The restless mind

Abdul Kalaam: A dream is not what you see in sleep. A dream is what does not let you sleep.

However I am talking about the kind of mental unrest that results from some form of unfinished business. An unfinished task at work… an unfinished conversation with someone… the unfinished book… all of these are potential causes for a restless mind. And someone like me is pretty deeply affected by it. I can’t even break a book at a very interesting point without going a bit further and leaving it at a point where I can make peace with it and get a night’s rest. As weird as I am, if I leave some work behind, it haunts me in my dreams. I am a dreamer. I have dreams almost every night and I can remember most of it in the morning, color and all. I remember the time when we were learning Calculus in School. Every night, a different mathematical expression would present itself to my sleeping brain, which would then tirelessly perform continuous integrations and differentiations, whatever the case maybe on it till I got up exhausted, not having gotten a wink of actual sleep.

I think the real reason that such things affect people like me is that there is no closure in those situations. Even in the smallest of things. There is no conclusion to a certain thing which leaves a lot to the imagination. And having had no lack of that, it leaves me completely at unrest. A lot of them these days, turn into blogs as you regulars must be reading. But some others haunt me till I can ‘complete’ it. The different possibilities till one real ending are boundless. The end of a book… the settlement of an argument… the completion of a task at hand and so on are my closure elements. And I need them. They give me the sense of fulfillment and I need it for my sanity as vague and weird as it may sound. And if I am denied of the closure, it robs the pleasure of the whole thing. I know people for whom it doesn’t matter. It’s just a book/movie… who cares who won… can we not discuss it at all? Nope… doesn’t work for me. Which is one of the reasons that in all of my blogs for example, I need a closing statement. Something that effectively concludes a discussion. Ever noticed? This is your chance.