Transient

Its been a long time since I wrote anything in prose (well, most of the recent posts were attempts at poetry), so here are a few lines of my thoughts.

What prompted me to write this was a nonfunctional shower, which either burned me or froze me, and I would wait endlessly for water of some comfortable temperature.

Looking slightly deeper, I realized that often in life, we wait for things to settle down before we begin serious work. After moving to a new place, we often hear people asking us if we have settled down, and whether routine has been set. Thinking about it, I often see myself giving excuses in the first month after a significant change "I am still settling down, getting used to things".

We are really uncomfortable with transients, not only in heat transfer equations (for which we generally use steady state approximations) but also in real life: physical and mental. Jet lag would be another example (slightly inevitable though) of a transient.

Applying the heat transfer analogy (HT happens to be my favourite subjects at present), if the time frame under consideration is smaller than the characteristic time scale, the steady state approximation holds. So similarly in life, we must build speed. Both of thought and action.

I would attribute success to mastering the art of surviving in transients. Not waiting for things to settle down. As the speed of change has gone up in the recent years, waiting for things to "settle down" looks like a folly. We ought to find some quasi-steady state in between transients. (If that line makes sense).

So I'm presently looking at the best ways of building speed of thoughts in life.

Pastmaster

As the sun climbs down
beyond the quiet town
and a mild breeze
whispers with ease
and as the night grows older
the wind blows colder
and a dark gloom prevails
as the mind derails,
And time moves faster
hailing the pastmaster
while thoughts stay still,
motionless till
melancholy grows
and a figurine shows
a hazy form
with the same old charm,
dissolves in the air;
And with despair
as you stare into space
the heart picks pace
and silence surrounds
as death does rounds;
And sands still steady
the body is ready
to flow with the waves
as the mind still craves
for a moment more;
they wash ashore.