A is for Apple
A is also for Anxiety. And Alive. A is also for Abundance and Absolute
I grew up in a family, where my anxiety before examinations was misinterpreted as conscientious. My parents unknowingly enabled it by removing a lot of tasks from my plate so that I could focus all my mental energies intensely on one complex problem in academics and take it to its solution. To exacerbate the problem, my efforts, tears and nights of anguish were rewarded by my teachers and university examination boards with good grades, trophies and certificates. All this meant that, nothing needed to change.No matter the what the difficulty of the challenge, the joy after said accomplishment was short-lived , if any. A solemn celebratory dinner with the family without much fanfare. My practical parents, considered it boastful to speak highly of their children’s victories. Of course, I did not pay much attention to these ‘trivial’ absurdities - as long as my brain was able to process what was being taught in class and as long as I was moving from one complex assignment to another, I was good to go.But a week before examination day, crippling anxiety would creep in. This anxiety would persist even when I was well prepared. To ensure nights of restful sleep during revision and preparation leaves I had to vomit food. No amount of chiding, consolation by my parents would do, just vomiting food. It is only when I came across an article about how supermodels battle with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia did I realize that this was not ‘healthy’.In high school, I wished to study just physics, math and the languages. I loved to learn and my brain absorbed information like a sponge. In every grade, I looked forward to discover the wonderful truths of the world around us and the laws that governed this system. I loved the complex math that was required to explain these laws. Fast forward to young adult hood, I was absolutely unprepared for disappointments in social settings - in a friend circle of boys and girls, I would start by being ‘friends’ with every body and end up as being the only ‘single’ person in the group as the others would form pairs around me over a period of time. I took to journal-ing about these little disappointments mostly unless the outcomes were unbearably harsh in which case I had to throw up food. Vomiting food has been my way of coping with severe anxiety for many years now.As I look back on those early years, today, I understand how closely our stomachs are related to our mental health. Thankfully, this is not complicated to understand. When our mind is stressed psychologically and if we do not address the stress by talking about it or by removing our self from the stressor, our stomachs will refuse to digest the food we give it. This is one of the ways our mind-body system can ‘rebel’ to let us know that it is anxious. The truth is that the most gentle , empathetic people who are great listeners and sensitive to the needs of people around them grew up around insensitive and self-centered care givers. Their need to make everyone comfortable around them is a mixture of genuine concern and a subconscious guardedness of their own emotional needs - which come Armageddon may, they will not reveal. Ironically, our hearts look for such expressions of emotional honesty and vulnerability when we seek ‘companions’. Hearts instinctively recognize pretense and falsity.Millennia of social conditioning and refinement have trained the conscious parts of our brains to ignore the voice of our own hearts. As a race we never had elaborate and fair displays of abilities, or mating calls or dances or immaculate nest building abilities like some of our relatives in the bird and animal kingdom. So we increasingly, tried to train our aesthetic sense to refine what our eyes find beautiful or what our ears like to listen to, where our bodies feel 'comfortable', what our palates find pleasing. Be special in any way - signals in advertisements, magazines, movies in our environment scream to our brains: be uncommonly intelligent, incredibly beautiful, or funny, able to read sheet music, or play the piano, or go to the Harvard or Oxford, or Juilliard, or travel the world, learn baking at Le Cordon Bleu or be unbelievably wealthy. Sadly, alas the heart laments and economists agree that such endeavours only isolate us from fellow humans even more, when not done with the appropriate intention. Should no one then single-mindedly pursue their interests, sharpen their skills or reach new frontiers in their chosen fields for the benefit of humanity ? Should the progress of our race be limited to the average of the level of all its inhabitants ? This certainly seems insulting to our analytical capabilities and intellectual interests, quite oppresive and totalitarian - and is most definitely not being suggested here.For any solution to emerge which includes everything between individual welfare to climate change, our learnings from the past suggest that it must surely consist of the following elements, in the very least :
