Sunday January 29th 2012
Change. We either crave it or are resistant to it. It’s a natural part of life – we evolve and we adapt… and only the fittest survive. Humanity is proof of this; our existence is all the evidence we need that change is an inescapable aspect of life. How you embrace it depends on how you feel about your life right now, on your attitude in general, and on your previous experience with change and how it affected you. If you are not content with your life with the way it is right now, change may be welcome, and this more so if you share the positive view that generally everything works out for the best. If you believe that things happen for a reason and that wherever you end up in life it is your destiny, then you are more likely to be able to accept change and live with it. Of course your past will also be a factor in determining just how you view change. If you have not come to terms with major changes in your history, if you have not understood why they happened or what you benefited or learnt from them, then you probably will not face change with a smile. You will not be open to it if it has not opened doors for you in the past, or if it has but it only to cause you pain. Nevertheless, if you truly think about it right now, hasn’t even that suffering been some sort of life lesson? Are you not all the wiser, stronger and more experienced for all the difficulties change has brought to you up until now? We are who we are because of everything that has happened in our lives so far, so if we like who we are then surely we must give change some credit. And if we don’t love ourselves or where we are right now in our lives, then surely change must be the first thing we desire and seek?
There is a saying: if you can’t change things, then change the way you look at them. Well, even changing your point of view on something is an act of change. Your aspect on a situation is as versatile as you choose it to be. You may not always have the choice over what changes takes place or not, but you do have the choice how the change affects you, how you see it. You have the choice to modify the effects of change to some degree, by altering your opinion on it and reaction to it. You may not be able to control external things but you can control your behaviour and therefore you have the power to decide that the change is for the best.
Change changes us. It’s inevitable. We cannot avoid the clutches of transformation no matter how hard we try to run and hide. Just like everything else in the universe, we constantly morph into different forms of ourselves. Nothing out there remains static forever – including us. It is mankind’s innate right to move and to develop: we grow, progress, advance. Everything that surrounds us is energy: a continuously flowing and changeable force. We too belong in this vast world of energy. The planet, and everything on it - including us - is subject to change, at any given time and any given point, in any given way. Coming to terms with all this, our reaction to metamorphosis should not be one of despair, discomfort and fear. Instead - no matter how hard or impossible it seems - we should put our faith in change and invite it in, not just for dinner but to stay the night. We may end up liking this unpredictable stranger bearing surprise gifts, and ask him to live with us!
For those of us who crave change and wish it would come sooner, for those of us who need it desperately but have no idea how to set the wheels of transformation in motion…here is a small piece of advice: take action (even waiting is an act) and have a little more patience and belief. Change will come. In the meantime, while you wait, change is probably already occurring inside you. Simply the act of changing your habits or beliefs, or doing even one small thing differently will ultimately change you. Often, you don’t even realize it’s happening until much later. Change can be crafty, it can come in disguise. Don’t be fooled. No matter how insusceptible you think you are to it, change is bound to find you, and whether you know it or not, change you.
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Sunday, 29 January 2012
Monday, 9 January 2012
2012 MY DIARY - JAN 8 - love hurts
Sunday January 8th 2012
Love hurts. Those of you who haven’t experienced that haven’t truly lived… or truly loved. Only if you know the feeling of having your heart shattered into a million pieces, of not being able to breathe because of the pain inside, do you really know what it means to suffer because of love. Heart-break is called such because of the sensation of an actual breaking pain inside when your love is in some way destroyed, rejected or taken away from you. Crack! Snap! Bang! That is how real and intense it can feel.
Only when you actually lose something you had, can you appreciate it; the same applies with love. Only the loss of love or the person you loved really gives you a sense of its value – because of its absence. With each painful experience, we become deeper people, more able to experience the highs of life. Only when we feel completely empty inside (sometimes because our love has been stolen or has run dry) are we able to fill ourselves up (again) with love. A paradigm would be the clay pot being burned in the potter’s oven; only after it has been scalded with heat can the vessel be ready to be filled with food. A wooden goblet must be carved hollow in order for it to be able to contain wine. The pot and goblet are vessels, like our souls and our hearts, and the food and wine represent love. In other words, it may take some burning and emptiness in order to produce something ready, with the right texture and depth in which to carry nourishing, intoxicating, pleasurable and satisfying love.
