Tag: reality

Multi-Tasking and living in the NOW

When we become more like the person we want to be, we like what we do and we therefore can appreciate it more. We love what we are doing. We love who we are. We do not want to go back to a past version of us, nor do we care for a future version. We appreciate the life we have.

The only reality is the now. Now is the only time that counts. Now is the only time we can make a change. The past is gone. It lives on only in our memories. Let it be there. Don’t keep wishing for it to come back. Because it never will. And the future lies ahead. Only our plans can influence it. And those get messed up more often than not. Longing for the future to come will only hinder us from appreciating the present.

We should learn to live in the current moment. To fully appreciate it. But to fully appreciate we need the present to be aligned with our vision. With who we want to be and we need to be fully living that very moment. Our attention is this very precious thing. It is essentially the same as our time. We have to be mindful of what we spend it on. And when we are multi-tasking, we decide, that something is not important and not good enough to completely focus on it. And we end up not living those moments. We end up wasting them.

Not only does half-heartedness not lead to happiness. But it deprives us from feeling fulfilled. Because we never allow ourselves to get emotionally involved in anything. Because we are doing something else at the same time. Or because we are thinking about the past or the future. Maybe we just have too many commitments. If we cannot go to class without constantly being on our phones planning the next party, we most likely will neither listen to what we are actually wanting to learn nor are we planning the party well. We will have to re-plan the party and read through the materials of that lecture again. And in the end we will end up loosing time and hating ourselves for it.

I get a lot of weird looks because I decide to first and foremost be a student, because I love studying. And that is my commitment. I rather commit to one thing and do that right with good to amazing results than do three things at a time, messing at least two of them up and not enjoying it.

The other point is: If you are not committed to what you are doing. It will make you plain unhappy, because frankly you’d rather be somewhere else. This is why we have to be careful with what we commit to. Because we may slip into commitments that do not suit us. And of course this is a journey of trial and error, but we have to be aware of that.

And finally multi-tasking prevents brilliance (granted not always). If we cannot focus on the one thing we are doing we have a harder time understanding it and it is nearly impossible to do our best. Which means that our growth is hugely limited and therefore multi-tasking will prevent us from reaching our full potential. And that is just a waste of our resources and plain sad.

I believe there are things that work great together. Like riding a bike and listening to music. Or looking out the window of a driving train and listening to music. I even think that depending on the music it can even be listened to while studying. Though that last part is extremely debatable.

But I also have experienced how just being in the moment focusing on only one thing makes me feel at peace. Makes me happy. In fact I am texting, writing this post, listening to music and singing along from time to time right now. I could also imagine drinking a cup of tea as well. But it works for me. However I am slowing down to notice how good it feels. Slowing down to tap into how I feel deep down. Taping into my body a lot more often than I used to. And with the realization that it feels good comes the gratitude and the love for my life and inevitably happiness.

I am aware it will not always feel like this. But the more I practice it now. The more it becomes a habit. The more often I take a few heartbeats to take insanely deep breaths and just be there, the easier it will be to appreciate my life when it is getting harder again.

So all we need to do is know what we like doing. And do it well now. Appreciate it. And smile.

Emotional Intelligence: Curse or Gift?

No feeling understood can be the source of great pain. It is a symptom for many mental diseases, such a Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Social Anxiety and more. Not being understood leads to the loneliness that we humans dread so much. Feeling a bit lonely from time to time appears to be a normal part of life and nothing to stress out about. It is not like anyone who ever feels lonely has a serious mental issue. But when is feeling lonely an actual problem? When is the pain that it causes too big to be ignored? Being honest I think this has a lot to do with how the individual experiences the loneliness. But at the point, where it seems that the isolation starts to swallow everything it is definitely a problem.

Now, where does this all-threatening loneliness come from? Throughout history there have been brilliant minds such as Van Gogh who suffered from severe mental disorders and loneliness and yet were extraordinary personalities. And we see a pattern: many artists showed this issue. But why artists? Is there something, that makes artists different from other people? Something that makes them lonely? I think there is.

It is “emotional Intelligence” and I am honest I do not like the term. It is the ability to “see deeper”. Yeah, what the heck does “see deeper” mean. It means, that an artists sees connections that others don’t. And this is why that person can be an artist in the first place: As an artist, we do not define the world newly (though some do create worlds), but we find extraordinary connections between ordinary things in life. We shed a new light on the existing world.

But this “seeing connections that others don’t” is making artists lonely. Because we think differently. The way we perceive the world is different. We feel the world differently. And often times, we cannot explain why. We are not able to tell, why this beautiful sunset moved us to tears and the people around us do not understand. We keep asking fundamental questions. We challenge reality day after day. This is what cannot be understood. Why ask the same questions over and over. Why do we see connections between separate things in reality? And sometimes, we do not even know why we just happened to know what is going on in another person. We do not know how we could find the right words to comfort them. But we probably just saw those subtle hints in the world around us and without even realizing what we were doing, we followed our “Intuition” and did the right thing.

I am throwing around words like intuition and emotional intelligence and some might still not know what it is and say that these are not scientific concepts. Well no, they are not. But intuition and emotional intelligence in essence is the ability to make connections between things. And because it is something that not everyone has to the same extent it can make a person lonely.

But there is a bright side to it: in many sciences making connections between things is crucial for progress, which means that people with high emotional intelligence have a higher probability of understanding science faster. Note that it is only the the likelihood that is affected, because it is possible, that someone has high emotional intelligence and is great at human interaction, but has problems with math, because those two fields are so different.

However if we have high emotional intelligence, we have at least some area in our life, where we see connections that others don’t. This allows us to be better in that field than other. And this is a fact that we can draw energy from. We may not always be understood. But in turn we are allowed to have a deep understanding of the world, which I personally find overwhelmingly beautiful.