Samir Shukla
By Samir Shukla
It was twilight hour on a thick summer evening. I set a task for myself and walked around our house for fifteen minutes with my eyes closed. I mean really, totally, closed. I felt my way around the house touching walls, chairs, tables, doorknobs…
I began from one of the bedrooms and headed toward the kitchen to get a glass of water, while keeping my eyes tightly shut, self-imposed blinders, if you will. I made it to the kitchen, fumbled around a bit, opened one of the cabinets and retrieved a glass. I tapped the counter all the way to the sink, found the faucet handle and filled a glass of water. It was just water but somehow tasted extra sweet.
I drank the water and walked around trying to find other familiar items and spots. The timer on my phone went off, marking 15 minutes, and I opened my eyes, looked around the surroundings, now visually retracing my steps. The time was spent grasping at things and figuring out specific number of steps or distance between parts of the house. This seemingly trivial task was daunting, even in familiar surroundings.
This brief self-directed exercise was a physical manifestation of things that have been going on in the world that I have been pondering for a while. It crystallized even more after I heard a couple of guys having a loud conversation in a grocery store parking lot earlier that day. They were riled and talking about silly conspiracy theories. Not laughing about it, but buying into it, as if to find someone at that moment who may disagree and pick a fight.
I also recalled another episode from a few years earlier.
“Men are getting the short end of the stick these days.” That was the comment from a handyman I was looking to hire for a small job in our home a few years ago.
The conversation veered to contemporary social constructs while we discussed the work and negotiated a price. I pushed the conversation, and his buttons, a bit further to get his take on the comment he made. He had some valid points, but his arguments were wrapped in assumptions and personal experiences that did not reflect the larger issues that affected his life. He went on to typical blame games for his own lack of success. His basic complaint was that the world had gone dark, and in his case, men were getting a raw deal.
This was the reason for the short exercise, to demonstrate how blinders or self-inflicted blindfolds affect life’s trajectories. People’s views have corroded into cocoons where many walk around with blinders on, whether they are political blindfolds, socially tinted glasses, familial discord projected onto the world, pre-conceived notions, suppressed prejudices, and suspicions of others.
The 15-minute exercise was instructive. It was a metaphorical test of personal will and mindset. The idea was to think about navigating a world in the dark, in this case closed eyes functioning like blinders, and then translating the experience into a better world while eyes open. It made me think of my own blinders, even though I try to have an open mind on all fronts. I suggest this or similar exercise for everyone. It gives a sense of grasping at straws along with practicing sure footedness of tasks and beliefs. Even your own familiar home may trip you up in the dark. Maybe some will wind up seeing the world a bit differently, realizing how their own attitudes create a fog around clear thinking, their own blocks of prejudices and pre-conceptions becoming clearer when the eyes are opened.
In essence when minds are opened.
One of the tragic progressions of our current political and social era is the formation of self-delusions, gravitating toward one’s biases without reasoning or reflecting. Self-delusions are the ultimate blinders. It’s hard to remove these when a person isn’t willing to look at facts and truth, which often stare right at them. Preset biases wind up doing the dirty work of manipulators, hence a divided country.
If we can recognize our own delusions, then scheming politicians, economic uncertainties, wildfires of misinformation spread via social media, and myriad other shades of thought corruption can be tempered, for one’s own and the betterment of the whole.
Simple exercises like these may have an awakening power, if one is to translate them into daily life. Fifteen minutes of a specific task with eyes closed, and when those eyes open, set the world into something a little better, brighter.
Blinders of the mind are the clunky blocks repressing self-awareness. The toughest thing for folks is to admit that they may be wrong, or their information or idea is malformed.
The world has not gone dark, but there are lots of sinister shadows lurking about, and they need light or clarity of mind to dissipate. These are shadows and clouds of people’s own making. A self-awareness exercise on a bright summer day, or any day of the year, may help.
Samir Shukla is the Editor of Saathee Magazine
Contact: samir@saathee.com
Twitter/X: @ShuklaWrites
Newsletter: ShuklaWrites.Substack.com
