Tag: dailyprompt

  • What I wish I knew…

    What advice would you give to your teenage self?

    Response to writing prompt from WordPress
    1. Any knowledge acquired in school has severely diminishing returns in terms of practical life the more you progress beyond the 8th grade
    2. Completing school is not a reflection of your self-worth or your accomplishment as a human being
    3. If you are taught religious beliefs through the fear of the consequences of not practicing those beliefs, it will turn you into a shitty person that judges everyone else if they don’t comply with your beliefs
    4. Your body doesn’t have a mind of its own no matter what people with medical degrees want you to believe
    5. If you’re at peace with yourself, your body will be at peace with you
    6. Don’t let the demons of others define your self-worth
    7. People who bully you are only doing it because they’re jealous of you, and not because there is something wrong with you
    8. Don’t trust every person who appears to be sincere in advising you. Many just want to be heard without trying to understand what’s important to you.
    9. Dabble and experiment in everything that piques your interest about the world, but don’t lose yourself to dabbling, especially when it comes to relationships
    10. Your parents are not the same as your sibling’s parents, because your parents had a different reality before and after you came along. Each sibling changed their reality, each life experience changed their character, and they reacted differently to each of your siblings and you because they were different people at each stage of their lives. Not because they meant harm, or because you weren’t enough.
    11. Success is loving what you do. It’s not having a good job because you’re afraid of being poor or unsuccessful
    12. You treat others the way you feel about yourself, not the way they deserve to be treated. So be kind to yourself and learn to understand why you are who you are.
    13. Every life stage will cause you to instinctively respond in the way you saw your parents or significant others dealing with that life stage when you were little. It’s your only point of reference about how life works. Allow yourself to get it wrong, but own it when you do.
    14. Don’t stop at judging yourself or others. Instead, let judgement be your first step, and let compassion and understanding drive what you do with that judgement.
    15. There are too many variables in life for any single way of living to be the only way to live. Understand the wisdom behind the traditions that shape your teachings so that you can implement the wisdom in your life with understanding, rather than blindly following the tradition with fear.
    16. Just like you’re not raising yourself, your parents didn’t raise themselves, so allow them to be human in the same way that you want others to create space for you being human.
    17. Be consciously responsible with your heart, so that you’re not reckless with the hearts of others.
    18. Embrace life, don’t fear what the future may hold, and don’t let the past contaminate the present moment beyond the lesson that needs to be learnt from the past.
    19. Don’t just survive. LIVE!

  • What bores you?

    Writing Prompt

    prompted by WordPress

    Petty social banter about people’s lives. Discussions about status and status symbols, and influencers and social trends.

    We’ve lost the art of being interesting, and mastered the art of how to make boring look appealing!

    We’re so desperate for familiarity because of our isolated lifestyles, that we feel a need to find resonance on social media with others who share similar habits, or preferences, or flaws, or annoyances. And while we’re doing that, we look for more distractions from our boredom because we realise how much time we have for social media while not having any clue about how to have a life.

    Yeah, I’m a cynic and this is a cynical rant, but prove me wrong?
    Prove to me that there more people in real life who are interesting and deep without needing to share their depth or fascination on social media?

    So, what bores me? People who are obsessed with other people’s social advancement is exceptionally, tediously, nauseatingly, mind-numbingly, and cringe-worthy boring to the nth degree.

    That’s what bores me.

  • Losing out on life

    How does death change your perspective?

    Death doesn’t change it. Death defines it.

    In the absence of finality, we take things for granted. The moment there is no risk of loss or of an ending, we have no need for urgency or gravity in the present moment. If there is always going to be more, we have no reason to rush to make the most of what we have.

    The only guarantee in life is that it will end. Unfortunately, because we survive more moments than we succumb to, meaning that death only happens once while life happens every day, we take life for granted and assume that death will happen at some point in the future.

    Life should not be about what we wish to accomplish before we die. That’s a transactional, fear-based approach to life that cheats us out of life itself. Instead, it should be celebrated in the moment because of what we are capable of celebrating, and not because we need to celebrate it before it is lost. That’s how moments of joy are created that make life worth living, and death a warm end to a beautiful life.

    Death-bed regrets only take hold if we didn’t live life meaningfully. And we fail to live life meaningfully if we’re fearing what the future holds, or holding on to the pain or memories of the past. Those memories were created by what happened in those moments, not by preoccupying ourselves with what was to come.

    So, if you contemplate death, or you contemplate the impact of the past on who you are now, you’re missing out on life. Because life is what is happening right now. Everything else is either a memory, a dream, or a preemptive nightmare. It’s not life.