Looking Through the Window

Looking through the window was a hobby for many when I was a kid. After lunch my mother used to spend one extra hour in the kitchen to set it in order. Then after a small 30 minutes nap she used to spend her entire afternoon knitting sweaters for us, our relatives and sometimes distant relatives as a hobby.  She used to sit near the window that was opening towards the main road and observe . Several hours used to go by but I have never seen her getting bored with the visual. Sometimes she used to take a deep look at some stuffs to understand them better. I never heard my mother complaining about getting bored.

My mother wasn’t alone who spent several hours of a day looking through the windows.  I have seen many young mother’s feeding their kids by showing stuffs through the window to divert their attention. That was the pre-Television era in Bharat.

Remembering these I tried to look through the window for sometime today. My challenge was to look through the window for one minute and observe what all happening there. First of all, out of several windows I could not find the most happening window of my house. Finally I compromised with one of the windows which opens towards the road. Could find some birds hopping from one place to another in search of grains, could find dogs searching for some interesting food from the dustbins kept for the garbage collector to pick up. Could find people reading news paper and listening to radio. Just 10 seconds had passed by now. I was impatient now to read the newspaper in my tablet, listen to some newly released hindi movie songs in my mobile and propose one interesting breakfast for today to my wife. That brought the end to my challenge of watching through the window for one minute.

We are so empowered now a days and our desired things are available so easily that we hardly wait for any stuff. This seems like the mantra to call a society as a modern society. Whatever you need should be in front of you the next moment. So we find it difficult to prioritize what to do first and what next. This also lets us do lots of things in a short span of time. So we tend to do more work than required. This increases our own expectation from ourselves to do more everyday. This entire process eats out our personal time. We are never left alone with ourselves.

Quality of life also reduced to great extent as we are impatient to finish one stuff at the earliest to do the other. Sometimes we do multiple things at once. We live life for entertainment more than for ourselves. I also observe that we are losing sense of humor as we always need external energy to make us laugh so we have almost killed the internal mechanism that makes us laugh.

Hence I have decided to take an one minute challenge everyday to watch through the window and observe. No new action plan should come out of this observation. This session is just to observe.