Living the Subconscious!!!

As someone of young age, I am expected to remember things without having to be reminded. Alas, this is not true for me, I tend to forget things very easily, for which, I used to get good scolding from my mother. But even my mom lives far away to nag me anymore. When in boarding school, I came up with a solution to my forgetful mind, which was keeping a diary. I kept a dated dairy throughout my high school and college so that I could note down things with deadlines, which helped me submit assignments on time and attend meetings and activities when and where they were required. I made a very good use of the diary keeping habit and lived a very active life in college, making best of various opportunities given to me.

Last May, I graduated from college and entered work life. Coming out of the protective shell of college was a shock, if not bigger (than when I left home at an age of nine to go to a boarding school), but definitely similar. I no longer had access to free dining services, free cleaning, cheap laundry and walking distance classrooms (my work which is 40 minutes in a taxi). Most of all, I missed my diary, as I was not entitled to one at my work place (with a consultant position). This logic did not seem logical because although I am just a consultant, I believe that I do need to balance my personal and work life and stay organized in order to be productive at work. Instead, I opted to use sticky notes. The only problem with sticky notes is that you can’t really organize them by date and so you need to clutter all to do lists in bullet points, which makes it almost easy to miss deadlines.

I imagine that my brain was having a hard time as well to organize the information and store them using those sticky notes and I started experiencing sub conscious note keeping instead. For example, I was supposed to call the Air Con guy to come fix my AC but I often forgot as I was at work all day and came back home pretty late. So I started dreaming about my AC dripping water all over my apartment and flooding my wooden floor. I called the AC guy right away and got it fixed. Next thing was when I was trying to send some money home to pay for my sisters’ living expenses in Kathmandu because they just finished high school and they are preparing for some entrance examinations for college. I forgot to transfer money for couple days and I dreamt about my mother not telling me the exact amount that I needed to transfer. So I called my mom the next day to get her account details and sent the money right away. Once in office, we were discussing on fixing date for a meeting to be fixed for the upcoming year and everyone was pretty tensed up. The following night, I dreamt about having a hard time to meet the deadline for preparation of the meeting and facing others hurdles at the office.

Having these kinds of dreams has been an out of ordinary experience, and at the same time, it has definitely proved to me that subconscious mind is stronger than we think they are. At times, they are not hesitant to show their presence.

What Goes Around Comes Around

“A person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equal the credits” wrote a friend as his facebook status. The instant thought that I gathered was then many would be sleepless because as ordinary human beings not all of us care about equaling debits and credits. But later it reminded me of nature’s own mechanisms of equaling debits to credits. It may just be that I notice some things more than others do and hence there have been events in my life that have made me rethink nature. Although I cannot remember all of them to put down in this blog, there are few recent ones that I can account here.

As taking a taxi to work is the most convenient, if not the cheapest, I usually take taxi in the morning and take the boat/motorbike in the evenings. One of those mornings, it so happened that the taxi meter said 112 baht and I gave him 115. The driver did not give me 3 baht change back. I did not mind it because 3 baht is only 10 cents in US dollars. Later that day, I went shopping because I needed groceries for the weekend cooking ceremony (as I usually cook only on weekends). Although the supermarket is only 6-7 minutes away from my apartment, I decided to take a motorbike taxi from the supermarket because my bag was heavy. The motorbike rider asked for 20 baht but I offered 15 and he agreed. When he dropped me off to the apartment I realized that I only had 12 baht change with me and a 500 note. The bike rider did not have change, so he only took 12 baht that I had, saving me 3 baht. It was amazing how I lost 3 baht at one place and gained exact 3 baht at another on the same day.

Sometimes it feels like the universe is conspiring to put me in debt but I have become more cautious because I have begun to understand that debit must always equal credit. For example, the boat conductor (not sure if that’s the right word to use) does not ask me for fare often and hence I always buy the boat ticket in advance to avoid any probable greediness. Even then, the lady at the pier has once given me two boat tickets with extra 6 baht change. When I was telling this story to a friend, she was like, “that’s great, now you can use that ticket to go back home.” To which I replied that I had returned the extra ticket and change and she said that action should bring me good karma. Another instance is of couple days ago when my friends and I were walking to a restaurant for lunch from work and I found a 100 baht note by a phone booth. I got so nervous that I gave it to a vendor nearby who was selling noodles on the street and to my surprise she took it without any hesitance.

As crazy as it may sound, I do believe that debit and credit must always be equal and this maybe the reason why I do not want to burden myself with credit because I know that I cannot get away with it. I guess this is why they say, "what goes around comes around".