Practicality of Pessimism

“I never knew you would turn out like this, those days you use to talk about practicality and crap” my friend kept saying these words as I was lamenting my losses in life. I argued back saying I am still optimist and also practical but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t take away the pessimist overtone from my voice. This makes me wonder – is optimism all about illusion. Is it true that when you are sad and hurt, if you alleviate above the realm of reality and cover yourself in cloud of happiness people calls you an optimist while if you moot over the reality and prepare yourself for the worse you are a pessimist?

For me reality is always what I want to be in. I do not mind mooting over it again and again, however one thing, which I always keep trying, is to change the reality by being a part of it. In that effort there is hope and that hope is what I call optimism. As of today there are few things that are beyond my control, few partially while rest fully in my control. For the one beyond I would try and bring it in at least partial control else would try to dissociate with it ASAP, for things in control I would keep thinking on it, question myself, try to improvise, analyze it so that I can make it happen. In this process I might tend to lower the expectation of a favorable outcome simply because experimenting with the facts clears the uncertainty around the event and probabilities of the outcome can be deterministic and hence more discrete with less assumptions and chances of exaggeration. Does that make me an optimist, practical person or pessimist? I would never know that nor would my friend and frankly it doesn’t matter for next day I have to get up and clear the mess anyways and move on in life and again come across a situation where I could question myself with the same question, after all till we keep having heavy meals we need heavy conversations to follow suit J

Spirit for a spirit

Man! I need to do something with my life. Day after day I am just going through the daily regimes of life, kidding myself, at bedtime promising myself an interesting day tomorrow. Each day was just an exact copy of the previous day, like a daily batch processes scheduled by the windows task manager. Somehow I had to force an exception in the code and exit this infinite boring loop. How could I do this, the code was static with no branching option, internal daily variables were being set with prejudiced values. Well the only way I thought it could happen is by passing external variable values, which could crash my code and force me out of oblivion.

In yesterday’s daily run I decided to accept one such external parameter – invitation by my friend to a dance club. Now that is something I never usually do, in fact it would be the second time. Normally I would have declined the invitation citing reasons like work, tiredness et al but this time I said lets go for it. However there was one problem – in a dance club you ought to dance. To me it is like climbing the Mt Everest, no actually I would be more hopeful of this than being able to dance! Few occasions when I shook my legs was under the influence of spirit and this time too I had to rely on it? Also I had a point to prove to few of my friends who lately labeled me terms like ‘Sad’, ‘Girl’ for not displaying enthusiasm to parties, fun frolic. (With due respect to the fairer sex, the term ‘Girl’ in no way symbolizes the behavior, just uttered on instinct by my friend). This evening I had to exhibit my ‘free’ and ‘lively’ spirit and ironically I needed spirit for that. So after reaching the club I indulged in few drinks, its effect was quite immediate, soon I was flowing with the music, becoming oblivious to the surroundings and people around. Within 30 minutes I was in a perpetual state of motion (To everyone I would just say it was dancing but this might offend the real artists J) and this state continued right till the end of show. By then the spiritual influence was wearing down and senses were taking the control back and in 15 minutes after the show ended I returned to the original state. The log file of the spiritual run said I ‘danced’ for about 2 hours continuously, my friends were very amused and entertained seeing me ‘perform’, all in all ‘we had fun’. So hurray!

What I didn’t realize yesterday was that the spiritual script was detrimental to my OS. It had done severe damage to certain hardware and the whole of morning I was busy error handling. Even after a forced re-boot (sleep) in the afternoon system refused to come back to normalcy, in fact had a severe headache coupled with unease stomach. The entire batch runs scheduled for today had to be either cancelled or re-scheduled for tomorrow. Before this even though not interesting system was stable and running fine, but now it is neither stabile nor scalable. So what did I achieve? Frankly nothing. Seems like the force exit of the routine script was not at all a good idea.

In hindsight the whole concept for having spirit to get new spirit is so silly. For me to dance and have ‘fun’ I need to forget my surroundings, people around me and just let myself loose. These instructions per se need to be executed by my mind and does not matter which script includes them. Why cannot I simply include these instructions in my daily script, be happy and live freely on my own. Even though it may not be as effective but at least it is more stable. So now as struggle to restore normalcy continues I vowed never ever to rely on the spirit to have fun. I am sure the sense of achievement in attaining a mediocre state of liveliness is much more than these temporary frills.