What I think you think that they think
Thirty pounds and gazillion days of inactivity ago I could have never envisioned that one day I would be running my first half-marathon. In addition to the race-day being so exhilarating, experiencing the training has reinforced my belief that most of our limits are self-imposed.
My regurgitating of the inputs in psychology, social psychology and sociology has introduced me to this fascinating idea of behaviors and actions driven by a yin-yang like interplay between you as a person and others. Psychology vouches by the motto that it is ‘I’ who thinks, reflects and hence acts on the world. Sociology on the other end of the continuum lives by the maxim that social structures and society defines a person. Enters social psychology. Adopting the best from both, it redefines thoughts and behaviors as a reflexive understanding and private interpretation of what has been handed to you by the society. Going one level deeper, this further bifurcates into micro-sociological approach where the content of social relationships is not as important as structure and a pure social psychological approach where content is more important.
At the risk of irking purists, this reductionist explanation that I just shared, hits at the root of my proposition about defining limits. The ideas about how much, how long, how far, how deep, and how many are in all probability bestowed by ‘others’. In the spirit of sociology, the cogitating and assimilation of most of these demarcations of high and lows is ignored. They are accepted because they are what everyone does. So you cannot perform if you sleep less than eight hours, you should not work out more than six days a week, work and play should not be mixed together and the list is endless. The idea here is not to malign these ‘truisms’ because they provide huge predictability to the world, but when they are used to define constraints is when they loose their luster.
This is also not to glorify the Ayn Rand like one-person army ideas about pooh-poohing all that is defined by others. The thought here is to understand and redefine limits to ensure progression.
Whenever we are in a ‘knotty’ asana in a yoga class, amidst all the huffing-pufffing and sour-lemon faces of fellow ‘yogis’ there are a few who exude a calm that probably is the objective of the whole asana. Those are the torch-bearers of the hypothesis that real limits are understood when you solve the dilemma between what has been defined for you and what you can achieve. My yoga teacher often says that if you are unable to reach the ‘prescribed’ form of the pose, instead of forcing it, you must scan your body to understand if it is because of your bone structure aka ‘sociological/others defined’ boundary or it is because of a lack of flexibility of your muscles aka ‘psychological/self defined’ boundary. The beauty of this statement is its generalizability to all limits in life. The continual redefinition of ‘what I can do’ is imperative to experience that invaluable feeling of moving ahead.
Thirty pounds and gazillion days of inactivity ago I could have never envisioned that one day I would be running my first half-marathon. In addition to the race-day being so exhilarating, experiencing the training has reinforced my belief that most of our limits are self-imposed.
My regurgitating of the inputs in psychology, social psychology and sociology has introduced me to this fascinating idea of behaviors and actions driven by a yin-yang like interplay between you as a person and others. Psychology vouches by the motto that it is ‘I’ who thinks, reflects and hence acts on the world. Sociology on the other end of the continuum lives by the maxim that social structures and society defines a person. Enters social psychology. Adopting the best from both, it redefines thoughts and behaviors as a reflexive understanding and private interpretation of what has been handed to you by the society. Going one level deeper, this further bifurcates into micro-sociological approach where the content of social relationships is not as important as structure and a pure social psychological approach where content is more important.
At the risk of irking purists, this reductionist explanation that I just shared, hits at the root of my proposition about defining limits. The ideas about how much, how long, how far, how deep, and how many are in all probability bestowed by ‘others’. In the spirit of sociology, the cogitating and assimilation of most of these demarcations of high and lows is ignored. They are accepted because they are what everyone does. So you cannot perform if you sleep less than eight hours, you should not work out more than six days a week, work and play should not be mixed together and the list is endless. The idea here is not to malign these ‘truisms’ because they provide huge predictability to the world, but when they are used to define constraints is when they loose their luster.
This is also not to glorify the Ayn Rand like one-person army ideas about pooh-poohing all that is defined by others. The thought here is to understand and redefine limits to ensure progression.
Whenever we are in a ‘knotty’ asana in a yoga class, amidst all the huffing-pufffing and sour-lemon faces of fellow ‘yogis’ there are a few who exude a calm that probably is the objective of the whole asana. Those are the torch-bearers of the hypothesis that real limits are understood when you solve the dilemma between what has been defined for you and what you can achieve. My yoga teacher often says that if you are unable to reach the ‘prescribed’ form of the pose, instead of forcing it, you must scan your body to understand if it is because of your bone structure aka ‘sociological/others defined’ boundary or it is because of a lack of flexibility of your muscles aka ‘psychological/self defined’ boundary. The beauty of this statement is its generalizability to all limits in life. The continual redefinition of ‘what I can do’ is imperative to experience that invaluable feeling of moving ahead.
posted by Garima at 3:25 AM
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