There's a meme which goes around that, "Life is a tornado and I am just the cow being spun around for cinematic value." Well, life has felt like that since late last year. But like the day follows night, night follows day, tornados too settle at some point. I feel like the cow that survived a small tornado though the after-effects are still there... the point is that I survived. Perhaps I also learnt a few things. Maybe that's the point of tornados...?

I was telling someone the other day that I like my life to be very routinised in general. However, because you learn things from experience or conflict rather than routine, I do need to have some manageable bits of that too in my life. I guess for the instrumental purpose of connecting my thinking to actual experience. How can I write about an experience or say anything meaningful about it—which is what I wish to do in my routine day as an academic—if I don't experience it myself? I mean, one can get some sense of an experience second-hand too but it's not the same thing. <Deleted short snippet from here to reuse in an article. Will reference it when published>

These quotes on ‘consciousness’ and ‘attention’ made me ponder. Especially when I think about how we seem to waste a lot of attention on the irrelevant and trivial these days. I remember growing up gorging on books and that is probably the thing that has made me who I am. As Iain says here, subject and object both change in the process of attention. And now, with the ubiquity of technology, social media, what not… what are we paying attention to…? Probably points to the reason for the hollowness and shallowness that abounds everywhere…

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"The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences."

 “Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognize (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “firmed up” — and brought into being.

[…]

Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something — or don’t attend to it — matters a very great deal.”

~ Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

There are days when I focus on the things that matter most, believing that action is more important than fruit of action. And then there are days when I am haunted by the unfairness and pointlessness of a world where action and fruit of action rarely coincide. The question of the meaning of action becomes paramount. What really stops us from giving up, what really motivates us to go on when nothing really makes sense and there seems to be no design whatsoever? If things are as random as they are, why not let randomness just take over…? I mean, you might still suffer at the hands of fate—by fate I mean randomness—but at least you don’t have to worry about not deserving it. Cutting your nose to spite your heart perhaps, but you won’t be bothered by questions of how action does not coincide with fruit. You would be equally undeserving or deserving and you would have no reason to be baffled and bemused by what keeps going down in the world…

Yes, it is one of those days where I am finding it hard to keep my bafflement and befuddlement at bay. I find it hard to find motivation in the idea of action for its own sake, and for its own enjoyment. Internal goods, as they call it in the academic world. I guess that is something. That one finds enjoyment in the internal goods, goods that no one can really take away from you or curtail access to. Maybe there is something in that. Maybe I should make peace with that. Even if my action never meets with commensurate reciprocation, it will still not be for nothing. I would have already earned something that not everyone can earn and certainly one cannot earn without action. Perhaps there is some innate justice in the scheme of things though this scheme doesn’t respond to the logic of the world we have today. Perhaps I need to appreciate this deeper logic instead of getting seduced by the ways of the world—as they would say in India philosophy, all is nothing but “māyā” (illusion) and “mithyā” (deception). But, how do you hold this position and still stand for justice in the world?