There’s a shit ton of self help advice out there. There are tonnes of self help books and blogs and almost of all them market themsekves as if they have it all figured. This post isn’t a rant on self help books, infact I liked them until recently but I realised they weren’t helping me. I used to feel enlightened after reading them but that faded away rather quickly and that was mostly because I don’t think I actually implemented what they preached.

  • Get up in the morning and everything will be sorted. Well okay! but on the 4th day you feel like sleeping a bit more and there you go.
  • Read about the 5/25 Buffet rule? Are you working towards the 5 things you want the most and ignoring everything else? Nice! Way to go! but you slowly see the effort starts fading away in a week or so.
  • Don’t give a shit about what people say and think. Well YAY! but after a while you find yourslef thinking about what people would be thinking about an earlier awkward incident.

This happens with me and I think a lot of us can relate. Now this isn’t a failure of those self help books, infact if we practice what they preach we will benefit a lot! But guess what? We are humans after all. Just a push and we easily get distracted from the values we were trying to adopt and I think that’s okay. We are not perfect creatures and frankly a lot of the advice seems unreasonably hard to follow (at least to me) and so I was thinking what is something extremely easy to follow but relaxes you and helps you think clearly and then it came to me. It’s something almost all of us do and probably love but probably none of us actually talk about it. What?

Looking out the window!

Right? We all love it right? But this small little thing isn’t talked about that much. Infact I didn’t even realise that I love doing this and how much it helped me until recently. So I looked for articles and blog posts that echoes this thought on internet but couldn’t find anything and hence the motivation for this post.

Plato suggested a metaphor for the mind:

Our ideas are like birds fluttering around in the aviary of our brains

But in order for the birds to settle, we need periods of purpose-free calm.

Staring out the window offers such an opportunity. The point of staring out of a window is not to find out what is happening outside but to actually find out what is going in your mind. I feel we overestimate our capability to understand and process all the thoughts that keep going on in our head. Our brain is a complex thing. Our thoughts are complex in nature and rarely straight forward and unless you take out time to delve into your mind, to see what they actually mean you won’t be able to listen for quieter suggestions and thoughts and perspectives of our deeper selves. In short you get to know more about you and who wouldn’t want that? Staring out a window provides such an opportunity.

When you stare out an window you see the world going on: people going about their business and not giving a shit. You might feel alone and left out but that’s the point. At that moment you don’t have to respond to any of it. You realise it’s been a tiring day and for a moment you don’t have to think about your deadlines, about your due assignments, about your boss going bat shit crazy because you screwed up something at work. You think of nothing. You allow your thoughts to wander off. It’s a moment to daydream, something which I believe is massively underrated. I read somewhere some of our best insights come when we stop trying to be purposeful and instead respect the creative potential of our mind and I couldn’t agree with this more.

Looking out a window is even more fun when we are in a moving vehicle. You see people going about their business and you know that almost all of them are going through some major struggle in their life but you still see them going about their business and you realize none of them give a shit about you, they are there for themselves. This might make you feel alone but it gives a sense of relief that you might not be the only one and you get the courage to go through whatever shit you are going through.

In this age humans are not suffering from your traditional old problems. Advancement in science and technology has solved most of the problems human civilisation faced for centuries but I feel it might have given us a new set of problems. Problems which affect us psychologically. Problems like depression have increased exponentially over the past few decades. Studies show that we are living in the best time possible for human ciivilisation but we’ve been becoming less happier over time. Window daydreaming might be one of the strategic rebellion against all the excessive demands of immediate pressures which might ultimately even be insignificant; An opportunity to delve deep into yourselves and explore the wisdom of the unexplored deep self.