Milking the Meaning of the Moment

I decided not to go to a cafe today. Wanted to spend some time at home, in my room, on a weekend, for a change. I'm feeling very relaxed but sleepy at the same time. But no matter, we'll continue blogging today's article which will be a reflection on the passing of time.

I do not feel my age at all. Partly this is because the core beliefs of mine have not changed much over the past 10, even 20 years. I have gained a lot more in terms of knowledge and temperament, but I am still steadfast in my goal of remaining single, continuing my life as a secular sanyasin.

We remember our lives as a series of events. We feel that time passes quickly only when we do not have interesting marker events through a specific passage of time. Marker events are like, a change of jobs, marriage, deaths, births, accidents and anything out-of-the-ordinary that makes a deep impression in you. And your life is just remembered as a chronological series of such events. The less events there are, the faster time seems to fly.

Repetitive events or tasks do not register much in our minds. These become the background where the outstanding events stand out. Repetitions however build momentum. Repetition also creates habits. Habits are simple automatic 'macros' that get executed on cue. We can program the body and mind with useful macros by choosing what we perform repeatedly. When we go about our daily lives, we are most of the time, driven by such macros, contributing to the sense of swiftness in time's passing.

The series of marker events become the framework for us to recollect and to place the chronology of other less important events, when they are recollected. I would remember when I read Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, because I have a memory of reading it at the airport in Hong Kong, while waiting for my flight home, on my first trip there. I choose to read outdoors because of this--the location where I read a particular book, even a particular page is registered in my mind clearly.  

Some great memories I have: reading about the mutiny on the Bounty at the Day's Inn motel in Palo Alto back in the early nineties; The Unbearable Lightness of Being in my rented room in Damansara Jaya, Barrow's Boys while enjoying a stout at the Bishan St 22 food court, The Horizontal Instrument at a park in Geneva, a biography of Sukarno on the train to Bandung and Hemingway's collection of short stories in a waiting room at Assunta hospital, Petaling Jaya. Having books with me, enriched my life considerably.  

Nowadays I'd also bring along my fountain pen and journal with me--creating new memories by writing at different locations, capturing the rich experience of writing with a fountain pen on a fresh crisp page of my journal.  Pens, books and journals are my everyday staple.

Life is lived moment by moment. What matters most is the moment itself, like now. I'm typing these words, every word is roughly a moment in time. Each moment is infused with memory from the past and an anticipation of the future. Memories are the fuel that propels us into the future. But in navigating life, one must focus on the moment at hand to fully live. Even a recollection of the past is a present moment, fused with the intensity of memory and the weight of its philosophical meaning.

Milking meaning from each moment, would be a good way of describing how I live my life. Even the most mundane moments have meaning. Every day when I perform my job, I try to infuse each moment, even boring ones with some kind of cosmic importance. By respecting the moment, you are acknowledging life and allowing that quanta of time to be a pixel in your overall picture of life.

Blogging is a way for me to live life intensely, because I reflect on every word that I choose, and I infuse them with the emotional force of my experience. The meditative act of writing is a great clarifier and cleanser of the mind. 

Our lives are ephemeral. We knit our experiences into the fabric of time and make our mark in physical space by building, destroying and rearranging matter. We attempt to procreate for self-preservation. But all that, in the end is in vain. What matters is the moment of time when it is lived. So milk the moment for what it's worth--whatever it is, that is the meaning and the totality of your life.

Mining Meaning from Mindlessness

It's a working day again after a week-long break for Hari Raya. I have been reasonably productive though during the holidays, working on my favourite projects. I like to put every second to good use. Even idleness has to be 'meaningful' idleness.

Now, how do we gauge what is meaningful and what is not? Why should 'meaning' be an important aspect of life? Why do we have a need to seek meaning?

Meaning is a vector--it has both magnitude and direction. Doing something meaningful in life means that you have a direction or goal to aim for. And then you expend time and energy towards it. How much time, how much energy you invest---that's the 'magnitude' part of the meaning vector.

As long as our lives are guided by over-arching principles and purpose, even moments of idleness will automatically have meaning. How? Let's say you are watching TV, channel surfing randomly until you hit something that catches your fancy. And then you sit there on the couch for an hour, watching whatever that caught your attention. Is this activity meaningful or a total waste of time?

One could argue that watching TV can be meaningful in many ways. Maybe you just need to relax and take your mind off work for a while. That could be a good reason. It's a 'sharpening the saw' activity that is essential for us to be fit and ready when we are required to do so.

But sometimes we tend to over-exaggerate the need to relax. A short nap or a walk in the park could be a better way to refresh oneself. Most of the time, watching TV is just a way of putting off work. It's simply easier to press a button on the remote control and let your mind shift aimlessly in tandem with the channels. It's basically a form of daydreaming.

We can, if we choose to, watch TV in a more meaningful manner. Many TV series are quite educational. I'm not talking about serious documentaries that are obviously directly educational, but even fictional ones. Fictional films, drama or serials, especially the high-quality ones, can help us learn a lot about history or other domain subject matter like law, or government, or criminal investigation. We just need to be smart to know where real-life ends and fiction begins. All fiction are based on real-life situations, only exaggerated for dramatic effect. If we are smart in knowing these boundaries, we can extract the essence from the dross.

Hence watching TV is like a process of mining. There's a lot of junk that's being fed into our minds, but every now and then, a gem of a lesson emerges and you lap it up with relish. We are like those underwater filter-feeding creatures. They live by allowing water to flow continuously through their 'mouths' and have food nutrients extracted from it.

Watching TV is certainly not energy sapping, only time-consuming. So it is an activity that's performed at the cost of your time. But always remember this: time is a finite resource. Even though we can filter educational nutrients from this activity, it is better to be smarter in the process. We can enter into this low energy mode but still have a better flow of content fed into our minds. That way, we get the most value for the time spent.

Actively choose what you feed your mind with. That way, you can better control the quality of meaningful nutrients that are being consumed. And do have a conscious intent to extract. Extraction requires some effort. Energy is involved, but it is minimal, if you've already acquired the habit. To extract, you will need to be questioning, comparing, assimilating and noting facts throughout the entire experience. Only when these activities are present in your mind, and not simply passive reactivity, can knowledge or even wisdom be extracted.

So, treat the mindless experience of watching TV as a process of mining. You'll be surprised to find out how much meaning you can extract from it.