Control vs Restriction.

What I find interesting about this picture isn’t the human who’s almost perfectly centred at a distance. It isn’t even the leading lines of the sunshade on the building on the right hand side. It’s the trees. Notice the bottom part of the trees. These pavements are actually concrete, and a small hole is made to allow the trees planted there to grow. But more often than not, the hole made turns out to be small and the tree breaks through the concrete as it grows tall.

What we need to understand from this is that these trees actually break through the concrete only because we humans control their growth. Or do we? You see, there’s a narrow line that distinguishes control from restriction. Control is placing a few constraints and directing something. Whereas restriction is a step or two further than that. It’s about severely dictating something.

I think that the concept of control applies to our life as well. We try to live a life without distractions, without junk that would make us unproductive and lazy. And whether we achieve such a lifestyle depends our ability to control our mind. Our ability to control our temptations and restrict attraction towards the things we know will make us unproductive.

It’s quite easy to get carried away by the notion of productivity and tend to overdo things by constantly working for long hours and not take a moment to check our direction of progress. But work without direction and supervision would lead to monotony- basically boredom. So while it’s important to ensure productivity by staying in control of our mind, it’s also important to spoil ourselves to a small healthy amount to ensure that we don’t get burnt out due to overworking or overthinking.

I think this applies to workplace ethics as well. An aspect of micromanagement involves the push towards achieving 100% productivity all the time. But let’s remind ourselves, although we live in an era of technological domination, we’ve not been able to achieve 100% productivity even with machines. So how would it be just to even expect 100% productivity from humans who are far slower than machines (in some tasks). So let’s get back to the topic. We need to understand that they too are people. They will have days when they’re super-productive, and they’ll have a few days when they’re probably too overworked and need rest, so their productivity is going to be less. It’s a mix of the two that makes humans and their life interesting. I think that we need to start appreciating humans for having imperfections, making them an interesting species. I think we need to accept and understand one another and make up for one another’s weaknesses by supporting each other, for that’s what humanity is defined by- constant support of each other in times of need.

Phew! We’ve come a long way in this post- from control to productivity to support to humanity. This power of the human brain to relate one thing with another makes us the most interesting species in the world. The human brain surely wanders wildly about a train of thoughts doesn’t it?