Love is without doubt, one of the – if not the most – powerful thing in the world, and this is obvious simply from the fact that countless living creatures have done amazing and crazy things for it and because of it. Love drives all sorts of animals and people to do and feel all sorts of things, often without logical explanation. There is nothing to match this thing called love or completely explain it. For everyone, love is different – it could be described in similar ways by many, but no-one really know how each of us feels within when we identify it, and that is why love is relative and personal. Alternatively, one can look at love at a more universal level. Love is a ubiquitous force that exists independent of the people experiencing it. That idea of omnipresent love can be much more powerful. Either way you look at it, love has immense strength and energy, which is why it can be amazingly good. However when you have tasted its sweet, delicious fruit… and then the tree is chopped down, it can feel incredibly bad. You hurt because you no longer have any fruit to nourish yourself with, because you don’t even know if another tree bearing that fruit exists in any other orchard on earth, and because you don’t know if you will like or be able to eat any of the other fruit on any of the other trees around. You feel like you will starve and die without it.
Love indeed hurts. That is perhaps why they say that people “fall in love”, because when you fall you often hurt yourself. But people keep doing it, so we know it’s got to be worth it. It has never, ever gone out of fashion. We are made to love and be loved – it’s in our nature as humans. Denying ourselves of that would be like denying the day of sun, or the ocean of water. We cannot fully experience the height of our existence if we spend a lifetime without love at all, and that is why we go to all lengths to find the real thing, and then keep hold of it when we find it. Which is why, if we have to give it up or lose it or realize we have never even had it in the first place, the pain seems unbearable, catastrophic even.
What we must remember when it comes down to it, is that love is accessible to all – there is a form of love both out there and within us which is easily tapped into if you just believe in it and allow yourself to feel it – and it is free. Imagine that: what is perhaps the most powerful thing ever to exist is free for all! The only cost you may have to pay is the pain and hurt you will most probably feel when some other factor affects your love in a detrimental way. Nevertheless, if you can truly love yourself, no-one can ever take that away from you. So it is worth it, at the end of the day, because, unlike everything else in life - including life itself – some kinds of love can last forever.
Love hurts. Those of you who haven’t experienced that haven’t truly lived… or truly loved. Only if you know the feeling of having your heart shattered into a million pieces, of not being able to breathe because of the pain inside, do you really know what it means to suffer because of love. Heart-break is called such because of the sensation of an actual breaking pain inside when your love is in some way destroyed, rejected or taken away from you. Crack! Snap! Bang! That is how real and intense it can feel.
Only when you actually lose something you had, can you appreciate it; the same applies with love. Only the loss of love or the person you loved really gives you a sense of its value – because of its absence. With each painful experience, we become deeper people, more able to experience the highs of life. Only when we feel completely empty inside (sometimes because our love has been stolen or has run dry) are we able to fill ourselves up (again) with love. A paradigm would be the clay pot being burned in the potter’s oven; only after it has been scalded with heat can the vessel be ready to be filled with food. A wooden goblet must be carved hollow in order for it to be able to contain wine. The pot and goblet are vessels, like our souls and our hearts, and the food and wine represent love. In other words, it may take some burning and emptiness in order to produce something ready, with the right texture and depth in which to carry nourishing, intoxicating, pleasurable and satisfying love.
Love is without doubt, one of the – if not the most – powerful thing in the world, and this is obvious simply from the fact that countless living creatures have done amazing and crazy things for it and because of it. Love drives all sorts of animals and people to do and feel all sorts of things, often without logical explanation. There is nothing to match this thing called love or completely explain it. For everyone, love is different – it could be described in similar ways by many, but no-one really know how each of us feels within when we identify it, and that is why love is relative and personal. Alternatively, one can look at love at a more universal level. Love is a ubiquitous force that exists independent of the people experiencing it. That idea of omnipresent love can be much more powerful. Either way you look at it, love has immense strength and energy, which is why it can be amazingly good. However when you have tasted its sweet, delicious fruit… and then the tree is chopped down, it can feel incredibly bad. You hurt because you no longer have any fruit to nourish yourself with, because you don’t even know if another tree bearing that fruit exists in any other orchard on earth, and because you don’t know if you will like or be able to eat any of the other fruit on any of the other trees around. You feel like you will starve and die without it.
