I welcome you to my blog and another wonderful edition of the Hive Learner's featured post. Lately one thing that has become very difficult to do is to take time to reflect or have the time to observe some quiet time where you can comfortably collect your thoughts, compare them and also reflect to see if you are making actual progress or it is the other way around. The world has become so noisy to the point where silence is a treasure hard to come by; the saying 'silence is golden' was not taken seriously until now; it is very difficult to actually come by these days.
Observing some quiet time for yourself has become nearly impossible to do because we are all so busy; you leave the house in the morning and come back late in the evening, and at that point what you need is rest, not quiet time, because at that time your thoughts are already chaotic due to the day's stress, and you cannot even think straight. How busy we are and how noisy the world that we live in is have made observing a quiet time difficult and reflecting a thing that we do once in a while.
A lot of things are also competing for our attention: our phones, social media, and entertainment platforms. Sometimes when we get a break from life's struggles, instead of collecting our thoughts and reflecting, we opt to spend time on social media, and after that, getting back to life's struggles, we spend time chatting on social media, scrolling through social media, and moving from one social media application to another with zero reflection in mind. The truth is reflecting and spending some quiet time with yourself is no doubt one of the best times to realise and discover where you are lagging.
Before I graduated college, I will say it's been a year or more than a year since I last sat down with my thoughts, reflected and tried to align back with goals and aspirations. Now I have graduated, and the life I imagined I would live after graduation is completely different from the life I am currently living. It was at this point that I realised how noisy the world was, as there is nowhere to stay and actually think and try to pinpoint where you went wrong and what to do next to help you get back on track.
Currently working in a school, lately I do a lot of reflecting. Whenever school dismisses, I go to one of the empty classes, which is my only way of observing some quiet time because back home I have my uncles' kids making noise like there are a dozen of them, whereas there are just 4 of them. Then, during school hours, there are students everywhere and fellow teachers gossiping and gisting, and the only time I have to observe a quiet time is after school when the students have gone home and just a few teachers are left.
This quiet time and my recent reflections have helped me calm down. I realised I was putting so much pressure on myself and comparing myself a lot with people who did not start from the same starting point but want to be at the same level as them. I realised I was comparing myself with people getting way more support than they talk about and way more than I am getting, and all of that has helped me ease the pressure I was actually putting myself under. Quiet times are when you pinpoint errors and mistakes made and then try to correct them. Lately I observe quiet times more than I can actually count, and that is the only thing that has helped me stay sane.
