Enthusiasm can be dangerous to your well-being. I have been a supreme enthusiast most of last eight years. My enthusiasm has come in my way in more ways than one.
Mind Your Talent
One area we are most enthusiastic about is exercising our beloved craft. It’s a deep self-expression and the surest way to bliss. Contrast this with what Lao Tzu, the founder of one of my favorite philosophical paths – Taoism says:
Silence and Spontaneity seem to be opposite ends of the spectrum. I am in love with both and would love for myself to harmonize them. But is it possible in the first place?
When I wake up, just like others, my awareness is at a low. Ironically I find it easier to be myself during these times. There is nobody looking upon me from a watch-tower. Because my own self-aware self is absent. I am under nobody’s radar. There is no productive/unproductive or worthwhile/not worthwhile tag as applied to my actions. I can crack jokes at length (oblivious of any time management) and blabber away to glory with my little one. The watcher and the commenter are not home. There is nobody telling me what to do and what not to do.
Key learning points from the book
By Alan Watts
My conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real ‘me’ than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems to be so fleeting and intangible but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions about what I will be in the future. So it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.
by Alan Watts
We have been brought up in a religious tradition, that to a great extent has taught us to mistrust the nature around us and to mistrust our own selves as well. But the irony here is that if u cannot trust your own basic nature, then how can you trust your own mistrusting ? Isnt your mistrusting a part of your nature ? How do u know that your mistrusting is not wrong as well ? If you do not trust your own nature, you become as tangled up as anyone can be.
Confucius was the first to say that he would rather trust human passions and instincts than trust human ideas about what is right, for like the Taoists he realized that we have to allow all living things to look after themselves.
