Awkward Relationship

Relationship with another human being can be a wonderful thing and at the same time quiet puzzling. It is a source of happiness and also deep pain. Its effect in human psyche is immeasurable. It is the most fascinating topic for the Psychologists. There are all sorts of relationships out there. I want to focus one quiet peculiar relationship which I want to call awkward relationship.

This kind of relationship has a great beginning. The other person becomes your best friend. Everything is great. But then something happens in between. May be you go away to another place far from where the other person is staying. Communication becomes thin. Or unsaid conflict, misunderstanding and grudges brew inside. Or may be some third person seeds the negative attitude about that person. The feeling of comfort in your talk with that person becomes formal, cold and avoidant. You expect the other person to speak first and may be the other person expects the same from you.

There is no public spat or conflicts that other persons can infer to. It is insidious. You may not recognize the causes at the beginning. But retrospectively reflecting the reasons might be clear. The other feature of such relationship is that you cannot out rightly end this kind of relationship because you still value or have some feeling for that person. After the passage of time, you might want to reanimate the relationship. But it is difficult since the thread of relationship is faded or lost. You don’t know how to start. Or it becomes very awkward to speak to that person again.

Psychology says that for resolving any relationship problems you have to talk or express. But it is easier said than done. If it was that easy then the relationship wouldn’t have been awkward in the first place. After not speaking properly for 3-4 years you cannot just go and try normal conversation with that person. Or even to start a conversation you don’t know how to start.

‘Should I say sorry ?’ Oh that might be more awkward. What are you sorry about anyway? For not speaking ? Then why didn’t you speak ? The explanation is burdensome. Or ‘ Should I just start normal conversation as if everything was fine between you’. But this is not just being you. What should you then?

I am not offering any solution here. I have such awkward relationships in my life as well. I am trying to figure it out myself. I think for now we have to realize such relationships exist. And lets hope there is a chance to revert back to the good old days.

Deciding to be a Vegetarian

During the last year , June 10-2020 , when I was reflecting on my diet intake and its effect in my health, I realized that meat did not agree so much to my body. I had never thought to be a vegetarian so when I thought about experimenting myself to be a fully vegetarian ( with the exception of eggs and milk products of course) my palate discouraged me from that thought. With constant juggling of my mind I got the hold of these two extreme thoughts and made them sit over to reach to one compromising solution. It might sound funny and silly to the people reading this. But the mental conundrum of a meat loving person deciding to to be a vegetarian is a serious business. So I came to the decision that I would give my palate a year to satisfy its urges and also get used with the idea of being a vegetarian. So the mental standoff was resolved.

I come from a community in which meat is essential in every rituals. We are a community that loves meats. We entice the people from other community with the varieties of meat cooking. I think there are very few people who does not love meat. Most of us relish it. The same is true for me. Me and my wife (girlfriend at that time) decided to forego the buff food items from our food options four years ago ( exception to that – we ate buff meat when it was brought from our village) . From that moment we had eaten very less buff food items. Buff or red meat for the matter used to give our digestive process a huge pressure afterwards and sometimes even took ill due to it. Then there was a media report about the way the buff meat was processed in Kathmandu which was very revulsive and frankly vomit inducing. If anyone is thinking of leaving a meat that tv report can do a good job of desensitisation. So I think the decision as of now to become a vegetarian started with the decision not to eat buff items.

To make myself clear there is no ideological reason as such motivating my decision. I don’t and will not bash the people who eat meat. I am experimenting myself for a year from June 10, 2021 to the June 10 next year to remove meat from my diet. Lets see what happens. And if I think that this was a bad idea I would resume eating meat again.

I like to experiment on myself. But ofcourse that would be with behaviours deemed safe physiologically and also can be reversed back if found unsuccessful. I have done many trials in myself. However most of them were failures but these failures always force me to think from another perspective or angle. So to say that I like experimenting myself would not be an under statement. Gandhi also did a lot of experiments in himself which made him Gandhi we know of today. Without those experiments Gandhi wouldn’t have experienced his truth. Well again I am not in the path to becoming Gandhi. You can read his experiences about his own experiments on himself in his autobiography – My Experiments with Truth.

My family members including my wife are doubtful about my commitment. This hurt my ego and I have to prove them that I can live happily without eating meat ( Just joking – but they are not 100 % convinced). The only problem that I fear is that I might lack protein in my diet. But this will give me an opportunity to research about it hopefully. So on with my new experiment with myself. After all if it doesn’t kill you, you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment on yourself. That’s research for you by you.

Why we choose the easiest things?

It’s after a long time that I am writing a blog. I used to blog a lot when I was in college days. It had a different charm and I thought I was a good writer. This was where I could show off my writing skills. As days passed by I don’t know conclusively the reasons why – but my writing became very slim and slimmer and then for a while I totally forgot that I even had a blog.

May be I was just becoming lazy ? Didn’t I get a good topic to write? Was I suffering from writer’s block? Did I realize that my writing was not good after all? For me at the beginning writing started with a fascination – something that I was attracted to. For that fascination to hold up you need to put effort constantly and continue writing even when you feel like not doing sometimes. When I think about it, I feel that I didn’t put the deliberate effort to write. Writing became increasingly a difficult choice as the time passed by and I lost the touch of it .

Writing for me is the medium that I can express better with than the other mediums. My thinking become crystallize when I write. I find out insights when I reflect by writing. But then why did I stop writing? I think it is to with our mind and its preference. Our brain likes to save our energy by going into the automatic or autopilot mode where the least amount of energy is used. You don’t have to consciously put any effort, concentration and attention which is very energy consuming. So in order to save the precious energy, the brain sits on the comfortable sofa and just idles with social media, changing TV channels with remote, compulsively watching youtube videos. That’s the easiest thing to do compared to sit, think and type for the writing. In fact our brain is such a मक्खी चुस ( fly sucker?? – meaning very greedy) about saving energy that even to decide a film to watch from many options becomes too heavy task for us. Therefore sometimes you suddenly realise that it’s already been half and hour in Netflix but you cannot decide for which one to go.

Writing is undoubtedly a very difficult task which requires conscious focus, attention and active thinking. I think that bombardment with too many choices and preferences make us lazy and entitled. This leads to the obvious. We are evolutionary engineered to opt for easy option. And nowadays the options come with too much of enticement hooked to arouse our insatiable pleasure seeking behaviours which is very hard to resist. Again to resist you need to put more mental energy. And by resisting such easy go pleasurable options for energy draining enterprise such as writing is too much of the hard task.

The easiest things are like sugary chocolates where you have it for pleasure but too much of it brings trouble. So is the case with the choices of life. The Psychologists such as William James believe that with constant deliberate effort and practise we can break the barrier and threshold of our reluctance and resistance to bring out true pleasure and satisfaction in our work.