Skip to main content

Hard Reset

Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind was an impulse borrow from the library. I've liked everything I've read by Pollan so far so I was curious about this book. I listen to it on my walks and these days I often take them in the middle of the work-day so I can spend time in the sunlight for a couple of hours. The workday is endless and this pause keeps me from feeling worn out even after a long one. A sharp switch from my work mode to listening to Pollan talk about the mind and spirit altering effects of LSD and psilocybin is a dramatic shift and forces my mind to reconfigure itself entirely to engage with the book. This is so far and removed from anything that is part of my daily life. 

A couple of hours later when I am back from work, I feel like I had a long mental holiday and feel more energized to pick up where I left off. The other thing the book is doing for me is making me think hard about stopping cold and restarting the next part of my life as no other way is likely to work. That which I am waiting for - the sign, the epiphany, the perfect opportunity and so on will likely not arrive. It will be a lot easier to roll along to the next thing that follows from where I am at right now. Its akin to the experiences Pollan describes in the book that people had after trying psychedelic substances except that in my case just hearing about it is inspiring me to consider a hard reset to force change. In any event, this is a fascinating book and the story is superbly told. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more