Meditation

1/3/11
Since my seventh grade, I used to wonder why my parents reserved an hour of their special and intimate night time to muse over our family book on Meditation, titled "Muraqaba" (an arabic sufi word for meditation), authored by some native Pakistani/Indian in Urdu. Today, sitting in my Digital Signal Processing class, I think I got the answer, or atleast some what, thanks also to my discussions on world religions with my roommate and to the fact that I never stopped thinking about resolving my very serious problem, distractions of my mind.

These distractions, as one generally does not notice, often bombard our mind while we are engaged in an important work or perhaps during casual hours. I was facing the same situation. And although, the process of unconsciously being reminded of your pending tasks is a useful innate trait affixed in your mind, it poses a hindrance in your mental productivity and is detrimental for your concentration. But concentration and a focused approach to thinking and reasoning is quintessential for evoking your creativity and ingenuity. Thus with distractions storming your mind, your concentration and with that your creativity suffers. It gets irritating for me when in the middle of reasoning my way out, for instance, of a vector calculus problem, my mind sets off virtual alarms for pending and overdue tasks. In the heat of emotions, the mind fails to recognize that these pending tasks are of far less significance than my intellectual enlightenment through the task at hand, i.e. of vector calculus.

It is indeed difficult to manage time and yet more so to stay focused during a task whose time is now. Because the fears of both performing well on the current and other tasks, and of ill-managing your schedule never leave you. It demands courage to stay focused and also self-confidence that you can and will handle everything one after the other, that is, it calls for a meditation.

I think that meditation is to gradually filter out all the unnecessary to-do's hurting your current mindset. It is to let go of all other tensions storming your thought process and to focus your thinking power on the task at hand.