A year of resolve ahead?

Read more, write more, travel more, focus more, pay more attention to detail, step outside my cocoon and be aware of the world, cook more, become a fitter me, concentrate better, slow down, talk less, sleep (less or more???), life can be improved in a thousand ways...

Yes, it is that time of the year. I am not one to take stock of the previous year and I don't usually make resolutions. But today I am tempted. I embarked on the mental quest for a resolution and realized that a resolution is a self defeating entity. My premise is that a disciplined person does not need to put an oath down on paper, police herself and then reward herself to achieve something as trivial as a visit to the gym everyday or half an hour a day to keep abreast of news. Neither should she wait for a new year to begin these habits. Quitting alcohol or smoking or drugs are graver issues by virtue of being addictions and require more than just discipline. But it is her lack of discipline which gives rise to the need for alternate motivation to develop more mundane habits and to the procrastination until a new year or a birthday to begin. And this very lack of discipline will avenge itself by preventing her from keeping up the resolution successfully. Such is the self defeating nature of a resolution; it arises from a want of discipline which defeats the resolution itself. One could argue that we don't live in an ideal world and that resolutions serve as an anchor, a walking stick that abets noble goals which may otherwise not even be attempted. But unaccompanied by discipline, a resolution reduces to an anchor lowered on quick sand, a walking stick deserted by its owner.

This year I want to court discipline itself, wage war with it, conquer it and own it forever. I'm assuming that discipline is the starting point of achievement and hence can be acquired. For if it cannot be, then nothing can be changed or achieved by an aspirant who is not blessed with it. I'm putting this down on paper now, hoping that soon I will do away with the need to. I could call my quest for discipline an oath, hopefully the last one I will ever make. I'm also imposing on myself the onus of taking stock of my "resolution" a year from now. Sigh... my beautiful, ironical life!

Wish you a Happy New Year!

This blog

Every couple of months I spend long hours reading every post I've made on this blog. I do so to take stock of my writing but end up reliving the actual moments that made me write each post. Today as I read some of the posts, I realize what an important extension of myself this blog has become. I refrain from calling it a "part" of myself because I believe that it is a parallelism built around my commentary on life (in handpicked fonts and justified text). Every post on this blog is witness to ten others relegated to the recycle bin, deemed unfit for public display, at times too unbearable in its honesty.

I come to this blog to pen the unthinkable, to think the unpardonable. This blog is my irrational dream. It is a recourse for my restlessness. It is also my bruised ego. A cupful of joy, my unshed tears, my denied fears. It is my silence, my screaming pain sometimes. It is my unleashed anger at the aberrant world. My helplessness too. My insomnia. My cheated, defeated reason. My will to beat the odds, my intermittent persistence, my bent beaten resignation. This blog is my corner of the universe where reality submits to imagination. It is the reign of conjecture over fact, hypothesis over proof, rebellion over reason. It is a tiny tribute to the belief that Art is God, Effort - worship, Creation - sacred. This blog is the nonzero sum of my rationality, my curiosity and my insanity.