A dearth of thought

As I gradually get into a routine, the days start to blur together. The nights seem to vanish in the blink of an eye. The purpose of it all seems questionable. How unfortunate then that almost everything in this civilized world of ours encourages a routine. 'A systematic approach' some call it. Others call it a rut. Everyone knows that it is boring and there is nothing more effective at making a person brain-dead than a routine.

The human mind is a complex, powerful and yet delicate monstrosity of an organ. It must be carefully nourished and regularly exercised in order to achieve peak performance. From the very childhood, as the mind slowly grows and wraps itself around and extends beyond the skull of its host, it craves encouragement. It enjoys challenges and looks forward to solving problems. This natural curiosity and thirst for brain-food rarely survives into adulthood. Education ensures this. Most telling is the fact that many of our greatest scientists and inventors were unceremoniously thrown out of schools when they were kids. 

If the human mind is, on a regular basis, discouraged and forced to conform to a mediocre standard, it initially fights, then resentfully submits and finally accepts its fate and goes into a perpetual comatose state of inactivity. A routine does just this. When one follows the same schedule every day, there is nothing new for the mind to do. Its higher functions are no longer needed and are hence shut down. The human becomes nothing more than a biological machine running a program in infinite loop.

There are ways to break out of this stagnation. Stimulation of the brain on a regular basis becomes an absolute necessity in this conformist world of ours. Individual thought and expression become absolutely critical in an environment which seems to beat all its inhabitants into an unrecognisable pulp of average bodies and even more average minds. This is where creativity comes in.