Inertia

There is a reason first impression is the best impression: people just dont care to look at you as a dynamic person, changing and evolving constantly... it's just too complicated to look at it that way... a lot less trouble to just take a look at you, turn you over, toss you up, take a sniff and sort you into a basket with some predefined proto(stereo)types...and while this category set might be ridiculously crude( good person ,bad person , medium person- cross out those not applicable) , truth be told, the most refined categorisation is still not so much better..

People want to categorise, simply because it saves a lot of memory space.... sorting or classifying is an efficiency thing......and while it simply doesn't do justice to the infinitely complex entity that is man, it is necessitated simply because..well...to everyone's mind, there are some people who just aren't worth remembering more than vaguely... in fact everyone else is remembered in only as much detail as their deemed worth in that person's mind..

But if you notice, even that is not the problem, even a crude categorisation might suffice if only it allowed for some dynamic element... but people don't like to have to change their impressions of you as you change... instead they expect the opposite, that you change only after giving them due notice, when they are ready to update the 'you' in their minds which often takes ridiculously long .....Unfortunately, men(/women) ,as all other social animals, deem others' perception of them extremely important by default and if this instinctive urge is unchecked, they end up spending most of their lives living a life they want others to know them by....

Ah, in digressions within digressions i have come a long way from the point i set out to make... which is simply that something has to be changed so a man can change his opinion the moment he sees reason to, and not feel ashamed or afraid about it... something needs to be done so that he can live a life which reflects his opinions at all times, a function always of his current beliefs, and which changes track whenever the mind through new reason sees it fit, without worrying about acceptance amongst others....a life that is unbound by social views, the life of the reckless , free spirit that every man(/woman) should be.

In contemplating on some comments to a previous post, i realised that changing oneself even slightly is ridiculously difficult for a man who worries about what the world thinks of him... dynamism in views is perceived as the sign of an unstable mind, and indeed it might be for all i care, and yet can not equilibria be unstable, and indeed is it not in such unstable equilibria that some of nature's most beautiful phenomena have their roots....? ( for starters, life is itself an unstable equilibrium....)

I myself experienced this difficulty a couple of years back (about the time the adolescent mind decides to assess everything it has been taught till then...) And my search for solutions led me to these conclusions.

You could live a life expecting others to be open to change in you... to view you as a dynamic person.. to assess you constantly...this is the easy way, since it requires no major shift from the paradigm of life you are taught throughout childhood: to please you parents, teachers et cetera...

But, for reasons i have already underlined in my opening few statements, you have to admit that people would have time to do little else if they were doing that kind of thing all the time with everyone whom they hold as important as you...and taking the easy option can hardly be expected to solve the problem ... and this leaves you with the option that i believe everyone must take...

To assert your independence, to care not for what anyone else thinks, so long as you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it...to live by an identity that you give yourself, not all the rest of the world...

It seems to me the only real way to a free life, the only way to not end up doing things you no longer believe in simply because you openly believed them when you knew lesser, the only way you can always stay true to yourself....

The other day, a friend of mine pointed out to me that my first 3 posts were respectively a first post on my first post, a cynical take on cynicism and a waste of time on how to waste time.... well, this isn't something i consciously set out to achieve , and consequently, this post is different , it is a change from that self developed pattern of my previous three, and it is about change.

Oh the inertia! How it plagues me thus!

dinesh jayaraman