meaningfully chilling

have been thinking about how one chills - or rather, what chilling really means. in the broader, conventional sense, chilling for most people is not working, or not thinking about work. (let’s stick to the mainstream definition of work here - a day job for our average Joe). so i tried doing the same: consciously deciding not to think about work, next steps, goals, etc, and magically hoping i’d finally witness chilling myself. but to my surprise, the opposite happened- I became more agitated/anxious while trying to evade my thoughts and worries. this got me thinking about how subjective & contextual chilling is. i realised chilling, for me, is my mind being at peace - not chasing, not struggling, just being present in the moment. but that doesn’t mean i have to binge-watch my present moment for it to qualify as chilling.

allowing myself the freedom to act on things i’m naturally drawn to is the strongest eigenvector of chilling for me.

not conforming or confining myself to structures, and letting my thoughts & actions flow, is how i’d say i feel i’m chilling. an example could be speed-dating a lot of problem statements without feeling the pressure to land on any world-changing insight. relieving myself of expectations, not time-bounding my aspirations, and just letting myself do things i feel complete harmony with - that’s chilling for me. spending hours talking with friends about what excites them, running random experiments to solve mini-problems i see/experience around me, penning down my thoughts, fighting kafkaesque feelings while reading Trial, boxing my emotions out on the bag- these are some of the ways i’m meaningfully chilling these days.

not being hard on myself is also an important aspect of chilling. understanding my privileges, weaponizing them, allowing myself ample time, and being okay with zero measurable/quantifiable displacement - that, to me, is the way to meaningfully chill.

in simple words - I think to chill is to follow one’s heart without any expectations! :)