Wanted- A New Agenda

The year 2015 is here. Will it be different? Not easy to predict but all new years have one thing in common. They begin with a lot of hope and a large number of. Gradually, hopes start giving way to despair and resolutions get watered down due to inadvertence or compulsions of circumstances. As the year progresses and people look back for stock taking things appear much the same and a sense of déjà vu sets in. Can the present year give a break from the past? People may ask why. Because we have had enough of sameness in a decade and half of the 21st century. Let us look at the coming months with a new frame of mind. A mind free of all encumbrances of the past. A mind free from spurious ideas of hatred and violence. A mind that wants to cherish peace and happiness. Is it possible will be the question that many will raise. And rightly so, because our thought processes operate like a series, in a continuum in which the past pushes the future. For a change let us alter the paradigm. Begin with a new approach. Like the management idea of zero based budgeting. Start a fresh. Let this be a year of change. And the first requirement will be the peace of mind. It is the lack of peace of mind that is proving to be the root cause of all our problems. There is a step wise process to arrive at the peace of mind.
The first step is to identify the causes that destroy peace. While there may be many, the board categories can be identified. As a student of psychology we were told that stress was a factor that disturbed peace. And my professor taught me that three life style attributes were responsible for this. Those were, as very poetically told but the professor, hurry, worry and curry. Well, that was some four decades ago. The time has changed and so has the nature of these attributes, though their character still remains the same. The hurry is about the rush to catch up with everything in one go. Or rather doing too many things at the same time. In the modern lexicon it is called multi tasking. Yes, the net result is hurry. Hurry leads to anxiety. Anxiety of not being able to complete any one of those myriad tasks. The result? You end up doing nothing properly. This leads to worry. What if I fail? As if the heavens will fall. But heavens do not fall and the worries are largely imaginary. Now coming to the third attribute – curry. It is again a life style attribute which indicates culinary misadventure. What you eat. The traditional curry has acquired broader connotations today.
It includes many of the new age food that we push through our gullet. Yes, the pizzas, the hot dogs and several other varieties of junk food fashionably called fast foods that damage your system faster than curry. All these three lifestyle attributes come in combo pack. Hurry leads to worry and worry leads to more curry. Results are rather disastrous. To both mind and body. What to do? ‘Hasten Slowly’. Have a simple agenda. No hurry, no worry and very little curry. Observe this for the entire year there will be less of despair when we look back at the end of the year.