A Great Pair: Attention and Knowledge

Women Walking on the Beach, Painting by Joaquín Sorolla

I batched out almost two hundred pictures in the folder “October Days ’22”. I pointed almost thirty as ‘favorites’ and fifteen out of the lot would be going for printing. I ticked off that work in my planner and moved on with the next task. Well, this last one needs correction. It’s not a task; it’s something that is going to give my living room’s one corner a dash of creativity. My October days gave the utmost priority to my short beach tour. In those days, I mostly dipped myself into the waves like a marine creature and whenever I got the time to walk through the breezy beach, I collected shells. Almost a full pouch had been sitting on the cabinet top for a fortnight. The hangover phase was pretty long and my October became like a tired, lazy, grumpy chap around its mid-way. I untied the lot and carefully arranged them. I changed my phone’s wallpaper; now it has a shell, my fingers and a bluish and whitish ocean at the back. I always wonder how shell and sea always look perfect with each other. I guess they have a pre-tuned tempo.

Pre-tuned tempo is the cult we need to find out and match. It can go on like pen and paper, salt and salad, and many more. We might not find anything special in that. But if I go on like habit and health, determination and money, choice and success—they create something like a ladder. If the first one goes well, then the other part comes later on. If somebody works on each pair I guess that person can get closer to the ‘dream’ life. Whereas the definition of ‘dream’ life can differ from person to person. But overall these three sets go well with any version of ‘dream’ life.

Now the question is how these pairs can work seamlessly with our chores. Do we need a complete turnover or can some daily small changes bring that? Let’s accept that it’s complicated. If we go with habit, it is time-dependent. It never moves fast. The next one is determination but if we clip the ‘money’ factor with this then it is even more entangled with other actions. These things need proper plans, actions, and to some extent, luck. And choice, this one is pretty much whimsical. Now the question is how will they work in favor of us if they are quintessentially complicated?

Complicated things need attention and knowledge. They can get into our routines if we create attention and knowledgeable inputs into our systems. For example, shell collection is a matter of attention but it also needs some ocean-specific knowledge, like when the ocean will get high tide and low tide; when a person should actually go searching for shells. It’s a small-leisure task but still it focuses on attention and knowledge. Similarly, habits need attention but how I will make them beneficial for my health—the calculation needs knowledge. The same thing goes for the other two. A strong and sturdy outcome is a combination of the pair—attention and knowledge. They are ruling over the rest. I truly feel they are not pre-tuned. These two strings need the tinge of personal tempo. They both need the person’s ambition to make each day a solid step towards an ecstatic future. I call that ambition Ina*. Two great strings may have started with a slow tempo; we just need to give them a nice pace.

(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)