I grew up in a family, where my anxiety before examinations was misinterpreted as conscientious. My parents unknowingly enabled it by removing a lot of tasks from my plate so that I could focus all my mental energies intensely on one complex problem in academics and take it to its solution. To exacerbate the problem, my efforts, tears and nights of anguish were rewarded by my teachers and university examination boards with good grades, trophies and certificates. All this meant that, nothing needed to change.No matter the what the difficulty of the challenge, the joy after said accomplishment was short-lived , if any. A solemn celebratory dinner with the family without much fanfare. My practical parents, considered it boastful to speak highly of their children’s victories. Of course, I did not pay much attention to these ‘trivial’ absurdities - as long as my brain was able to process what was being taught in class and as long as I was moving from one complex assignment to another, I was good to go.But a week before examination day, crippling anxiety would creep in. This anxiety would persist even when I was well prepared. To ensure nights of restful sleep during revision and preparation leaves I had to vomit food. No amount of chiding, consolation by my parents would do, just vomiting food. It is only when I came across an article about how supermodels battle with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia did I realize that this was not ‘healthy’.In high school, I wished to study just physics, math and the languages. I loved to learn and my brain absorbed information like a sponge. In every grade, I looked forward to discover the wonderful truths of the world around us and the laws that governed this system. I loved the complex math that was required to explain these laws. Fast forward to young adult hood, I was absolutely unprepared for disappointments in social settings - in a friend circle of boys and girls, I would start by being ‘friends’ with every body and end up as being the only ‘single’ person in the group as the others would form pairs around me over a period of time. I took to journal-ing about these little disappointments mostly unless the outcomes were unbearably harsh in which case I had to throw up food. Vomiting food has been my way of coping with severe anxiety for many years now.As I look back on those early years, today, I understand how closely our stomachs are related to our mental health. Thankfully, this is not complicated to understand. When our mind is stressed psychologically and if we do not address the stress by talking about it or by removing our self from the stressor, our stomachs will refuse to digest the food we give it. This is one of the ways our mind-body system can ‘rebel’ to let us know that it is anxious. The truth is that the most gentle , empathetic people who are great listeners and sensitive to the needs of people around them grew up around insensitive and self-centered care givers. Their need to make everyone comfortable around them is a mixture of genuine concern and a subconscious guardedness of their own emotional needs - which come Armageddon may, they will not reveal. Ironically, our hearts look for such expressions of emotional honesty and vulnerability when we seek ‘companions’. Hearts instinctively recognize pretense and falsity.Millennia of social conditioning and refinement have trained the conscious parts of our brains to ignore the voice of our own hearts. As a race we never had elaborate and fair displays of abilities, or mating calls or dances or immaculate nest building abilities like some of our relatives in the bird and animal kingdom. So we increasingly, tried to train our aesthetic sense to refine what our eyes find beautiful or what our ears like to listen to, where our bodies feel 'comfortable', what our palates find pleasing. Be special in any way - signals in advertisements, magazines, movies in our environment scream to our brains: be uncommonly intelligent, incredibly beautiful, or funny, able to read sheet music, or play the piano, or go to the Harvard or Oxford, or Juilliard, or travel the world, learn baking at Le Cordon Bleu or be unbelievably wealthy. Sadly, alas the heart laments and economists agree that such endeavours only isolate us from fellow humans even more, when not done with the appropriate intention. Should no one then single-mindedly pursue their interests, sharpen their skills or reach new frontiers in their chosen fields for the benefit of humanity ? Should the progress of our race be limited to the average of the level of all its inhabitants ? This certainly seems insulting to our analytical capabilities and intellectual interests, quite oppresive and totalitarian - and is most definitely not being suggested here.For any solution to emerge which includes everything between individual welfare to climate change, our learnings from the past suggest that it must surely consist of the following elements, in the very least :
- individual contribution that moves the race a step closer towards the solution of a common concern
- warm-heartedness, joyful cameraderie with fellow community members
- voluntary selfless service offering one's personal best to make the lives of young and aged members easier (irrespective of whether they are related by blood)
- access to constant learning of new languages, skills, music, math, science and art for everybody with the larger aim to connect, communicate with and entertain other members of our community
- reflection and recalibration of our personal compasses
- a life of relentless and endless learning and practical implementation of our findings in social experiments
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