TODAY IS WEDNESDAY
After 5 weeks in India i have reached the point where I don't know what day or date it is and no idea what's going on in the outside world. I also have no idea what's happening in Strictly, X Factor or any of the soaps. If admitted to hospital I would probably be diagnosed as borderline demented. The only regular clue I get is the calendar day stamps on my blood pressure tablet which I take first thing. Does it worry me? Not one bit, the sun rises in the morning, I get up and have my coffee, I pootle about a bit, it gets hot, I have a read and a kip, then in the evening it gets dark and when i'm tired i go to bed.
Here there's no such thing as a weekend to frame the working week, it seems a very foreign construct. I know Indian government departments and big corporations adhere to the 5 day working week but in day to day life it has little effect. Shops are open or they are closed, its all rather random, there are so many different religions here "Sunday" can be any day, Bank Holidays are as likely to be mid week as on a Monday and reflect the ethnic diversity, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, all are celebrated. It does on occasion get confusing but as I said the sun still rises and sets, folks spend time with their families, washing gets done, shopping happens, people go to work, find time to go to the beach, sleep, exercise, etc. Ah! I can hear some of you say what about "work-life balance", where is the "quality time" I could never cope with this chaotic approach.
True, folk work long hours here but here's a few things to ponder upon. When you get home from your working day or at weekends do you always totally forget about work? Is your conversation about what happened today and what's going to happen tomorrow? Do you ever just "dip in" to your work emails "to get ahead of the game"? When watching the news do you pay attention to the bits about (in my case) Healthcare? Are many of your Facebook friends colleagues? Do you socialize with people you work with? Just how much of your physical and mental energy and time is work taking out of your life, insidious isn't it? And if you actually love the job... its worse. You may have much (and i do mean MUCH) better working conditions than folk here but are you still in a cage, granted a guided cage one which you have collaborated in building but still a cage. I know I was.
We all live in our own little realities inside our heads...
NOTE FROM EGO - "No we don't I live in the REAL world"
Do you? That's nice, how's it working out for you? Firstly define REAL. You experience and interpret the world around you through the filters of your own emotions, experience and knowledge i.e we live in the past.
Side note - Did you ever think about the fact nothing you experience is in real time, its already happened. What you see has traveled to you at the speed of light to your eye, its then converted to electrical impulses and conveyed to your visual center in the brain, decoded and passed on for recognition and finally interpretation. Its only "fast" because you have never experienced anything faster. e.g. ADSL broadband was amazingly quick going from dial up - now with fibre it seems to take an age, you only know what you have experienced, "directly" or via others. In evolutionary terms we have evolved to think as fast as we needed to to survive, so it conveyed an advantage, some creatures react much faster than you or I could because they need to. So if someone tells you you are living in the past... they are right, we all are.
As I was saying, we all live caged in our own little worlds, sometimes, not all the time, that would be mad making, its a good idea to challenge those realities. Travel, at its best, does that for you. Go on, bend a few bars.
K
Happy Hump Day
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