“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

― Mark Twain

Have you ever sat outside a doctor’s office (especially a dentist) and imagined the pain that is about to come and come out feeling that your fear of pain was unwarranted? 

I have, numerous times, no actually all the time. I have a hyper-active brain, I imagine 100 possible outcomes for 1 event in my head and most of them are not very pleasant. My imaginary pain is worse than real pain and since I’m insomniac, my imaginary thoughts occupy most of my time. Between 2-3 AM is the worst, the world is quite (eerily quiet), everyone is sleeping and you are up, staring at the ceiling and imagining your worst fears coming true. World wars, mindless killings, floods, wildfires, pandemics, and next day meetings, all come together to haunt you, remind you and warn you that this world is terrible and it would be better if you just went to sleep forever.

It’s gloomy, I know, I live with this feeling every night. Everyday I wake up feeling – what’s the point. But then you get into a routine, you brush, shower, have breakfast and drive to work. You work till your eyes scream to be shut and your brain freezes to release another thought, so you pack your bags, lock the office and drive back home to survive another night of endless thinking that will make you keep falling in the abyss of despair.

Ok, I may have painted a really horrible picture of life here, it’s not sad, I’m not sad, I’m just desperate, desperate to stop overthinking, to stop worrying endlessly, to stop trying to imagine the worst possible fate to mankind and to just learn to be in the moment. I have learned to channelize my thought to huge extent, I keep swiping them left or right, just like the tinder app, thoughts I like, I swipe right and keep them in memory somewhere, thoughts that scare me, I swipe left and they just vanish.

I have tried meditation, sheep counting, backward counting, chamomile tea, electronic distancing before bed, all the silly stuff so-called doctors ask you to do, nothing works, so I learned to make my own mechanism to help calm my super active brain. 

I read – I read a lot, sometimes whole night, if I cannot sleep, atleast I can make myself smarter. 

I clean – I have an OCD about organizing things, so when I cannot sleep, I organize – closet, drawers, tables, anything and everything. 

I watch – I love to observe, I observe people, plants, animals, you can learn so much by just watching.

I listen – I try to listen to the not so obvious sounds, focus on sounds that are hidden somewhere in the chaos.

My latest activity has been watching and listening to the rain. It has been pouring crazy the last few days and I would stand at the window and watch the water splatter across the window and fall on the ground. Sometimes it would be intense as if it was angry at the world, sometimes it would be just a drizzle to caress the leaves. The sound of the rain drops falling, it would keep changing depending on the mood of the cloud, heavy rains would be angry and scary, light rains would be soothing and pleasing. But nevertheless, rains would keep falling on the ground, without thinking about where the water will end up, without worrying about what will happen to the water when they fall and their essence would be lost. 

Sometime ago, someone I know asked me what type of water form I love the most, I generally am not a water person so I just said – water in a glass. When I asked him, he said, rain drops falling. I thought it was an extremely cliche answer as since ages, rain has been associated with romance, there are songs in rains depicting love and passion. Although I’m not sure why he liked the rain, for me when I observed rain, it brought a sense of complacency, a feeling that helped calm my mind and just stare at the rains. After a very long time, I actually had no thought in my head, I just watched and listened to the rains without getting bothered about my imaginary woes and worries.

Maybe I will sleep better till the monsoon season, I can leave the worries till winter and who knows, maybe they would have gone in hibernation by then!