365 ways to cook eggs

Was emptying my book shelves when I came across a book entitled "365 ways to cook eggs".  I bought it from a NLB sale some 10 or more years ago. After a decade or so I would congratulate myself if I do know 10 ways to cook an egg This indeed is a classical example of wanting to do, wanting to learn or wanting to experience 101 things and forgetting almost all along the way.

Not to worry, this is not a blog bemoaning procrastination although  year end reflections is around the corner. In fact I want to celebrate idleness or half idleness if you wish. What it means is to shorten the 'to-do' list; to really wake up to reality and focus on 1 or 2  projects/activities closest to my heart. This exercise may also require the peeling off of layers of inauthentic needs of being useful, altruism inclusive. 

Yesterday's ST article "The benefits of an 'inactive' mind" by Maria Konnikova (a doctoral candidate of psychology at Columbia U) enumerates the power of mindfulness and concentration. It discusses various experiments which gave evidence of how even short dosages of daily mindfulness training/meditation brings about not only emotional regulation but also the ability to concentrate. It is also scientifically proven that meditation practice enhances connectivity between the part of the pre-frontal cortex which monitors attention and another part of the brain known as the right insula which regulates our feelings and thoughts, thus enhancing the effectiveness of the brain's attentional resources. New evidences also suggest that our brains structure can continue to change and develop with training. The article mentions an experiment where the activation in the pre-frontal cortex of older adults began to resemble those of younger people after just 5 one-hour training sessions on a task that calls for deep attention.

Whilst meditation and mindful activities like calligraphy once rank low in my priority of daily tasks and delegated to 'only when I have time to spare'; I shall now have to make it a point to spend at least half an hour or more to still the 'monkey' mind so as to cultivate a 'neural real estate' that promotes nourishment for the brains and hopefully delays the 'cognitive decline'.

So instead of trying to master 365 ways to cook eggs, maybe I should spend an hour a day focusing deeply on frying an egg, observing each outcome with varying amount of oil, varying intensity of the fire, varying size of pan used, varying time to flip over etc etc. So my 'mental future' does not lie in knowing the number of ways to cook an egg but the concentration of frying one.