Thoughts on Parenting

The following is an archive entry from a chat with Talha where he had asked me how I had learned English as he had done it by consuming media in English. I mentioned the same along with mentioning how my mother sometimes used to make us write about random things such as some character from the cartoons we were watching and so on. He later mentioned how internet-era kids are so better at English comprehension, on which I objected on the ground, although their English is better, overall today's content is mostly slop and it has made kids dumber. I then explained that by slop means how the context for the videos or the kind of content kids watch is fake. Kids continue watching baby stuff and that's also because parents want to continue thinking their kids as babies. During the chat, he had shared a sample video for what his nephew watched when he was <1 years old which was this. 

The next day, I replied to the message with the link to this video and wrote the following which makes this blog entry.

Solitude

 It turns out different people mean different things by solitude. So let me put different words for the different ideas.

Firstly, there's the idea where someone is both physically and virtually disconnected from other people, such as when people abandon their phones etc. and go to a far away isolated place. This sort of solitude tries to minimize social interaction with other people. We can call it external solitude.

In contrast to this, is the idea of internal solitude. In this type, one might be living among people in a seemingly usual way. He might be living in a hostel sharing room with his roommate, taking a bus, buying grocery, etc. So apparently, he is doing social interactions, however, none of these social interactions actually take space in his mind, because his mind is mostly occupied with his own ideas.

The more I am writing, the more it's becoming apparent that these classification are not true classifications but rather loose attributes with blurry distinctions, but nonetheless, I'll continue these thoughts and would later reprocess them to see if they make sense.

Then there's this another distinction based on the perspective of the person in solitude. One is thought solitude where one tries to block out input of information or thoughts from external sources (save one when one is reading?) so that he can spend his time thinking about and refining the thoughts or ideas already accumulated in his mind.

While, the other form of this is poetic solitude where the person derives a poetic pleasure in spending his time in contemplation of beauty of the things around him. But it's not just about contemplation, I think, it's also about becoming more receptive of your surroundings, in order to see what is hidden in plain sight. And so, it does not necessarily have anything to do with writing poetry, but those who actually wrote good poetry did so by this means.

Both these forms are interesting, but important to note these are two distinct things. There's also another offshoot which is loosely attached to this classification which is the meditative form of solitude. I don't know much about it, but from what I have heard or read, it involves removing each and everything from your mind, whether ideas, thoughts or whatever. So, you are neither contemplating your surroundings, nor your own thoughts, nor others' thoughts, but just trying to empty your mind, sort of like an F5 for your brain.

I guess these are all forms that come to my mind now. These forms although distinct are not permanent. There was a time when I used to spend some part of my day in poetic solitude and some part of my day in thought solitude, specially in my early university days, since I had come to a somewhat new social environment, I was being more perceptive of the new surrounding (and I also was being some sort of poetic about it), but after 2 years, the poetic part almost faded away, which sometimes feel strange to me because it was nice too, but these are the things for which there's no point forcing yourself into.

Similarly, some people might spend most time in internal solitude, but sometimes they need external solitude as well to amplify the effect of internal solitude.