Defragging

ACOMPUTER is basically lazy and stores data where there is least resistance. Hence, eventually, it slows down as file fragments are strewn all over its memory field. When this happens, it’s time to de-frag(ment) and bring it up to speed again.

Similarly, our biological computer, the brain, is essentially lazy. It processes incoming data in the easiest, most instinctive, but not generally the best, way possible. Hence, eventually it also needs defragging.

Today, not only are too many things happening at the same time and at a dizzying speed but also just about anybody wired to the internet can react to them in real time, thus cluttering our brain with an increasingly nightmarish mix of healthy and mostly toxic data.

Unlike, however, its robotic counterpart, the brain is under a human person’s control. Hence, defragging the brain is really meant not so much to speed up data processing as to allow our true self or genuine persona to make the best sense of the data clutter our brain must continually wade through.

We defrag ourselves not to lose sight of guidepost categories like the moral, the essential, the decent, the noble, etc. that are not the easiest to come by. We defrag to maintain our sanity, our honesty, our humanity in a world that is replete with forces constraining to lead us to where there is least resistance to our selfish ego.

Now, how to defrag. For all they are worth, my preferred methods are:

First is daily prayer-meditation. Nothing complicated but just a short simple prayer to wish the best to all of God’s creatures.

Second is community service to rein in the ego’s narcissism. The fastest way to fail to make sense out of our life is to satisfy only the ego’s (false persona’s) demands.

Third is occasional travel, both near and far, to bond with relatives and friends and with nature. Many can testify to the calming effect of soaking in nature’s beauty and bonding with people who mean the world to you.

In fact, by the time you read this, I would be on my way back from California and Washington, USA, not so much to see places I’ve already been to before as to bond with people who have been part of my past and who I want to be part of my future which is now.

Yet, by that time too, I would also have been smacked in the face by more toxic air that continues to blow over the Philippine social landscape and would have been thus “obfuscated,” to use a fellow columnist’s word. Not the least of this is the jumbled mix of emotions surrounding a hated dictator’s undeserved burial in LNMB (Libingan ng mga Bayani).

Would that suggest taking a break from social media? But how if you are a columnist that must soak it all in and share your take on it? But anyway, I am on defragging mode.