Many years ago I was sitting in a group of learned men. As far as my memory goes, I was in college at that time. Very young to think about good and bad. Age of rebellion, to go against the world and do as you feel is right. Well, I did not come out as one of the young entrepreneur to be celebrated many years later, but I mostly challenged the norm to do what I thought is right. Many people would have suffered due to that :). Anyways, I was talking about the group. I am not sure what those people were discussing, even to the extent that I do not remember who were those people. But one statement remained with me i.e ” There is more Bad in this world than Good. This ensure that people value Good and give its required importance and attention”. Well, it may not have been the exact words, bit more or less.
I was not sure what it meant. I thought why it has to be like this. It felt like the same way as in many religious sections; God helps poor and sufferers. I always questioned as why would God do all this to these people just to make them remember Him so that he can love them. Really??. I still do not know. Anyways as I said I always challenged the norms to the level I could.
Once I was renting an apartment where the landlord was living at ground floor of the building. One fine evening we happened to talk at length. I found myself telling him about my struggle with short term memory. Many of my friends knows about this beautiful property of mine. I remember now that once in my college I asked one of my friend in the morning to remind me that in the evening I have to do some work. In the evening, I went to the same person and told him that I forgot whom I have told to remind him something. I was completely lost by that time. he could not stop laughing and told me that he was the one and told me the work as well :). It was funny for sure. There are many such incidents that happened through my life. So, I told my landlord that initially I felt very bad about it. I used to feel that if I could remember things life would be easy for me. I tried to the level what I could convince myself to improve. That is another thing that my 2nd best characteristic is procrastination :). However, with time rather than fighting with it, I felt I am getting aligned with short term memory. I started to see the positive side of it. My life changed after that.
The biggest positive side of short term memory that I could find was that I do not remember -ve stories or incidents. It is not that I do not remember anything at all. (Un)fortunately, I have not reached that state yet :). But, I realised and observed that most of the time people talk about -ve things in their past/now and how things would be positive in future. Once in a while we can find some old memories when friends after long time. But that last for short time and soon after one can feel the tone of conversation change. It does not matter what the topic is. It could be some bad incident in school, at house, with friends, with boss, a match loss or an opportunity missed or loss in some finance. I found that although I do not remember positive events, but I do not remember -ve ones too. I felt for some reason that overall it is very good. It gives me a chance to stay relaxed, not to carry the baggage of old heavy memories, to start afresh, to move forward easily. However, I never understood why I felt that way and was it related to the statement of Good or Bad in some cosmic way.
Recently, I read an article in HBR ; The Neurochemistry of Positive Conversations. This article felt like a scientific/chemical evidence of the the statement that I heard many years ago as a teenager. It states that our body chemical equation is adjusted to retain -ve emotions for longer time than positive ones. To keep balance we must give more effort to keep the positive environment to keep alive positive feelings. This article suddenly took me many years back and reminded of that beautiful statement. It kind of felt that may be science and old scriptures are slowly converging.
I am not sure what exactly is correct or not. Unfortunately, I was very weak in Chemistry. To the extent that I always somehow managed to pass through my exams with bare minimum. This does not give me a good position to interpret this article very well. However, one thing I have observed with time. Share a genuine smile, the smile that lingers on your face. The smile that can magically transfer to another person and make him wonder why (s)he is smiling. This smile when is shared enough, does bring a lighter environment and make people happier.
Keep Smiling.
Love
Arundeep