Hey reader,

Hope you are doing well. Almost an year ago, I wrote up on an interesting topic of Connections. Why are connections important, why should we care about it, and focus upon building or maintaining connections.

As per my belief, which is a beautiful armour, everything in universe exists in balance. Be it matter and antimatter, good and evil, summers and winters, everything and so is the connections and disconnections.

Sometimes you have to disconnect to stay connected. Remember the old days when you had eye contact during a conversation? When everyone wasn’t looking down at a device in their hands? We’ve become so focused on that tiny screen that we forget the big picture, the people right in front of us.

Regina Brett

Disconnects, by this time, I think are of two types. One is being disconnected to the world or peers, and another being disconnected to your own self.

For now, I will be more focussed on first part, i.e. disconnection from the peers. And to know or to better understand it, I tried out to experiment something. Yea, I know I am mad but its fun, experimenting stuff in boring life, isn’t it?

Imagine switching off your phone for 10 days (not really switching off, but just switching off the social network). Not a big task, I know. It’s quite easy to do, for some and for some, it may not be. For me, it was somewhere in between the easy and tough.
So, everything from WhatsApp to Facebook and everything is uninstalled. First hour, feels peaceful, though it’s very weird that we start getting curious how will the world react to it. Who will think what? Who will try to reach out? Who will call to check upon and what not! Yeah, I won’t say that I didn’t think of all these, it’s natural. I was curious. I had expectations. Expectations are crazy things, and always surprising.

We all have 3 networks at least, first and foremost the family, second being the friends and then the work. Interestingly, family spotted it first that the messages are not being delivered to me, so parents and my sister got to know it first. It was surprising as I thought it won’t be the first one as I’m always around and a call away.

Work, not really noticed it, except a few, though it was easy for them to reach out to me at office and simply ask, if it’s all right. Fun part in that is, you can say to them, yeah it’s all fine… just trying to reduce the distractions so I can focus more on work. Like really? LoL. But it actually helped to focus more, and it was a lot of less disturbances. Plus, I never expected that anyone from office would even notice it but they did and most importantly, asked if I’m fine.

The most delightful surprise in life is to suddenly recognise your own worth.

Maxwell Maltz

Now the most interesting part, friends. Well you can always expect one thing from friends and peers, that is surprises. Surprises that may cheer you up or just hurt you so badly. In crux, both happened.

It’s an easy guess, people you expected would notice, never really got to know and the people you expected least, noticed. People who like talk once in months, called, and just asked one thing… Dude, what is it? Some turned back to SMS to check. And rest, don’t even know about the experiment yet. Well, it will be injustice and mad thing to expect that the whole world of yours will notice it within that short span of 10 days, that you have disappeared. But, being a human, you have feelings and hence the expectations.

We have a few people, we are in touch with. Some with whom it’s every few hours, or morning/evening or at least once in every day or two. It’s natural to expect they will get to know first. Though, that’s where the surprise is, because it’s not necessary how you are seeing things, they exist in the same way. And so, my disconnect was really interesting, full of surprises, learnings and experiences.

We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us.

Laurie Colwin

Best part of getting disconnected from the outside, is you get connected from inside. And that’s where I found and learned about great thing called, Intuitions of which I talked about in my previous blog.

Another thing I learned is, life is easy and beautiful. It will have problems, it will have surprises, it will have shocks, but the life will still exist.

Everyone has problems in life. Everyone is right and everyone is wrong. But, there is no point of having the grudges or keeping things up for long. If it doesn’t looks okay to me, I will say it, I will talk to them, because who knows if next day, I or they actually get disconnected from everyone and everything. So, if you think you are surrounded by problems, smile and just say to yourself, everything is fine and will be fine always, and trust me, this is very comforting.

-Navneet