Turn Off the Lights!

'Where are you going?'

...

Around midnight, I'd turned off the lights as I often do and was drinking a cup of Earl Grey. Now, about Earl Grey... I've quite recently developed a liking towards it. I used to not like it and the reason is it doesn't quite taste like black tea, you know, more like herbal tea... And for me, there's black tea and everything else. Green, red, white... However, it's a soft tea and it makes a perfect choice around midnight when I'm too hungry to drink stronger teas.

Anyway, I was drinking my tea and listening to music on my phone. The screen of my phone, despite being at the lowest brightness, was still too bright in the dark. So I turned the phone over. And something quite predictable happened. I started seeing other things, things that were already around me, but out of my vision because of that bright light of the screen.

There are things in front of our eyes, yet we can not see them. And sometimes, we look for those things in the wrong places. In the bright and attractive lights... while all we have to do is to turn off the lights.

...

When they say 'we're creatures of habit', they're right. Once, I tried to question everything that I do in a day. I mean, everything I can think of... When I wake up, what I eat, where I sit, which way I take, how I talk, how I feel in certain situations etc. And I asked 'why?'. Why do I do these things the way I do them?

The whole experience was surreal. I felt as a stranger in my own body. There I was, doing things automatically and every time I tried to intervene, to do something differently, I felt this strong resistance. When I suggested 'let's take this road today', someone inside me told me to go away with my adventurous ideas. I was like a secondary voice.

I can see the efficiency benefits of a routine, but there's also the danger of loosing control and being manipulated.

...

The truth has a smell of its own. When we feel it, we just have to follow it. Turn off the lights, change the routine...