Every now and then fasting is a good thing. Helps your system reset. For some reason, fasting is more of a regular things with women in my life than the men. Mom, sister, wife, MIL all fast every now and then on a Friday or Saturday on some pretext (god's name) or other. Sometimes it is a full blown water only fast. Other times it is a liquid diet only and sometimes it is a "no tamarind, lime, etc.. sour or tangy" fast. My dad's idea of fasting was skipping Saturday night dinner and no one in our house pushed me or my brohter to do any fasting.
While fasting w.r.t. food is a good thing, that has been proven by eastern and western medicine and science, fasting with respect to external information is a very very good thing! Just went through that experience recently.
Three plus weeks ago, on an evening, I went through my Facebook feed, Twitter feed, Linkedin feed, google news feed and they all ended up depressing me thoroughly. There were mergers in the semiconductor industry that were unparalleled and folks were ending without jobs (this is Deja vu for me and it seems to have something to do with the election cycle for sure. Third time I am seeing this correlation), there were folks in south India fighting over a water dispute, there was US election politics and the ads in social media that just made me want to go throw up(I totally sympathize with swing state voters and what they go through), not to mention that work was tough as it is and we were going through what was probably the toughest phase of a remodeling at home.
After some interesting feedback from my wife and kids, just decided to do the following :
- delete the folder called "social" in my iPhone (which meant no FB, twitter, linkedin, etc. )
- delete safari from my home screen in the Mac. So there was no internet searching, no news, nothing, no late night comedy shows watched the next day, nothing.
- there is no TV at home anyways, so that was automatically taken care of
- the radio was turned off in the car while I was in the car, no exceptions
This in itself was an interesting experience. The first two days, you instinctively search for that folder when sitting in the restroom at work or home, come home and try to check some cricket score, look for that FB feed... but with some training, you get past it after day 3 and stop looking.
San and the kids were right. I spend a lot more time with them, have meaningful conversations without distractions (they are the ones more distracted now), had fights with them which I actually won! (doesn't happen), laughed a lot, lived a lot better in short!
Then just before the Asia trip, went to check the feed, just to make sure there were no world events in that part of the world that would affect me and sure enough there was a Typhoon going through on our flight path on the way back. The fact that social media I am used to are all blocked helped continue the fasting!
During that 2 hours spent after a 10 day break, realized that nothing is really changing. Same news feed. Same negativity overwhelming the positive.
The only postivie things were : nice photos of dancing ladies, landscapes and puppies from three of my friends, posts of my friends improving on their yoga experience in and out of the hot room (either smiling faces or faces that could bore a hole right through you with their intensity!) and the snaps of friends who posted things about their kids doing stuff!
The rest of the feed was a bottomless abyss which drowned out the positives.
That made me want to do two things. Find a way to filter the things I didn't want to see (it is out there and we should know it is out there, but there is no need to over dose on it), or continue the media fasting indefinitely.
Two days ago, I had an interesting conversation with my yoga teacher and I realized again that it is good to have conversations, it is good to meet new people, interact. Just pick the people and the interaction and it will be okay.
Now that there is a better system in place, will start writing again. Putting thoughts on screen (paper is better) is a good way to discharge some circuits in your head. A media fast and regular yoga, that is like a shutdown and reboot..
Let's see how Sundar 2.0 does in the coming months!
