Procrastinated…
It feels like a decade when I last wrote something, had a lot of stuff going in mind to write but there was one thing stopping me every time – PROCRASTINATION . Procrastination is the problem of every person I know, they want to do something and then they procrastinates. I tried to overcome this problem by reading a book about procrastination, but couldn’t finish it. Why ? Because when I just started reading, there was a pop-up message in my phone and I barely checked it out for only 2 min, but amazingly that notification of Instagram took me to a voyage which started from Richard Feynman’s videos to memes to some funny gold-digger videos on youtube, that only two minutes of my world proved to be 4 hours in this world, this used to happen a lot with me that I named it a *FEEDBACK LOOP*. In my quest to solve this problem of procrastination cause it was making me depressed, I found hope. The solution to this problem is that it is not a problem. I mean how could it be a problem if some of the best personalities were procrastinators, to name a few Leonardo da Vinci , Dalai Lama, King Martin Luther Jr., Saint Augustine, Bill Clinton were the best-known procrastinators. ‘I have a Dream’ quote was a last minute edit by Martin Luther Jr., Leonardo took about 7 years to paint Mona Lisa. So, there is no problem being a procrastinator and now I want to know some benefits of it. So I googled ‘ Why Procrastination is Good ?’ and after few hours of being in FEEDBACK LOOP, the results gave me hope, some of them were –
- Procrastination helps you make better decisions.
- Procrastination makes you more creative.
- Unnecessary tasks disappear with procrastination.
Procrastination is not the problem. It is the solution.
So,Procrastinate now, don’t put it off.
ellen degeneres
Well, none of them were true for me but I was filled with hope. I was happy cause I had hope. The next day was different. I made a better decision by choosing to sleep in my cozy bad instead of doing something productive. I became more creative only in my dreams while sleeping in that cozy bad,. Instead of making unnecessary task disappear , I made all the tasks disappear. See, the day was different because now I was happy doing this, now I have a hope that whatever I was doing has been trendy among some famous people. That day something beautiful happened, I found my new topic to write on and it was not procrastination cause it has a lot of hype these days, it was an underrated word but the most powerful, it was HOPE.
In every fairy tales and comic books, a hero marches headlong into the fiery jaws of hell to confront some great manifestation of evil. The odds are always impossible. The rationale is laughable. Yet our fantastical hero never hesitates, never flinches. He always stand tall and slays the dragon, crushes the demons, saves the planet and maybe even a princess or two.
And for a brief time, there is hope.
The opposite of Happiness is not being angry, cause when you are angry you give a shit about something I.e. you still have a hope. The opposite of happiness is hopelessness , the feeling or state of despair.
I deliberately used hope a lot of time above because instead of doing that same shit again, this time I was happy. Hope makes us human, hope differentiate us from some primitive species. And we humans are also attracted by hope.
Let me tell you a story of hope, not of those fairytales kind but a real world utterly fucked-up story, fucked in proportions and on scales today, that you and I with the comfort of free-wifi and oversize cozy blanket can hardly imagine. The story of Witold Pilecki.
This is a story of the time when the world has just passed from a big shock ( WW1) but a person was getting ready to fuck it up again.
Witold Pilecki was already a war hero and a true patriotic person who had fought in the polish-soviet war of 1918, after the war he decided to live a decent life in a village where he could live peacefully. But then the whole Hitler thing happened and he found his country (Poland) totally messed up. Poland was being attacked by Germans as well as Soviets from both side, and within a month Nazis had captured Poland . Pilecki co-founded the Secret Polish army to fight the nazis. During that time a lot of top polish officials and army officers were disappearing and no-one knows where. In those days Secret Polish army came to know about Auschwitz, a prison complex that germans were building and that the officials might be inside that prison, The prison was of a size of a city but no-one knows what happens inside that prison.
Pilecki insisted of going in Auschwitz to know what happens and he was first known person to go inside Auschwitz by his own will to know what happens inside it and to escape the prisoners.
