POV

It’s a technique in literature but also has a close corollary in real life. What matters is not how you look at things, or who is looking at it but the fashion in which you look at it. Brashly instinctive or plain-Jane conservative? The important point to note here is, that the POV you adopt can be nurtured and modified by external circumstances. The circumstances are manifold and how you eliminate the unnecessary to arrive at the meaningful ones define the platform you create while setting about tweaking your opinions.

Views go askew abruptly with or without a reason. Depending on which side of the bed you woke up in the morning, all of your thoughts from the previous day can either go for a toss or be brought to boil in the fullest extent possible. When taking on issues with slightly longer term implications, and with huge costs involved, you are wont to close out and retreat to a shell every once in a while. Your risk-taking ability or your mental approach can only go to a certain extent at alleviating all the concerns that suddenly take a life of its own. It’s not that these concerns weren’t there when you had pondered over it only last night. It’s only that today they seem larger in context and bigger in their overall implications.

Decisions, a manifestation of the views you adopt follow a similar pattern. The only caveat being, views are incommunicado when the event has already passed by its expiration age. Decisions however, can come back to bite you. Herein lies the essence of determining your ability to digest uncertainty. Relentless pursuance of the ideal decision is bound to back-fire sometime – if not today then very likely in the near-future.

If you are of the type who constantly goes back to the decisions you took and depending on how it panned out, manifest them in your state of being, you would do well to let a minimum of decisions cometh your way. In these cases particularly, you would be better off pursuing a single stream of thought rather than opening yourself to a barrage of options. How these options unravel are stuffs legends are made of for they are as much a practice in witch-craft as they are in pseudo-scientific enquiry. Colloquially, they are termed as “what if” scenarios which all of us are chained to every once in a while. The pointlessness of it never escapes our attention and yet, try as we might, disentangling ourselves from something that happened in the past is more complex than it looks. Call it the “narrative fallacy” if you may, but when we indulge in these frivolous activities we become a victim of a biased simplification of facts. History through the rear-view mirror always appears closer than they actually are. And simpler too.

In our attempts to reconcile our decisions, we become adept at harking back to the lost times and excavating those precious moments of indecisions when things could have gone either way. Like history, these decisions are the slaves of the winner. They are bound to the eventual outcome and our perceptions are chained to the resultant pathway that lie ahead of us. Uncertainties have a way of affecting us in the most indirect of ways. They make hay while the clock ticks by. Pervasive restlessness and all-encompassing negativity can often times erupt in the most unlikeliest of places. We are what our choices make us. But choices are not welcome always, especially when its replete with overlapping pathways. Indecisiveness result when choices are let to vegetate and when they do, a state of anxiety follows, proceeded by dense periods of pondering and heart-burn. We cannot choose conflicting things simultaneously, and when that happens, we become paralyzed by indecisions, terrified by the prospects of wrong decisions. Every choice we make, we eliminate or let go of other choices. 

I suppose when one reaches a juncture where free-will seems unwanted, one turns to faith and fate. Faith because he places his trust on a bigger authority to do what’s best. Fate because he accepts the uncertainty and accomodates the idea of resigning to the randomness inherent in our world. Lacking in either, one might as well Darwin it and continue by way of incorporating everything of the above into his daily existence.