Do not be envious! (There is nothing to be envy about…)

Photo by Spiros Kakos from Pexels

People look up at presidents as if they are special.

People look up at CEOs as if they are special.

People look up at leaders of states as if they are special.

But all these persons are just humans.

And the truth is that you are special as well!

It is all a matter of what you have decided to do. There are no successful humans or special humans. There are only humans who chose to dedicate themselves to something instead of something else. You could be in the position of those presidents if you wanted.

If you didn’t do such a great job at parenting, spending hours and hours talking and playing with your beloved child. If you didn’t pursue that phD so hard, spending hours and years in research. If you didn’t spend all that time in relaxing and doing nothing (yes, this is a choice as well!), cherishing every passing moment as no one else could. If you didn’t spend all those years in universities or if you didn’t spend all those years in martial arts practicing.

All these things are important. For those who consider them to be.

Don’t be envy of others. Be proud of your choices!

At the end, the sum of all actions of a person is always the same: Zero. We spend energy and time to do things. And this energy and time is always transformed into something else. It is just that every person choses a different ‘something else’. No matter what that is, the time and energy you have spend are always transformed. And yes, luck and other external factors also play a role, but we cannot control that as much as we would like so worrying or arguing about them is like arguing whether it will rain in one year or not.

Own your choices and accept that what you do is what you do.

Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

The entry of president Roosevelt’s diary the day his wife and mother died simply wrote…

‘The light has gone out of my life’ (source)

He was no longer a president. But a man who lost his wife and mother. It is this light that you must strive to find. Inside you, not in titles or degrees or achievements. But inside you. What makes you happy and whole? Try to pursue that. And no matter how unhappy you will become at the end – because at the end you will – you will be enlightened. Life has the tendency to be cruel, but it can never take away our choices.

At the end we all die. At the end we all have to face the void.

And rest assured, each one of us will do that alone.

And right there, it will be of paramount importance to be proud of your choices.

By humbling yourself enough to accept them…

And right before the end.

(Smile…)

No, I do NOT want to be a billionaire! (or Bruce Lee)

Seek peace… Conquer the world…

There is a great hype lately about how some new billionaire must be our new idol. And I totally disagree with that hype. Billionaires are not only overrated. They are constantly advertising all those things that should not be part of the principles in a man’s life.

To begin with, there is nothing wrong with being successful. I am not arguing against that. I am arguing against the definition of successful though.

Successful is raising your kids without having money.

Not creating companies with your dad’s money.

Successful is having a hard life and still smile.

Not being a rock star and being praised for working more than eight hours.

Successful is having a family and raising your kids.

Not changing women like shirts and buying your kids yachts.

Successful is creating a good company without subsidies.

Not posing as an entrepreneur with my money.

Successful is finishing your phD or your bachelor’s degree.

Not quitting school because you had an ‘idea’.

Successful is having humble beginning and still stay humble.

Not pose as the new Tony Stark while governments (or agencies) support your ideas.

Successful is breaking your will to accept the world.

Not breaking everything to impose your own will to the cosmos.

Does that sound like failure to you?You might be right.Because at the end, success is not measured by success. No, these are not excuses for me not being a billionaire. I am sure I would be one if I had the Jedi-mind ability to convince people of things which might lead them to jail or if I managed to convince NASA to give me money to build spaceships with a company I owned which could not make spaceships (random example). I am sure I would be a zillionaire if I decided to leave all my family and children and friends while pursuing my dream to save the cosmos from something it never asked to be saved from.

People admire Bruce Lee for being a master of the martial arts. But there is nothing magic in being one. All you have to do is practice all day long every day until you die. See? You can be Bruce Lee too. And a billionaire (but then you wouldn’t have time to get that black belt). And a phD holder (but then you wouldn’t have time to be a billionaire). And a family guy (but then you might not even have time to get a phD)…

It is all a matter of priorities. So get your’s straight. And stop admiring false idols.

At the end, every man (and woman) can go on his own path. What we need to make sure though is not that the path is enlightened. But that the path leads to light at the end…

If that difference troubles you, then cheer up. You are in the right path already. Only some tears away from a smile…

Or you can always be Bruce Lee.

FISH. BEACH. DEATH. (Inaction as a source of evil)

Beach. Children. Parents. Sun and joy. Some kids catch some small fish. They put them in a bucket of water. Eventually they forget about them for a while and some of the fish die. A little kid is crying. Parents intervene indifferently and put the rest of the fish back into the sea. And life on the beach continued. With play and laughter. Under the morning sun…

And yet, under that pleasant sun, something had died excruciatingly. Not because someone actively did something. But because someone was just indifferent and inactive. Now they were just some small fish. (Although this was certainly not a trivial matter for them if you asked them) Yet in another era this kind of indifference killed Jews. Or blacks. Today the same indifference kills Christians living right next to us. And we continue to play under the pleasant sun.

Forgetting that being good is not simply a state of “doing no harm”. Being good requires energy and strength. Being good requires vigor and determination. On the contrary, evil is usually not some action (e.g. commit murder) but the omission to actively do good! One needs to take active action against temptation and evil in order to be good! “I do nothing” is not enough!

No, being good is not easy at all.

Oops!

The little fish !!!

Anxiety. Modern civilization. Timelessness. Eternity. [Don’t be anxious, the river is not there, it is inside you]

About a year ago, Sarah Fader, a 37-year-old social media consultant in Brooklyn who has generalized anxiety disorder, texted a friend in Oregon about an impending visit, and when a quick response failed to materialize, she posted on Twitter to her 16,000-plus followers. “I don’t hear from my friend for a day — my thought, they don’t want to be my friend anymore,” she wrote, appending the hashtag #ThisIsWhatAnxietyFeelsLike.

Thousands of people were soon offering up their own examples under the hashtag; some were retweeted more than 1,000 times. You might say Ms. Fader struck a nerve. “If you’re a human being living in 2017 and you’re not anxious,” she said on the telephone, “there’s something wrong with you.”

It was 70 years ago that the poet W. H. Auden published “The Age of Anxiety,” a six-part verse framing modern humankind’s condition over the course of more than 100 pages, and now it seems we are too rattled to even sit down and read something that long (or as the internet would say, tl;dr). (1)

We are slaves to our age. We have been taught that things need to be done now. And when they are not, we feel “anxious”. We are taught that the universe is in constant movement. So when things are not moving we feel “anxious”.

And yet the river is not moving.

Close your eyes and you will stop seeing it.

No, it is not a trick. You really do not see it.

But even with closed eyes the river is still there.

Still. Eternal.

The truth is that you do see the river.

But long before you saw it…

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%