Greener Pastures III

This whole "Greener Pastures" business will continue I guess, for as long as I have choices to make, and for as long as writing remains a good option for me to delve beyond the visible. I'm not sure if the choices I've made so far in life are correct or if they'll take me closer to my intended destination. Heck, I'm almost not sure of my destination either. I just about know where not to go, and while that considerably narrows down my options, there's still a lot to choose from. And knowing where not to go never motivated anyone to achieve great things in life. At least not those who really achieved something. The real reason behind working/hoping for spectacular accomplishments is often,
a burning desire to prove oneself ( while it works, this is rather sad, because the motivation arises from insecurity). This reason immediately implies the presence of others, others to whom the point has to be proved. IMHO, anyone who did something to please others can never derive ultimate happiness from the accomplishment. Because primarily, happiness is derived from the approval one gets, in this case. Personally, this can never be my reason, because my heart is often stronger than my head and my work has to be a primary source of joy for me. Not secondary. The best moments I've had are when there's not a single soul around me , when there's only me and my music in this entire world, not afraid to go wrong, not soliciting approvals, no other thought except the ones in my mind about music. I realise that all is bliss only when the child in me was happily experimenting with all sorts of sounds and techniques and somewhere down the line, after the warm-up, the connection happens and the music starts flowing. All techniques, all methods fall in their places and the child is elated at the music, at perfecting a piece, at creating something. The adult in me is happy at the technical accomplishment, happy seeing the fruits of concentrated labour, and happy at having established a small moment of connection. But the truth is, the person who experienced the connection was the child, not the adult.

The adult only processed the data in real time, it was the child who made the data meaningful unconsciously.While the adult purposefully intended to make it meaningful and to decipher the meaning of the connection, the child was the one who got it. The adult was the one who intended to get it but never got it.
I realise now, that when my prayers turn really strong, it's the child talking. My adult came into being when I started understanding the world around me at a tender age. It was created at a time when my mind was transiting from the childlike " only me and my sandpile" stage to the "me and the sandpile and the beach and the tools I have to make a castle with, and the tools I don't have , and the tools the other kid there has, and the ones he doesnt have, and the sea and the people in the beach and how they behave" stage. Since the concept of God and importance of praying were taught to me before the transition happened, the child before the transition (Child 1) had already made those connections with the higher force . After the transition, the child with a brain now stuffed with information (Child 2)still turned to the pre-transition child when it came to prayers. That's how it's been all these years too. Child 1 knows only what it can do with the sand pile and to pray . Child 2 knows the techniques that others have developed to make a fantastic ,enormous sand castle, it has tried those tools and techniques and enjoyed the results , it slowly learnt how these tools are made, and then how bigger tools have been made. But it never created a tool of its own. It processes data, and quite often, it processes pre-processed information. Child 1 didn't know mugs were used to make pillars for the sand castle, but it saw a half opened coconut and fooling around with it, discovered that it can be used to make a dome for the main palace. But as child 2 slowly became more dominant, child 2 would take better mugs and tools from home and make a sand castle.

Over the years, child 2 became a database, correlating information with ease. Correlating information with other information in the data base or those in the outside world. But it never correlated data that hadn' t already been correlated by someone earlier. That, Child 1 did. Child 2 just applied principles, never discovered them. The complexity of the principles it applied kept increasing, till a stage where the Adult had to take over. In between, anytime child 1 surfaced, child 2 and later the adult discovered something new about analysis, suddenly found more meaning in some of the data they processed. But most of the time, it was just plain ol' data processing and later, pattern recognition going on. The truth is, anytime Child 1 surfaced, it was when the adult forgot about the surroundings for a moment.

Having understood all this only recently, I don't think I want to spend the rest of my life letting my adult take decisions that make it confirm to higher, pre-defined standards. I'm not saying I'm gonna be next big inventer on the horizon, but I know for a fact that I don't intend to suppress Child 1 anymore. I will not spend time letting my adult do the kind of analysing that it's expected to do. Not that I can call the shots here, but I can't let my adult follow the crowd while I wait for Child 1 to swim up to the surface. I still don't know what I'm going to DO about this thought.