Luck in leisure

By I. M. Soni

DESCARTES, mathematician and philosopher, claimed that his greatest ideas came to him while he lay in bed in the mornings, completely relaxed. There is a lot hidden in five words: "In leisure, there is luck."

Subconscious working requires time, relaxation and leisure, but the rewards which spring from its nurture repay richly.

Henry Ford praised "instinct." He defined it: "Probably the essence of past experience and knowledge stored up for later on."

A young medical practitioner was working on a lecture he was to give the following day on the subject of diabetes. He pored over all the literature he could find dealing with his subject until his mind was in a whirl with the various theories. Tired, he went to bed.

At two o’clock in the morning he got up, turned on the light and wrote: "Tie up the pancreatic duct of dogs. Wait six to eight hours for degeneration. Remove residue and extract."

Then, he slept soundly. He was Dr Grant Banting, a Canadian surgeon. These sentences led to the discovery of insulin which has saved millions of lives all over the world. His conscious mind posed the question but his subconscious mind gave the answer.

Most often the subconscious mind can be depended upon to find the answer — often at greater speed than conscious mind could do it. Its end product is better because it brings to bear all one’s accumulated experience gathered over a lifetime, including a great deal the conscious mind has completely forgotten.

We must hand over our problems to the subconscious mind in the form of "assignments" once we have assembled the relevant facts and arguments. We start the process by focusing in our minds on this material intently and long enough to get it thoroughly "heated" by our best conscious thinking.

This can be done by writing on a sheet of paper the problem which troubles us, detailing all its most important facets. Pros and cons should be enumerated in two separate columns.

Then do something else which relaxes the mind or talk the problem or situation with a colleague, exploring every angle in full detail. Get right down to facts without trying to reach a decision. When you feel the discussion has lasted as long as it can usefully assist you, break it off abruptly and set the whole matter aside to simmer.

This can be very effective in suggesting a satisfactory solution. Or you can work on the problem with your conscious mind until reaching a stage of mental fatigue. When this point is reached, put the whole thing away from you and indulge in a pastime, or rest.

One French scientist made a study of the working habits of his contemporaries and found that three-quarters of them admitted that their most important discoveries came to them when they were not actively engaged in them.

Obviously, there must be a time for concentrated application to our problems just as there is a time to be idle and allow the subconscious mind to take on its share of the work.

We are capable of our best thinking without conscious effort which can assist us to solve the most difficult problems. In fact, it can influence all our affairs with more wisdom and experience than our conscious minds can.

Ralaxation is the key to the door of the subconscious mind, which works best when we are doing something which gives us real pleasure. A happy healthy mind puts drive in our energies.

A vacation (or a period of relaxation) will have the same fruitful effect. Upon a return to work, certain baffling aspects are found to be clarified without deliberate effort.

Harding says, "Absence of effort, passiveness and receptiveness are essential conditions of mind..... The decisive idea has the way of appearing when the mind is passive and even contemplating nothing in particular."

 
The unreal world of aeroplanes and airports

By Mohinder Singh

"The best of air travel makes your spirits soar, but the worst? It’s reality with a bump..."

AIRPORTS are disorienting places. A vast expanse of air-conditioned spaces, with their multiplicity of signs and miles of similar-looking corridors. You are rarely fully certain you’re in the right place. And there’s always the lurking fear of losing one’s way or getting late for the boarding.

While waiting for your flight you’re in a strange state of being both bored and anxious. Every few minutes you walk over to look at the screen for flight information while a companion keeps watch on your baggage.

All your hand luggage is x-rayed. Even a nail-cutter could hold up clearance. The whole offending bag is then rifled through before they let you go.

For passengers riding in economy, conditions deteriorate when a plane is over two-thirds full — that’s the limit of comfort zone designed by airlines.

For instance, the armrests are only wide enough for a single elbow. Once the two-thirds is exceeded, someone will either lose an armrest or spend the flight elbowfencing with the neighbour.

And it’s just not the number of armrests which will be insufficient. The same applies to overhead baggage bins, toilets, drink and food trolleys, and flight attendants.

Much of the adventure of airline eating (there’s simply none in the quality of its food) is in trying to remove various items from their packaging without spills — starting with the peanut package itself. The cup-like containers of liquid with foil sealed over the top are almost deadly.

All in all, quite a job to manage everything in the limited space of the food tray. The practice of shoving discarded wrappings into the seat pocket in front is frowned upon by airlines. And you rate yourself lucky if your food tray is removed within half an hour of your having done with it.

You stand around the entrance to the lavatories, wondering how so many people could have simultaneously gone to sleep behind the locked toilet doors. For a really free run to the toilet in a fully packed plane, you may have to head there during mealtimes. But then you’ve food trolleys barring your way.

Any flight beyond four hours leaves your feet swollen. The body suffers dehydration. And your reflexes slow down breathing the stale air.

Another complication if your journey involves transfer at a hub; a point in the "hub-and-spoke system" that airlines employ to ensure fuller planes. What airlines assume to be a easy, smooth affair, can turn out to be quite stressful. You get down to a place you had no intention of visiting. You may well be clad in a shirt when it’s chilly there.

Transit passengers are herded into a transit area for the scheduled wait. Going to the toilet means wheeling your hand luggage along with. And you’re lucky if you manage a seat at a crowded hub like Frankfurt — some 1,40,000 passengers daily pass through that airport in peak season.

And worse still, if you have to use a shuttle bus or train for reaching another terminal for your onward flight. You ride in carriages with doors slammed shut and robotic voices announcing various halts, often in a language you don’t understand. You’re never free from the fear of making a mistake and getting lost. Missing your flight would not only entail hanging for hours at the hub but also getting separated from your checked-in baggage.

Eventually you come down at your destination. And start to battle your way through a sea of suspicion. Indeed airports are places of institutionalised suspicion.

At passport control, they match your face with the photograph on your passport. They check up whether your name figures on their suspect list. And they field all sort of questions about the purpose of your visit, the intended place of stay, and the duration. You are judged not so much for yourself as for the history and reputation of your country. An international airport is one place which brings home to you the importance of nationality.

And then you wait besides the baggage carousal. Young, vigorous people jostle in front, making you crane forward to the point of almost spraining your neck. An air of weary tension hangs around these "reclaiming points". You actually "claim" something that is already yours. The prospect of one’s bag not turning up, and the misery of spending some days without it, can be unnerving.

The ideal travel condition is if you have only that much luggage which you can take into the plane. And for that, it better be the sort of bag you commonly see following behind a crew member. The one with wheels that don’t wobble, a perfect size for cabin baggage, and the one that disgorges perfectly pressed clothes. More so the aluminium one that comes with pockets for "wrinkle-free packing".

You wheel your trolley through the Customs, handing over a signed declaration that you have nothing "to declare"; a statement that every air traveller feels uneasy making. Only thereafter you emerge into the real world, leaving behind that of airports and planes.