Recipe to Silence
A friend of went for a Vipassana course. Vipassana is a ten-day experience for detoxification of body and mind. Most important part is one is not allowed to speak for ten days. Many devotees try Vipassana with a thought to sustain through these 10 days of silence and it is actually a long stretch.
Five days later, I got a call from him that he had left the program midway because he wasn’t able to take the silence. It made him uncomfortable to a level where he started feeling anxious.
This is true for large number of people. We don’t often pause to evaluate how comfortable we are with silence. In olden times, grandparents were working for hours with no communication. They were absorbed in the activity and therefore needed no other distraction. But even outside working hours, their life was really quiet for long durations without feeling awkward or anxious.
Today, we take refuge in the outpouring of information available to us at a click. Our brain is continuously seeking new information though scroll of our thumbs and electromagnetic device called ‘Mobile’. The information available is totally massive and in many cases, non-required for us.
It is actually beautiful to be speechless. During beautiful sunsets, long walks on a beach, road trips in the mountains, and in prayer rooms—it’s easier to find calm and be mindful.
Investors go through continuous churning of information from family, friends, media etc which makes them anxious about investment. As we all know, silence is always more powerful than the noise of any kind. Market volatility is not new. It has been prevalent since birth of stock trading. If investor cannot handle that noise with their own silence than such investor definitely stays away from equity investment.
The Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Robert Koch in 1905 mentioned, ‘The day will come when man has to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague’.
Exactly, the noise of becoming infectious diseases like cholera and plague. Investor must stay away by taking vaccination names ‘silence’.
Nishit Siddharth Shah