Life & Naansense

“Change your prayer!!”

A few nights back, my sleep was absconding. No matter what i tried, it just wouldn’t come out from the shadows. The thoughts in my mind were like a wild forest fire; no amount of water was dousing them.

After all my efforts got swallowed in to the same shadows, i rummaged through my childhood coaching and tried an old resort, as is taught by most parents, at least in this part of the world - prayer!

I’d learnt a few lines from the prayers as practiced in Sikhism as early as at the age of two. Every night, when the lights would be turned out, my Mum would sit down for her prayer and direct me to do mine - whatever little i knew (which sounded uber cute courtesy a child’s phonetics). She taught me to recite the same whenever in despair or whenever i needed to calm myself down.
Somewhere after i entered my teens and before i left them, I took the decision to give up on this nocturnal ritual, strictly w.r.t. uttering the taught prayer. To my slightly crestfallen mother, i explained that I’d like to pray to the Power in my own words and my own way. God, if any, understands it all, right? ;-)

Many years have passed since then but till date i remember those few lines of prayer like a recorder. And like a recorder only i started mumbling it inside my head that sleepless night. But such a supernova was my mind that night, that my other thoughts overlapped with the prayer and as the prayer struggled not to get buried beneath them, the last sane neuron in my brain screamed, “Change your prayer!!”

I did and soon found myself flying amongst my dreams.

What i realized out of that is that over time that prayer had been hard-coded in my brain so much so that i could recite without even consciously putting any effort into it. That’s what repeated practice does. Prayer, or any other concentrated mental activity, is supposed to shut you off from everything else since all your energy is fueling and there’s none left for anything else. And your mind enters a state of stillness.
But that night, when i called upon it for mental solace, it couldn’t offer me any since i no longer had to move a single mental muscle to do it. It flowed effortlessly and my mind scattered in a million directions underneath it. It came so naturally to me, so by-default, programmed eminently into my psyche. My slavery of memory.

Rings a bell with Malcolm Gladwell advocacy of the “10,000 Hours Rule”? My mind knew this prayer like the back of its neurons now. I’d probably reached the ‘expert level’ for that prayer. Which sounds good (unless we are talking about messing things up, who doesn’t like being called, or at least to be thought of, as an expert?) but in this case, it isn’t. Instead of serving me, that proficiency proved futile.
And like that, we achieve ‘expert level’ for many other small things but some of them, sometimes, boomerang on us. We hold on to it hoping to extract from the same benefit which we had originally done. Caught in the cage of our own expertise and its ‘comfort zone’, most of us choose to trudge forward with that expert-level albatross around our neck.

The verdict on it is clear - abandon it! Replace it! Seize the chance to bring in something better! And don’t waste time in tying your shoelaces, just start running ahead, afresh; while realizing how damn heavy albatrosses can be.

Which expert level do you need to denounce today?