Lost | Confused

There are moments in life when you are lost. And there are moments when you are confused.

Confusion is a state of mind when you 'think' that there exist more than one equally good or bad option and you got to choose one out of them. The question being- "which one"?

Being lost is a state when you don't "where are you standing", "where do you want to go (next)?" and once you know the first two, the third is "how will you get there?".

To give you an analogy: Consider that last night you slept in your bedroom but today when you opened your eyes you found yourself in a jungle. You don't know where you are, where you should go next (search for a highway or a tribe or a river bank to seek help from fisherman. You don't even know if these options exist or not) and you don’t know how to get there. In simple words you are "Lost".

Being confused is a similar situation where you have a GPS device. So the confusion is which way to follow. Should you climb the mountain or cross the lake. Which is less risky and easier?

You are lost when you feel that there are no boundaries to distinguish between right or wrong, good and bad. It’s a situation of complete darkness. In darkness you can’t see the boundaries. You cannot see what exists and what doesn't. You cannot even see yourself. In the battle field of Kurkshetra, Arjuna was lost. At such times one has to ask the most difficult yet the most important questions. The answers to these questions provide the light needed in such darkness.

There are three ways to avoid confusion. First: following someone blindly; second: avoiding the knowledge of existence of other options. But a better way to avoid confusion is the third way:  understanding the technicalities, utilities and risks associated with the options and select the one based on suitability. Be it your career, business, relationship, life or a small thing like buying a smart phone you must be smart enough to the cumulative effects of different permutations and combinations i.e know the options and the effects in detail.

In simple words to avoid being lost one must look inwards. To avoid confusion one must look outwards. But to take the right decision one must look at both the sides simultaneously.

You are lost when you ‘feel’ that you don’t know anything. You are confused when you ‘think’ that you know but you are not sure.

The one inside yoU!

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.” 
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
― Albert Camus

Its better to spend time with yourself than to introspect yourself.
Generally when you introspect, you will interview yourself. You force yourself to answer questions.  Only a conscious mind can question. When you are consciously asking question you force yourself to answer consciously and you tend to connect two disjoint thoughts, do some reverse reasoning and come up with answers to justify things and actions, you don't find the reason so you create one.

To spend quality time with yourself can never mean that you keep on questioning your subconscious mind like an annoying reporter. When you spend time with yourself you are not an interviewer. You are an observer, a listener, a companion. Spending time with yourself means waiting for your mind to speak, enjoying the silence, giving time to your inner-self to boot. I have used the word "spending" and not "using" cause you don't be with yourself with any intention or purpose, you can't start with the aim of "utilizing" your time with yourself. You don't try anything (except ignoring distractions and which over the period of time don't bother you). Its like watching a dance. You enjoy the steps, you enjoy the movements of pause, you don't ask a dancer to make the next move quickly, you don't ask how and why did you not take one more round; instead you just observe and enjoy the dance. 

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.” 

Inner dance answers all of the questions automatically, because when you consciously ask yourself a question your subconscious mind also registers it. This is because your subconscious mind is always awake. Only when u let your subconscious mind to flow, you can get the answers to the most complex and important questions in life. This occurs at the right time these answers also connect the missing links but easily without using any reverse engineering technique. Archimedes discovered his buoyancy to displacement principle when he asked the question consciously but got his answer when he was expecting it the least. 

When you have spent enough time watching the beautiful dance, your inner-self invites you again and again to watch it and then just like your body tells you that it wants food your dancer sends you the signal that it wants to talk to you. Unless you once again watch the dance you feel restless. This article was written after I felt the urge to see the dance. I did not think over the points for the article. They just occurred to me and I kept writing. 

"Silence is all that is needed, and everything else follows on its own accord" -Osho