Love indeed hurts. That is perhaps why they say that people “fall in love”, because when you fall you often hurt yourself. But people keep doing it, so we know it’s got to be worth it. It has never, ever gone out of fashion. We are made to love and be loved – it’s in our nature as humans. Denying ourselves of that would be like denying the day of sun, or the ocean of water. We cannot fully experience the height of our existence if we spend a lifetime without love at all, and that is why we go to all lengths to find the real thing, and then keep hold of it when we find it. Which is why, if we have to give it up or lose it or realize we have never even had it in the first place, the pain seems unbearable, catastrophic even.
What we must remember when it comes down to it, is that love is accessible to all – there is a form of love both out there and within us which is easily tapped into if you just believe in it and allow yourself to feel it – and it is free. Imagine that: what is perhaps the most powerful thing ever to exist is free for all! The only cost you may have to pay is the pain and hurt you will most probably feel when some other factor affects your love in a detrimental way. Nevertheless, if you can truly love yourself, no-one can ever take that away from you. So it is worth it, at the end of the day, because, unlike everything else in life - including life itself – some kinds of love can last forever.
Saturday, 7 January 2012
2012 MY DIARY - JAN 5 - time
Thursday January 5th 2012
Time is a tricky thing. Paradoxically, it lasts forever, but somehow always runs out. My challenge for this piece of writing is to do it in limited time. Since I never seem to have enough time on my hands, and it’s always “too late” (it is 1am as I type this), I am giving myself 15 minutes at most to complete today’s writing. Time is of the essence.
There are so many famous quotes and phrases about time, I could spend my “15 minutes of fame” listing them, but you would have probably heard them before and that wouldn’t be interesting, now would it? So instead I have decided to make up my own sayings: “time is all we have left, when we strip away all else”. Or, how about: “time makes no excuses, gives no reasons or explanations - it just is…” Another one: “without time we would not exist; because we exist in time, it is part of our existence”. A rhyme anyone? “Tick, tock, tick tock, Time is racing round the clock”. What about a riddle? “What keeps moving forward, but never gets anywhere? Time!” One last one: “we are enslaved by that which we created: time”.
Whether those phrases reach out to you or not, you cannot deny that time is a huge factor in each and every one of your lives. It has affected you from the moment you were born, up to this day – in fact, nothing else has ever had a bigger impact on your life than this radical element. Because of it we age. Because of it we are born. We only have a limited amount of it in our life -“time” on this earth. Such a little word that stands for such a huge magic of science, a monumental part of the history of our universe.
Whether you personally are stuck in the past, longing and dreaming of the future, or actually aware and enjoying every minute of the present, chances are - like the minute hand on your watch - your life is revolving around a ticking clock. It would be a miracle if we could ever discover what exactly happened before that clock began ticking, and what would happen if it ever stopped. What came before the time bomb which we call the Big Bang exploded? What comes after? Is time really that fragile… or will it “stand the test of time?” It may be constant, yet time always appears to move at a different pace – it speeds up, rushes by, slows down. Who has not experienced a boring or scary minute that seemed to last a lifetime, or an hour of fun or hard work which passed by in no time at all? The biggest puzzle - and perhaps miracle - of all is how this organized thing we call time allows the world to function harmoniously. Without it we could not control travel or conduct successful experiments, we would not be able to count down the days of the year or monitor space travel. We could not even cook the perfect boiled egg! We would be lost - our world as we know it would end up in utter chaos.
