Pecha Kucha Night, Oslo
14.04.2016
Growing up, I have seen both my parents writing a journal to store their memories even though neither of them read any of it again. We (me and my siblings), however used to read them and misuse some of the information to remind them about the fun times they had in their time and to take it easy with us. I like the habit of writing a journal because it helps you rewind and look into your own journey and do a little introspection.
Last week I had a chance to attend an event called “Pecha Kucha Night” in Oslo, which inspired me to write this blog. Pecha Kucha is a Japanese word meaning chitchat, and the event is a global phenomenon with many volumes in different countries. The cool thing about this event is that anyone can present or talk about any subject matter for 6 minutes using maximum of 20 pictures to support the message or visualize the content. There were in total 11 talks and each one of them was so inspiring that I promised myself to never miss this event again. Not just the talks, the positive atmosphere and people, passionate about life and the world around, energized me to a great degree.
One of the talks, which really made me reflect, was by a woman who talked about a program called cChallenge. cCHALLENGE is an experiment that requires commitment from the participants to make one small change in their personal life for 30 days. The participants get the opportunity to “gain first-hand experience and insights on the relationship between personal change and systemic change. They begin to see where and how they make a difference, and it is not always in the way that they think. The changes do not have to relate directly to climate change or environmental issues; the point of the cCHALLENGE is to engage with change — ideally a change that is a bit of a stretch — and reflect on the process”.
The question that I asked myself then was what is it that I would like to change for 30 days that would help me create something positive. I had recently watched a Ted X video where I got to know about the concept “emotional hygiene” which I rarely hear of. It’s true that as humans, we always value our bodies more than our minds; if we sustain a physical injury, we go to the doctor immediately and try to find a cure. We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. However, the way we try to deal with these injuries is by pushing them out of our heads or shrugging them off. The speaker made an interesting joke that we often hear “”Oh, you’re feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it’s all in your head.” Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: “Oh, it’s all in your leg; just walk it off”.
One of the ways to practice emotional hygiene is to catch the unhealthy psychological habits and change them, which I identified as something I would like to change for 30 days. It often happens that you cannot stop replaying the negative events in your mind no matter how hard you try; the tough conversations you’ve had with your friends, a demoralizing event at work, the conversations you engage with yourself at times fretting about the future and getting into the fear of unknowns does more damage than one can think of. Chewing on negative thoughts can be paralyzing and the solution to solve it is to be compassionate towards yourself, as you would like your friends to be compassionate to you. By befriending oneself, can one achieve peace with one’s thoughts and grow out of the circle of negativity.
The take away from the talk was “By taking action when you’re lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won’t just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, and you will thrive”. This is exactly what I aim to do for next 30 days and hopefully for a lifetime.