Auschwitz was the most cruel thing that can happen on this earth, the kind of torture it do, the concentration camps and the gas chambers. It was completely isolated from the outer world and It was believed that Auschwitz is practically impossible to escape but this man Pilecki had hope. He had hope that he can break out and save his country. he went inside the prison and suffered from torture and cruelty but still he didn’t lose hope and within few months he was able to tell about the cruelty of auschwitz to the outer world, not only that but he also was able to make a network inside the prison to the outer world and was able to import medicines, food to this impossible prison. Pilecki was the first to warn the world about the Holocaust.
So, what Hope did was it made a man do the impossible. The prison was filled with top army officials who were highly trained and have fought in WW1 but instead of that no-one could ever thought to contact to the outside world because they don’t have hope, they thought it was impossible and then they didn’t try. Pilecki had hope that he can do that and he did. See, Hope is not only wanting thing that is achievable but it is wanting thing that seems unachievable.
The story of Pilecki didn’t end here. When he told the Polish army and world about the cruelty inside Auschwitz, the outer world refused to accept it. His own army which he cofounded refused. When Winston Churchill read the letter he said the Pilecki is exaggerating things, what he is saying is so cruel that it cannot happen. His own country refused him because they also thought he is too emotional and is exaggerating it. They thought Auschwitz cannot be that cruel. I bet the history says the opposite. But when Pilecki came to know that his own country of which he was a hero has abolished him, his own people whom he want to save doesn’t trust him, his HOPE that his country and allies would came to help has gone. He was utterly fucked. He was fucked in proportions that in todays world 1% of it would have caused us to start blaming god, a distressed and anxious life or even some of us would commit suicide in this hopelessness.
But Pilecki still had hope… He had hope that he can escape the prison, it was an idea that any sane prisoner would have laughed amidst all the pain. But Pilecki had a hope and he did it. Yes, He did it , he did the impossible, he was the only known man to successfully escape Auschwitz at that time.
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
Nelson Mandela
These stories gives us hope. Hope in its purest form. Hope to have a better tomorrow. Pilecki had a hope for a free and independent Poland and it was his only source of hope. Without it, he was nothing.
In the year 1947, he was captured by the communists and they tortured him so harshly and consistently that he told his wife that ‘Auschwitz was just a trifle’ by comparison.
The communist wanted to find some crucial information that pilecki had but after that they realised they could not get information out of him, and sentenced him to death. On the final day of trial Pilecki said
“ I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear “. And that is the most hardcore thing I’ve ever heard.
This is hope worth dying for.
These days the story is completely fucked up. We are living arguably better than they have ever seen before, yet we all seem to be losing our minds thinking the world is one giant toilet bowl about to be flushed. An irrational sense of hopelessness is spreading. The better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel.
We are living in times, where people are more educated and literate than ever before. Violence has trended down for decade, possibly centuries. Racism, sexism, discrimination against women are at their lowest points in the recorded history. Wars are smaller and less frequent than at any other time in recorded history. Half the planet have access to internet. We’ve , like, cured a bunch of diseases and stuff.
Life has become better, and no one seems to know about it.
steven pinker
These are facts but then there are facts that symptoms of depression and anxiety are on upswing . People in these days are more depressed than the times of British rule. Not only that, they are experiencing depression at a very early age. The cases of suicides of students not able to cope up/ lost all hope are increasing. Drug-overdoses have recently hit an all-time high. We are more isolated and lonely than anytime. We don’t trust anybody. We are hopeless.
Basically, we are the safest and the most prosperous humans in the history of the world, yet we are feeling more hopeless than before.
I love a text by Mark Manson in his book which I wanted to share-
If I worked at Starbucks, instead of writing people’s names on their coffee mug, I’d write the the following:
‘One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of Life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose – we are nothing. Enjoy your fucking coffee.‘
Credits-
Everything is fucked by Mark Manson.
TᗯIᑎ ᖇEᗩᒪITY 