Sometimes when my life feels like it is in chaos, I wish that I had more time to sort it out. I try to fill up my hours with productive actions rather than procrastinate, but even I admit that sometimes I just enjoy “wasting time”. This guilty pleasure is an act of rebellion; it shouts out to time “no, I won’t let you govern me, I will spend you as I wish and waste you if I want!” Doing nothing is the ultimate time waster, and arguably the best way to enjoy time itself. Didn’t the wisest of men say that simply allowing ourselves to be, and not do anything, is the most powerful state of existence anyone can achieve? When the mind and body are still, time ceases to exist… Is that not ultimate bliss, true freedom? And if time stops existing in the mind, does that mean that it stops existing altogether? If for a moment we can entertain the thought that we are the ones who created this incredible phenomenon, then do we have the power to make it disappear as well?
There are many questions about time, and few answers. The truth is that time is a mystery, but one dominant enough to captivate all of humanity. Time is timeless. Timespace, as quantum physicists call it, is what our universe is made of. How can it not affects us all? But how will it change your life? Only time will tell.
5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 – Time out. My fifteen minutes are up.
Time is a tricky thing. Paradoxically, it lasts forever, but somehow always runs out. My challenge for this piece of writing is to do it in limited time. Since I never seem to have enough time on my hands, and it’s always “too late” (it is 1am as I type this), I am giving myself 15 minutes at most to complete today’s writing. Time is of the essence.
There are so many famous quotes and phrases about time, I could spend my “15 minutes of fame” listing them, but you would have probably heard them before and that wouldn’t be interesting, now would it? So instead I have decided to make up my own sayings: “time is all we have left, when we strip away all else”. Or, how about: “time makes no excuses, gives no reasons or explanations - it just is…” Another one: “without time we would not exist; because we exist in time, it is part of our existence”. A rhyme anyone? “Tick, tock, tick tock, Time is racing round the clock”. What about a riddle? “What keeps moving forward, but never gets anywhere? Time!” One last one: “we are enslaved by that which we created: time”.
Whether those phrases reach out to you or not, you cannot deny that time is a huge factor in each and every one of your lives. It has affected you from the moment you were born, up to this day – in fact, nothing else has ever had a bigger impact on your life than this radical element. Because of it we age. Because of it we are born. We only have a limited amount of it in our life -“time” on this earth. Such a little word that stands for such a huge magic of science, a monumental part of the history of our universe.
Whether you personally are stuck in the past, longing and dreaming of the future, or actually aware and enjoying every minute of the present, chances are - like the minute hand on your watch - your life is revolving around a ticking clock. It would be a miracle if we could ever discover what exactly happened before that clock began ticking, and what would happen if it ever stopped. What came before the time bomb which we call the Big Bang exploded? What comes after? Is time really that fragile… or will it “stand the test of time?” It may be constant, yet time always appears to move at a different pace – it speeds up, rushes by, slows down. Who has not experienced a boring or scary minute that seemed to last a lifetime, or an hour of fun or hard work which passed by in no time at all? The biggest puzzle - and perhaps miracle - of all is how this organized thing we call time allows the world to function harmoniously. Without it we could not control travel or conduct successful experiments, we would not be able to count down the days of the year or monitor space travel. We could not even cook the perfect boiled egg! We would be lost - our world as we know it would end up in utter chaos.
Sometimes when my life feels like it is in chaos, I wish that I had more time to sort it out. I try to fill up my hours with productive actions rather than procrastinate, but even I admit that sometimes I just enjoy “wasting time”. This guilty pleasure is an act of rebellion; it shouts out to time “no, I won’t let you govern me, I will spend you as I wish and waste you if I want!” Doing nothing is the ultimate time waster, and arguably the best way to enjoy time itself. Didn’t the wisest of men say that simply allowing ourselves to be, and not do anything, is the most powerful state of existence anyone can achieve? When the mind and body are still, time ceases to exist… Is that not ultimate bliss, true freedom? And if time stops existing in the mind, does that mean that it stops existing altogether? If for a moment we can entertain the thought that we are the ones who created this incredible phenomenon, then do we have the power to make it disappear as well?
There are many questions about time, and few answers. The truth is that time is a mystery, but one dominant enough to captivate all of humanity. Time is timeless. Timespace, as quantum physicists call it, is what our universe is made of. How can it not affects us all? But how will it change your life? Only time will tell.
5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 – Time out. My fifteen minutes are up.
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