Consistency

Consistency

“Effective outcomes are considered as the product of certain necessary dimensions and consistency is one of them. Your actions must follow the consistent execution to arrive at excellence.” 
The absence of consistency will be all mess. These are such statements that park into your mind about consistency along with perfection. [Here the term consistency is not used as technique reference.]

Let’s take a few seconds and think why consistency is so important to achieve certain goals. Then the answer may come that when we keep on practicing the same thing again and again, it doesn’t matter if failures also exist, certainly one day we will succeed to reach our destination. But is it the only one and a correct way that leads to perfection?
In the end you will be with different answers with different interpretations. The term consistency can be defined as stability, uniformity, regularity, and lack of deviations. Here I’m going to use some contradictory statements to justify my point of view regarding consistency.

We may have heard this phrase many times, “change is the rule of nature”. This specifically describes that change is a necessary condition in all the situations of life accordingly we have to adapt. What if we are not going with the changes and tightly hold our consistent behavior? You can imagine what will happen if there will be only one constant season all the time. Everything will perish, in summer, will burn out and in winter, will freeze with freezing cold. Hence, we can say that nature is also inconsistent to maintain the balance. The same thing happens to our minds when our thoughts are not adapting the changes happening around us. But we have been taught that when someone is having a fixed mindset regarding all the things, he/she cannot be moved by anything good or bad. But is he/she learning any new skills, is there anything changes in his/her thinking process that may lead to growth.
When we consider our society’s rituals and traditions. There are many such traditions being followed without knowing their actual reason for existence. In ancient India most of the Gurus/Swamijis used to wear wooden footwear known as Padukas because they avoid leather sandals since it was made of the skin of dead animals and considered ominous. But today in 21st century there are still such people who wear Padukas for keeping the tradition with their uniformity and ignoring the reason for the inaccessibility of footwear of textiles and other options in the previous era. I’m not trying to disrespect any of the religious aspects, but uniformity in our actions will keep us away from the facts and benefits that we can enjoy with the coming change. Even though we are living in a modern era of science and technology there are still certain superstitions that are being followed in our different community groups. We people are not ready to accept the fact that the myths we are following are actually rotten. In fact, those are not the bhoots (ghosts) from whom we have to afraid and ran away but we need to ran away from our bhoot (past)  to live the present completely and to look forward to be a developed nation than a constantly developing nation.
 Marriage is another foundation that must be a permanent relationship based on mutual rights and happiness. But sometimes the word mutual fades away from some relationships. The concept of consistency states spouse has to abide altogether whole life even if one is being abused at harsh conditions. Such rapacity of consistency then leads to desolate results. Another type of consistency is genetic consistency, the way our parents think and believe the same mentality evolve into our young minds and keep on following the uniformity of thoughts. Often children belong to same religion the one followed by their parents. Sometimes they don’t even get a chance to understand other perspectives. Supporting the same political party is also considered as consistency. 

“The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again. The nervous system was designed to be flexible. You typically find yourself doing things you’ve never done before.”
~Mark Churchland

Hence, we can also clarify that inconsistent actions are more helpful to perform certain processes than the consistent one.
Remember, in our early schooling we were taught to fill the missing places of alphabets so that we can learn all alphabets in actual order. When we learn to place them in their correct places in an inconsistent way we automatically memorize the correct sequence of alphabets. Then here, “inconsistency is helping to move toward the consistency”.
There may certain situations come in your life where you stay back and be suspicious about the outcomes of changes occur. Is it really necessary that changes are going to harm you all the time? You are keeping yourself away from experiencing a new thing and staying with your consistent conduct will make your mind actually fragile. A normal person considers constant ways but wiser people consider a paradox as a beneficial experience. There are great wordings in the teachings of Buddhism mentioned in the words of Niguma, one of the originators of the Tibetan Shangpa Kagyu tradition:

Don’t think about your teacher or your practice.
Don’t think about what is real or not real.
Don’t think about anything at all.
Don’t control what you experience.
Just rest in how things are.

To conclude I want to say our thought process leads our actions and our actions lead to the different situations of our life. It’s nothing like we have to impose certain obligations on the way we think, the way we react. Just relax and experience things and try to implement the same in further experiences to improve each time. Rest of the conclusions I left to you to interpret your experiences of consistency and inconsistency in your own connotations. But remember, excess of everything is bad.

Article by: Chetna Salhan

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