She had declined to speak to him and had rejected his call to her, the previous night.
He let it be. Still confused and slightly hurt at this point, on account of the niggling pointy feeling in his chest region, he tried to calm himself down and gulped a few ounces of water, his mind still half-focussed on her. He couldn’t understand what had transpired between them to cause her to cut him off so abruptly. He wanted to know why, and the feeling gnawed at him stubbornly, like an irate woodpecker’s beak repeatedly bothering an equally irate oak tree.
Determined to not let the feeling affect his productivity, he began to methodically execute twenty pushups on the floor of his bedroom, the same floor where his roommate had spilt a box of hot spicy curry in a drunken stupor a few nights ago, while he had been sleeping soundly, his mind swimming in a haze of confused dreams, where he has been rolling on the grass with naked women at the crack of dawn at a farm house filled with writers, chefs, painters, inventors and coders, who had huddled together to escape the pools of shallowness, so entrenched among people distracted and addicted to technology.
His mind felt clearer. He was sweating.
It was thirty-seven minutes past seven in the morning. He had been awake for the past thirteen minutes. He had dozed off the previous night while reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s masterpiece, The Black Swan. He was impressed with the sheer quality of the man’s explanations about the pitiful mediocrity being peddled in the world under the guise of expertly curated work, when the work itself was nothing more than confident guesses and speculation masqueraded with jargon and subjectivity, with the plain intent being to confuse audiences with complexity, in a bid to prove their expert credentials.
His flossing done, he drenched himself with cold water, feeling the rush of the chemicals sloshing inside his brain, like a colloidal solution of egg whites being thoroughly mixed inside a powerful blender. He saw her again in his mind’s eye and shrugged it off, determined to take it easy and not unnecessarily make a mountain, when the situation might well be a molehill. Maybe, she wasn’t well. Maybe, she had just lost interest. It could be anything. Who was he to have a say in the actions of others towards himself? Self-reliance was better than wanton interdependence any day. You make things happen, you reap the rewards, exactly as you deserve.
The premise of capitalism stated that if you were productive, amongst a free marketplace of ideas, others had the right to choose and validate your work amongst competitors if any, and reward you accordingly, provided each side agreed to the value of the work. Capitalism needed human beings to think, create and produce goods or services of value, by moulding and creating materials according to their imaginations, using the principles of science, and make the world a great place to live in.
You need to be as productive as possible. You need to think. Daily.
Immerse yourself by studying the work of others. The world is a blank canvas, and you are the artist with a brush, free to choose a plethora of colours and shades to shape your own destiny on the canvas of life. Instead of being partially blind, study the entire system that you envelop. If you’re a writer, study the entire gamut of the publishing industry and it’s interdependence on other industries. For instance, from the materials needed to produce books, to the different genres of books available in the market presently, to marketing your own work amongst the audience segment most likely to resonate with your work, to sales channels, you need to understand and know everything. Including the people behind them all.
Know thyself well. And the world too. Amen.
Marijuana Maharaj 