The beautiful mind

-Vidhya Krishnan

This is not a review of the movie, rather review of my own experience. Mind- Amazing, tricky, powerful. These are the words I think describe the mind.

I wanted to learn swimming when I was 28. I lived in UK at that time. People whoever I came across knew how to swim. I thought to myself, what if I fall in water by accident? I decided to learn swimming. One of my batch mates was a great inspiration. I went to the pool in the city of Leeds (town up north of England). It has a big pool (50 m and 6’ deep). Many competitions are held in the pool. I asked for a tutor. A black guy came as my tutor. You remember Morpheus in ‘The Matrix’ movie. He looked like him. He said to me “You already know swimming, what do you want me to teach?”. I said, “No, I don’t know how to swim. Believe me”. He said, “No, it is not true. Anyone can swim. It is just that you haven’t realized it yet”. He smiled at me.


I asked him, “how do I realize it?”. He said, “You got to make your mind believe that you can do it. It is a fact that anybody can swim and they can’t drown in water. The human body is mostly made of water (75%). The body is like a air sack. It can’t sink on its own. That is the reason why dead bodies float. The natural tendency of the body is to float in water not to sink. Since the mind doesn’t believe it (when we are alive) due to fear, the muscles become stiff and people instead of lying flat they try to come out of water vertically and fill their lungs with water and they drown. I shall demonstrate you right away”. He then asked me to push myself into water holding my breath. I tried hard and found that I couldn’t push myself into the water, rather the water pushed me back to the surface. That moment was a great experience for me. I realized and wondered why did I get scared of water. I did the same exercise again and again to see and realize. You won’t believe, I learnt swimming in a week’s time. When I showed him how I could swim, he smiled at me again.

Oh, my mind! How did you trick me? I realized then that how in real life as well when we face new or different situations/people/place, our mind creates fear about it. It is just that mind sees it as something unknown. Mind doesn’t like ‘Unknown’. That is why we see people clinging to people they know or habits or place or job they feel comfortable. They don’t want to try something different.

From the incident, I learnt that if I can see beyond what my mind sees, problems do not exist. I need to understand the role of my mind. Mind is to think. But not to make decisions or conclusions. Of course, when I jump into water I need to be prepared. I should not breathe in when I am inside water and adopt to the environment. But there is no need to panic. Panic drowns people, not water!
The enemy is inside – fear not outside. Probably, an article on fear, what do you say? ;)