‘Arrest’, what does the word mean to you? To me, it is that period in time when the brain stops processing instructions for a moment and the heart skips a beat to acknowledge something magnificent and lovely. It could be a passing phrase you’ve heard, a question someone has asked or someone’s eyes that have spoken. I’m in a journey now where thoughts arrest me, more often than not. They make music appeal more to me than they ever have in the past and I have begun to enjoy this phase of my life. Gone are the days of the mind asking questions and actively seeking answers. My highly emotive state still poses questions but is not hard pressed for answers. Silence has begun to go hand in hand with music.

I have understood within my limited sense of being that laws of science aside, universe is also about timing. It is a chain of never ending events that tie together somehow, eventually. It brings people into your life at the right place and time to create an intervention to let you widen your expanse. It sends inspirations in myriad forms to help you find your version of truth; the heart and mind work in unison at the intersection of creativity. And I’ve found someone who’s giving me my instructions from the universe as to where I should lead myself to.

The question or thought that surrounds me today is how do we get better with every passing day? Is there a method to the madness or is it random? What are our governing principles or is that only a myth? What is it that we stand for and what do we fight for? The cosmos asked me these questions last night and I started looking for some answers.

I lived an extravagant and comfortable life, sometimes beyond my means, for the first twenty eight years of my life. This was a phase in my life where I did not ask any questions; I went with the flow. The next fourteen years, I spent asking specific questions and tried to force fit my life into a box of outcomes, leading to personal and professional disasters. What I regret most from that part of my life is not the pain or angst but the loss of my ability to take concrete decisions. I was quite good in that aspect when I did not overthink. But I do see light at the end of the tunnel.

Our emotive ability governs our response to events that transpire in our life. I believe that some of that ability is genetic and some of it is observational, which we pick up as we grow. For example, the emotive ability of an adopted child will combine the biological traits of the genetic parents and the behavioral aspects of the guardians. And these are the most complex wirings that we know of which degenerate as well evolve at the same time. The body decays while the mind evolves. The way I see it, the evolution of the mind is a chain reaction; a progress into the positive or negative. I do not think a mind has the capacity to stay in a neutral state because it has a need to react and grow on either side. I don’t think quantum is defined for positive or negative state but if it were we could associate small tilts in either direction with every event that the brain processes.      

For example, this morning, a car made an aggressive move in breakneck traffic and bumped into my rear view mirror. I let it go, kept my steady pace and let the music help me reach the state of normalcy. However, later in the afternoon, when I was returning from lunch, I almost ran over two individuals in a hurry to retain my parking spot. If I analyze these two events dispassionately, in one day, my brain positioned itself on either side of the spectrum. On one hand, it did not engage with a driver on the edge of insanity while on the other hand, it engaged in a far more dangerous act of harming two bystanders.

Impulses cannot be controlled and they shouldn’t be either because if you do, you stop feeling alive. But I believe that dissecting events that transpire in your life and finding an unbiased version of truth helps you grow. It is equivalent to stepping outside your own being and looking at the event as a third observer and finding out if the image is worth keeping or worth replacing with something new. If latter, paint a new image that the impulse can recognise for future action.

Meditation to me is introspection in silence. I find that zone when I drive to and from work every day when music plays in the background. The mind is free to think, act and react with the images it has formed so it can decide which ones are for keeps. I am no longer tired of the journey that brings me home. After all, home is where the heart is and I reach there with a clear consciousness of where I belong.