6am because of all the racket he makes. Take a leak man, but don't wake up my farishtas in the process!

And so, for the past week, I've been on 5-6 hours of sleep, every day. I feel like the guy in "the machinist" who hasn't slept in a year. Except my reason for not sleeping is a creaky floor and an early-morning pisser.

Even now it's 6:45 am...I've been tossing and turning for the past hour. No luck. Because, you see, now my body is tuned to this guy firing off the ol' creak alarm in the morn.

Feeling highly unamused at the moment.