Zen and the art of online irrelevance.

Looking at my recent drafts on blogger, I realised I was going a bit overboard ranting about a lot of things, people and their behaviour that frustrated me. And I felt unnecessarily irritated with the sudden increase in advertising and aggression on my  social media feeds.

I am an aspirational zen person and till recently, I felt like I was achieving my zen goals. So what went wrong?

Then it struck me: Most of the advertising and content I see on these feeds is in reality targeted towards, and created by people who are younger than I am by at least five to eight years if not more. And while in an ideal scenario I would love to go back to ad-free days with less social media, I can’t without deleting my accounts permanently. I realise that I now possibly fit into the grumpy aunt category (I should ask a young person.) Meanwhile, just the realisation that the ads and the content don’t speak to me and the act of reducing the count of people and topics I actually read about on my social media feeds makes me feel lighter, better, less angry at the world and more zen again. I am being random on purpose so I know that people who I engage with online are really worth engaging with.

Sometimes, personal progress is all about taking a few steps back and being absolutely irrelevant to and on some parts of the internet and the people on it.

Key bored.

I took up many activities during the gap between my 12th exams and college admissions. I had all the time on my hands so I taught 10th std. maths, took lifeguard/life saving lessons and did a short course to become a swimming instructor and spent a good 4-5 hours in the pool daily. Those were the highlights of the summer. But there is a suppressed memory of an activity I took up and it was a traumatic one- synthesiser lessons.

Traumatic because those lessons were boring as hell. The teacher- talented as he was just couldn’t make the lessons engaging or fun. It was so bad that after a month, I gave up playing the keyboard entirely! And what a tragedy it was as before this, I loved playing the harmonium and a small synth I had... without any lessons!

A few months later, I borrowed my uncle’s old acoustic to take some guitar lessons and I’ve been playing ever since. I’m not very good at playing the guitar even now, but really enjoy it.

Then the other day I realised there was an old synth lying around at home. My cousin needed it for practice whenever she visited us during her summer vacations and had since graduated to a bigger one. All the suppressed memories of those traumatic hours spent trying to learn to play the keyboard came back to me, but it was going to be different now. I wasn’t going to take lessons. At least not immediately, and not from that teacher!

I took it out of hiding, cleaned it and plugged it in... The moment I played the first note after

a decade and a half, I realise how much I missed playing the synth.

I’m still pretty bad at it. I can practice and become marginally better. The guitar lessons come in handy and there’s always the Internet for help. But what I really love is how happy it makes me feel... As happy as the times I enjoyed playing the keyboard as a kid so many years ago!

Key bored no more!