Swamped by knowledge, missing in wisdom?

We all are swimming in the ocean of knowledge. At least all of us, here on the Internet. Everything that we want to know and learn is just one click or search away. But that knowledge may or may not be useful to us. Something that works for someone, may not work for you, because you have your own personality. You may not like that method, it might not suit you in different ways – conditionally, intellectually , emotionally, socially etc. It might take many trials and errors before you distill down those ‘grapes’ of knowledge into the ‘wine’ of wisdom.

Merely knowing something is not enough in life. You may read a lot about oceans, but to actually jump into an ocean can give you a different understanding of the natural wonder that an ocean is.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
– Albert Einstein

The process of converting this knowledge into wisdom is causing endless struggles into each one of our lives! But that is how it has always been. Growth is always gradual, accompanied by struggles!

There is Google for knowledge these days, hence whatever you are seeking – appears in an instant. But there is no Google for wisdom. As of yet, that is!

The saddest aspect of life now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. —Isaac Asimov

Ideals and life

We all have an idea of what we want in life. That ideal job, awesome car, beautiful home, loving-caring family, an understanding life partner, free-flowing existence, and nirvana!

But all that exists in the head. While we should always pursue the dreams that we have, real life is tough and can be sometimes different from the expectations we have in life.

What would you do in a moment of disappointment? I would say that feel the disappointment for a moment, but don’t sulk in it. Disappointments are failures but failures are results of fault in action, or a fault in assumptions that you had made prior to taking those actions. You can change you actions and achieve the success that you want in the next iteration.

Failures should not be a reason not to dream and they should not be a reason to WAIT. I see so many people waiting in their life. I don’t know what they are waiting for! Because it is themselves who have to arrive at a new destination, not someone else. Why are you waiting? Keep moving. Keep the momentum up and go ahead.

So what I am saying is.

while you should pursue your ideals in life, you should not stop living your life in the wait of your ideals.

No magic is going to happen. Many a lives have been wasted in this wait in the existence of civilisation. Your is not going to be different. What can differentiate it is only the action that you take while continuously moving forward.

Meanwhile cherish the imperfection that you are living through if you can. Because imperfection is what makes life so interesting, because if everything was perfect and expected, our lives would have been so boring and predictable. It is these disappointments that make our stories interesting. It is when we are faced with disappointments that our resolve is tested, our intelligence questioned and our existence laughed on. And it is at this hour, we show what we are made of. And we are not made of just some chemicals, we are made up of dreams, resolve and determination. How else would humans land on moon? How else someone has dreams to colonise Mars!

I love champions who overcome challenges. Yuvraj Singh overcame cancer, fought his place back into the Indian cricket team and scored his highest score at the age of 35 years. There were many challenges in the path and needless to say many disappointments. Life gave him cancer, and he gave it a fight and won!

Don’t wait. Live before you die.

Yuvraj Singh: the spirit of a champion

Check out Yuvraj’s interview on his comeback here.

Who do you write for?

Why write anything on the web these days. There is already a lot of content in the world. All the world’s wisdom, knowledge and facts are always one search away for people.

I write for people who seek the same things as me in life and are on similar journeys of time. Writing also brings a lot of clarity to me. Believe me, once you start typing, more often then not, you would end up writing something which is not having any original or good insight. But if you still have the habit of writing, it will sometimes enable you to come with a new insight. So its not only the effect, its sometimes also the cause.

I also write to put an online record of things. Sometimes in future, it would be fun to read these blog posts, right? And looking back at this time, i would hopefully think that “I was young and stupid at that time 🙂 ”

Anyways, do you write something regularly? And if so, who do you write for? Tell me in the comments.

 

Noise and voice

The world is too much noisy.

I am not talking about the horns on the road, or someone shouting  or any other noise created due to sound waves. Today we are suffering from another kind of noise. One of information.

There is too much information on the internet. So much that smart Google engineers have been working over the years to organise it and yet Google is not the only source of information. We are drowning in the feedback of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and what not. Every couple of minutes, someone would message you on WhatsApp and your email is overflowing with unread emails. Mailing lists that you had subscribed to years ago is still sending you emails. You don’t unsubscribe because you are hoping that you would get that one interesting email which would teach you something interesting and valuable. Thank god for such a big inbox Gmail!

There is so much information all around us and very little wisdom.

Sometimes I remember my childhood when I would play cricket for hours on end, go on a walk without a cell phone and visit my relatives who did not have their face stuck into a smartphone and miss the era of pure human connection. I have also become much more prone to distraction over the years. I miss my virtual life on Facebook when I don’t visit the website for too long. I am sure that if I don’t post anything there for a month, not one person would notice. But in the old era, if I did not go to play cricket for one week, one of my friends would drop by home to enquire about me. There was some human connection in that relationship.

I want that personal connection back. That experience back and that voice back. The voice of blabber, the voice of endless jokes where critical analysis and paralysis was not suffocating people.

I don’t want to be in touch with people who have “status updates”.

I want to connect with people who have voice. People who know who they authentically are. Not people who want to showcase a personality so that they would be seen favourably by others on a social network.

Drowning in noise, I don’t want this!