In And Out Of Silence

Regular break from the humdrum of socialisation and daily community activity might beg for a break into solitude for introspection, with a re-energising feel that serves as a tonic to the body and mind. It promotes fresh ideas for new initiatives. It can be gently described as a temporary exile, or an essential pause, with potential for new insight or answers to persistent questions. 

Whether in a pensive mood or when bubbling with robust enthusiasm, occasional solitude can create cooling effects that refine existing thoughts with clarity, including the related pros and cons. Being briefly removed from the company one works in enables a sharper focus on issues previously not given much thought to. The approach is not isolationist but an avenue to reinvigorating the thought process and drawing clearer conclusions from varied angles. In other words, it adds to gregarious life.     

Silent spells help iron out problems for more effective socialisation and professionalisation. To many people, this space serves as an avenue for close review of things loaded with queries pertaining to who and why, where and when, how and with what implications. Buried in routine activity entailing immediate steps, one might miss the potential extra edge that solitude and the accompanying silence could offer. Social energy helps, and a degree of solitude supplements that energy. Even at non-solitary sessions, frequent visitors might not always be welcome. 

The desire to introspect should be there to avoid the waste of time. Recall and review of past events and personalities offer lessons at appropriate times. Reflection is a self-attention of an honest type. The light of inner brilliance just might flicker for meaningful conclusions. A connection can be drawn between events and characteristics.

Power of concentration

Making life better deserves qualitatively exclusive time for the self, that is, solitude. The resultant opportunity sheds toxic distractions. Making the most out of a given situation is to dwell upon issues of priority in an attentive but relaxed manner. Deep concentration provides answers to questions. Concentration carries the power of creating conditions for meaningful thinking. And silence aids concentration. If nothing new and convincing crops up, at least the outcome is not without an effort made, doing one’s best under a specific circumstance.    

Complete standstill of the mind, even for a very brief spell, detoxifies distractions. Unattended by colleagues or friends, solitude constitutes a self-research and solo journey to reflection. Individuals represent different manifestations. An individual can be seen in different facets and roles. Self-engagement with a high degree of concentration draws the best in a person who harbours no hesitation to shed biases, keen as s/he is for fresh insight into unanswered issues. 

A free market of ideas should not mean only selective ideas pushed by agenda-setters. Free thinking constitutes a master key to a research approach to curiosity. In principle, education envisages the democratisation of knowledge. What if the content thus popularised and spread is tilted in favour of the originator/initiator with motives designed to conceal from the public? 

Education is supposed to democratise and offer knowledge. What if it only spreads certain content intended by the power-wielders deep behind the public façade? If unscrupulous elements conspire to drive education as a tool for control, the capacity for critical thinking gets adversely affected. 

Consequently, education no longer upholds a critical mind and independent decisions. At best, it gives the illusion of free and independent practice, depriving individuals of the discerning power to distinguish what is sound from what is not. Free thinking is key to all quests and research works. Free market of ideas does not denote selective ideas only but a course that holds aloft independence in thinking and wise decisions to the best of opportunity and ability.

Silence itself is a space for some spells of conversing with the true self instead of engagement enforced by too much of social roles. The gestures to demonstrate, the conversation to dwell upon, the smiles to flash and drain your energy. Those not respect the quiet others rest on are not greeted with the keen appreciation they might like. Socialisation deserves celebration but not without recesses that serve as relief to allow an individual to listen to and converse with oneself. Death does not bode the soul’s end. Chitra Gupta’s or his equivalent’s ultimate verdict in other faiths promises liberation from the cycle of life and death, depending upon individual deeds. 

New innings

A legacy advice intended for us all: know and do your bounden duty decided by an orderly conscience. It is a valued lesson. This is no comment from a scribe on a high stage but something out of conviction, having seen more than 70 springs without knowing how many more ahead on Planet Earth. Thinking and acting with purpose at personal as well as practical levels should steer us as human beings to be more intelligent than any other species where life is known to exist. 

Free from the daily grind that engages an individual from especially school days through career years to the period after retirement from regular organisational duty to the formal entry into the “retired” category, the new track should be taken as a venture into activities suited to individual taste, age and health.  Many go for yoga, travel, gardening and spiritual journey. For me, reading and writing, more than conversing, will always be a passion as long frail health does not come in the way as a road breaker. What if space or platform is not available? After all, I have had such experience with at least three prominent broadsheets over the years multiple times down the decades.

Thanks to the internet, alternative avenues are available for writing with gay abandon. Within reach is personally crafted domain which allows narratives of any kind, every topic and any length and not necessarily any deadline. But then that is a contingency plan whose course and fate no one can anticipate with precision, thanks to the twists and turns of life and leisure together with the resultant pleasure.     

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)