What keeps you going?

Isn't it easy to spot examples of balance around us?

Be
it a see saw, or a vegetable vendor using their scales; You leaning and
balancing on the two feet of your chair or rotating a notebook on your
fingertip; spinning a fidget on your thumb or balancing a pen on your
nose. We all do and see these acts of balancing.

These occurances of events (reaction) that balances the initiation done by us (action) sooths our mind.
The balance feels right and imposes a sense of relief that everything is running smooth and fair.

Scientists
did focus on the physical aspects of balance but there is a lot of
intangible occurances that are action reaction duos and illustrate
balance.

At a macro level, transactions are kind of an action
reaction duo, you give something - you recieve something and hence
acheive balance.

Likewise there are many philosophical
instances that potrays balance for example the whole concept of Karma
works on the principle of balance.

One might not notice but most of our actions are actually reactions to our previous reactions to bring balance to our life.

It is indeed complicated to understand and take leverage of that understanding to attain balance in our lives, and yet some people live happily by gaining the balance unintentionally.
Our reactions often happen to be an unconscious effort to bring balance.

I am a BTECH student doing my engineering in India.

After surviving 15 years of my life burdened with the pseudo
competition that we are pushed into, I realized, we all must have at least
something that keeps us alive,that makes us strive for our survival, else the
cases of suicide would have been much higher than what we gasp at right now…

Believe me, every month 80%(okay, that’s not a proper
researched quantity, but if u are looking for authentic value, I am sure it
will be higher than 80) of college students get this feel “Why am I still doing
this."

Now here’s the data
for u “There were more than 2 million students studying at a university in
England for 12 months up to July 2017, and the suicide rate was
4.7 deaths per 100,000 students.”

I am writing this so that I can try to pull you from that
0.000047% of the population.

Read this blog only if you think you belong to the crowd of
80% which I mentioned earlier, because only then you are under the risk of
getting into the small crowd of 0.000047℅.

As small as 0.00047% may seem to you, it is indeed
the most critical and dark group of people who lose every hope for life… So why
not make sure that you never fall into it!

Lemme share my own story.

I actually started feeling the burden of studies when I went
to hostel after my 10th. Hostels for high school can be a real nightmare. Not to mention about the bullies and staying away from home food, you even
have to do things in order at specific times without fail.

If you miss even a single activity, you are the one who is going
to regret it.

Be it a simple class or your lunch, you have to do things at
that exact allotted time(yeah yeah, enough of hostel life, I will make another
blog on that, for now I just wanted to convey how tough a
hostel life can be if u are not used to it).

So, hostel life was a real torture for a guy like me who never
had this peek a boo relationship with his watch.

No, I never missed any activity, I was never being punished
either, but the amount of stress that kept me in line is what I want to share.

Your mind is like a see saw : if you are doing something you
are told to,in order to maintain the balance your mind, you tend to do things that you are not forced to.
And hence most
of the people happen to have a hobby! The brain tries to maintain the balance
so bad that some people take it further level up by doing things that they are
explicitly told not to do (Need examples? Aren’t the gossips you had in canteen
about the incidents (or more appropriately called as ‘Kaand’ in hindi) in your
school and college enough?)

In my case, I had nothing.... literally nothing, I didn't
know how to dance or sing or to draw or to write or even to read a tome.

Throughout my childhood I always had one thing coming after
other, and was always busy either with school work, or social bonding or social
media bonding or bonding with my TV(that too only doordarshan, a little intro to that in this blog).

So in hostel, the only thing I could do was social bonding,
in order to balance myself, all other options were not that possible in my hostel.

So I tried connecting to people in my hostel, and yes, I
survived my hostel life because of the friends I made( although most of them
were senior, coz they seemed a better mature group to be with). And as I kept
connecting to them I started inheriting their hobbies too, playing table tennis,
volleyball and basketball became my stress busters as well.

Now the kid who once was a wimpy tot became a happy kid, who figured out how
to survive.

Little did I know, things change with time.

In college, where I hardly got time to bust a nut(
another story of how busy my college life is). Assignments, Assessments,
Projects, Lab practicals, Viva .... Never stopped thrashing my unbalanced mind.

It took me two more years to realize, that it is not just
playing, singing or dancing that makes u happy in fact there can be a lot other
ways...

Here is a list of things that I tried to keep myself going,
to keep my unbalanced mind balanced, to do something that I am not told to, to
do something for my own happiness, to do something that made me feel better.

1. Making friends.

2. Playing your favorite sports.

3. Writing, photography.

4. Talking and sharing everything with someone constantly,
   be it your parents or friend.

And many more...

But this is not it...

I was missing the common link...

It was recently, that I discovered the link...

It was confidence, everything that I did gave me
confidence...

Making friends gave me confidence, that if I am in trouble,
I have people I can turn to.

Playing gave me confidence that I am doing some physical
activity and strengthening my body.

So I concluded that, anything that I do with my own wish,
boosts my confidence.

So, the answer to “what keeps me going” is as simple as “following
my head”.

What if we start thinking about the things that we are told to do, and understand its need so much as so that when we do it, it actually feels like following our own head!