Tuesday, January 18, 2011

1. The motivation to write!

One can safely assume that great scientific minds like Einstein and Newton came up with their brilliant  inventions  because of two factors; one , they had an indefatigable passion for the subject and two ,they had all the time and the resources available, to relentlessly pursue their wisps of ideas, and give shape and form to them.

Please be rest assured,  I am certainly  not  presumptious enough to compare myself to these geniuses. Nevertheless, I can't help but dwell on the fact, that at this point in my life , I certainly do possess one of the factors that  Einstein and Newton were privvy to, and that my friends is, time and the resources to pursue my dream - of writing! I do not have any grandiose plans to come up with any inventive genius , but I would feel exhilarated,  if I am able to give shape and form to the various unfettered thoughts, that flit through my mind, like butterflies in a flower-filled field ,on a warm summer afternoon.

Footprints in the sands of time !Time......of which there is no beginning nor end .
My mind travels across time, sometimes back into the past and sometimes forward into the future ,  the plan is to create little footprints......... sometimes of the past and sometimes of the future......so here goes.....

An ardent student of english literature, who fell in love with Venice, and all things Italian,  while reading the "Merchant of Venice" in school , I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what I have been doing, pursuing a career in corporate sales for the last fifteen years. Not that I did not enjoy it. But come to think of it, how could I use the perspectives and sensibilities gained from  William Wordsworth's poetry and David Thoreau's prose in the hard core world of business? At best, the sales proposals and presentations  that I drafted could have been made a tad  attractive with my creative inclinations! How could the romanticism of Shelley and Keats be woven into or around  hard as nails, sales negotiations?

As my career in Sales blossomed, my literary and creative pursuits nosedived. Life sucked me into this abyss  of  client meetings, sales targets, sales reports, presentations,sales training ,sales performance reviews ,deadlines etc. I have finally emerged from the abyss, after fifteen long years, so much like Alice . It  is almost as if I am back in my wonderland (or is it through the looking glass of life ?) and can't wait to meet all the mystical characters- the queen of hearts, the mad hatter,the cheshire cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee- come alive to entertain me ! And let me tell you ,how this transformation came about.

Rummaging through my treasure chest of memories, I chanced upon a bundle of journals that I  had written as a teenager. I had forgotten that I was  a budding poet back then and had even penned a few lines of verse. The profound emotions laid bare on paper set me thinking about how I have stopped "thinking and feeling".Where is the time to think and feel these days? I am  merely seeing, hearing,saying and doing stuff, merely using my senses , not my conditioned sensibilities.  It is not easy to shift gears in life, to move from one platform governed by the brain to another platform governed by the heart. One has to strike the right balance and I believe I just did. By pouring out my thoughts once again on paper , I seek and hope  to bring alive the sensitive, thinking, feeling  person that I used to be.

 I do not make any tall claims of  tossing up  inventions or ideas  in  the league of Einstein or Newton with my blog, but I sure do hope, to humbly reinvent a new "Me".


 

No comments: