Clarity

Smudging some smog off my lens in these Delhi winters

Writing this just after trying to smudge my glasses clear, it’s safe to say I can really use some clarity in my life at the moment.

While I don’t like normalising disorders, by claiming to have them, since I am not diagnosed with any of them, yet. I still feel I might be borderline ADD, since I can’t seem to focus on anything, and my mental clarity is pretty much worse than my visual clarity, and they don’t even make glasses for that, do they?

If there is one type of people, I envy the most, it’s the fucking specialists. The ones who seem to be born with a purpose in mind, who have absolute clarity in their thoughts, and are perfectly fine in executing that with almost psychopathic single-mindedness.

In a world with so many choices, how do people get this zen like clarity about what they want in their life, and how do they commit to something, without being worried about the opportunity costs it has, and all the other shiny things they can be chasing, instead of doubling down on one single thing?

I find it extremely hard to commit to any single thing, hell, with the year starting, I ended up opening almost 10 books in parallel, not being able to decide which one to read, and ended up reading all of them a bit by bit ( although eventually settling to finish a few of them, but still wasting a lot of time in the exploration).

The same goes for my professional life, when I was still an undergrad, I used to spend my time chasing every new field I could find, and trying to learn the basics of it, but which lead to a very superficial understanding of things, and always made me look with awe at people, who dedicated their effort in a single field, and became fucking good at it.

I feel the world is designed to reward people who show clarity of thought, I think it is because it is hard to achieve that. Because it is hard to have the conviction and the confidence to believe that what you have chosen is the right thing, and the universe rewards you for that conviction.

One problem for this lack of clarity is the seeming impossibility of predicting anything in an adult life. Most of the impactful events of the past have been unplanned, and life just happened to smack me in my face, one sudden day, when it chose so, how are you supposed to have any clarity in things while living in such an uncertain world?

It is also however true, that the moments when I have felt at peace with myself, and had absolute clarity of thoughts, are clearly somehow superior to the usual brain fog that inhabits my brain. I want to maximise moments such as those, but they are few to find and small to last, and disappear into thin air, like fog on glass.