Tag: Life

  • Inspired by Death

    When faced with the realisation of the finite nature of time, and by extension, life, it seems superfluous to be in search of inspiration to do that which I feel passionate about. Of all the day dreams and fairy tales that dot my imagination from my earliest memories, wanting to change the world was almost always a consistent theme, sometimes on a small scale, and at times in a much bolder way.

    I lack the patience to simply outgrow things because that implies a natural evolution of my being rather than an intelligent effort. Waiting for situations to change simply because with the passage of time it is likely to change is about as inspiring and meaningful as watching paint dry. Worse still, it holds the same sense of fulfillment as the act of counting the grains of sand in the desert. The remembrance of both the inevitability of death as well as the very finite limit it sets on our lives, often without warning, should be enough to spur me into action against every thought that I conceive without the need for any other motivator or source of inspiration. But it doesn’t. At least not as often as it should.

    The main reason I’ve always receded was because I saw no reason to proceed. An obvious statement with not so obvious implications. While the thought of death may spur me into action, it rarely has the same effect on those around me which frustrates me. That frustration is more reflective of my self-criticism of not being able to convey the urgency of life to those around me, and less about my contempt for their waste of life. So my choice to recede is because in the face of an unreceptive audience, any performance no matter how brilliant, is futile. So just as we need receptive hearts to inspire us to want to share a message, the absence thereof causes the words to dissipate into the lethargy around us.

    I sometimes grow impatient and aggressive when I’ve exhausted all reasonable measures to get through to someone that is blatantly destructive or oblivious to how they’re undermining their own potential, but once that final expression of exasperation is spent, the acceptance of it all descends and I move on to focus on more meaningful endeavours. Anything that holds the promise of fulfilment, not necessarily reward, is enough to engage my senses and pique my interest.

    I’ve often been accused of being obsessive with taunts of OCD hurled at me on many occasions, often cloaked as a joke. But my obsession is one that this world could use more of. My obsession is that I wish to leave every situation or every place in a better state than it was before I touched it. The net effect of my life must be more than just an accumulation of comforts and wealth, or a fulfillment of responsibility. It must extend to the upliftment of those around me, including myself.

    For this reason death inspires me. It inspires me because with each skill that I acquire, I feel a compelling need to use it to benefit another before the breath is removed from me and the skill is wasted. It will be wasted if it was neither used to benefit others, nor passed on as a gift to empower another. So before death reaches me, I hope to expend myself in ways that will leave as little wastage as possible for death to claim.

  • If Wishes Were Horses…

    I was reminded of that old proverb tonight. If wishes were horses, beggars would be riders. That’s how it often feels for me in life. Fortunately these bouts of wishing for what never was usually subsides within minutes, and rarely does it ever extend into hours or days. But that I wish or yearn for beginnings that were not intended for my life is something I can’t deny. Most of all, I often find myself wishing that I had sources of wisdom to draw on as I progressed through my years and my life experiences.

    Becoming an adult in a harsh world is difficult enough without such guidance. Finding your way amidst the jeers and ridicule of many while maintaining a single-minded focus on what you aspire to be is enough to try the tenacity of an angel. But I’m no angel, and fortunately the realisation of that struggle only hit me much later in life, well beyond that exhausting stage which made it somewhat more bearable. Perhaps that is the blessing of being oblivious at times.

    However, such struggles are never to be presented in single item purchases. They always seem to come in bulk purchases. Reflecting on those early years seems almost as if I had an idyllic existence at the time if I were to compare it to what was to follow. Painful lessons were learnt in my efforts to become a husband, and later a father. I’ve often felt twinges of remorse and guilt at the thought of the pain unleashed on others during those years of growth, but my saving grace is the knowledge that whatever I did, I did sincerely and out of genuine conviction for what I believed to be the right thing to do at the time. That’s all we can expect from anyone, isn’t it?

    Behaving maliciously is a sign of an infinitely more troubled soul than mine and I shudder at the thought, so as long as I don’t stoop to such levels, I guess I can take comfort in the fact that I am not truly jaded or bitter yet. The cynicism though, is open for debate. The wisdom accumulated through years of unaided struggles can easily be wasted if we’re quick to assume that we were being punished, rather than being educated. Without such trials, mediocrity and fragility would have taken me in a sweeping motion to a place that would have seen me dependent and needy of support structures reserved for the frail of heart, and timid of mind. Yet from a young age the innate resilience of my spirit kept me going. It has always been a sense of resilience that I could never take credit for. I did not sow it, nor did I nurture it. In fact, it nurtured me.

    And now, after all these experiences that have shaped me into who I am today, I still feel lacking. I wonder if the weight of being independently resilient with nothing more than faith to rely on will eventually wear away at my resolve and render me brittle and fragile at a time when the weight of this life just becomes overwhelmingly burdensome. Faith must remain my companion if I hope to survive this ordeal of life with any measure of dignity that may remain. My greatest fear is that at some point I may be faced with the harsh reality that perhaps I got it wrong all these years. Perhaps after all my resolve, my self-proclaimed philosophies of life, and death, and my supposedly informed perspectives of what makes us human, and what gives life purpose, perhaps at some point I will be disemboweled by the truth of what was, and the realisation of how far off the mark I was. And suddenly, the reality of death and the purpose of life will seem like a story very different to the one I just lived, with barely a breath left in me to try again.

  • It’s Probably Possible

    I’ve often been accused of expecting too much from people, only to realise that they in fact expect too little from themselves. I’ve seen this play out on numerous occasions where I’ve demanded a level of delivery from colleagues or family members that was slated as unrealistic, only to see them achieve their targets anyway. To me, it proved that my observations of their self-imposed limitations were true. If I was indeed expecting too much, they would never have met the supposedly unrealistic expectations, but because they expected too little from themselves, they assumed that they were incapable of doing so to begin with and therefore started out on the back foot.

    There is a fundamental difference between those with a can-do attitude and those with a I-see-a-problem-in-everything attitude. The one looks at the possibilities while the other focuses on the probabilities. As much as it sounds like a play on words, yet another accusation leveled against me on several occasions, there is a simple truth in it. When you consider probabilities, it immediately demands a focus on the expected hurdles, constraints, and other problems that may be experienced in trying to achieve something. Couple this with the predisposition that most have regarding their low expectations from themselves, and inevitably you end up with an individual that is going to be risk averse and safe, never pushing the boundaries, and rarely leading any efforts at all. In other words, you end up with a follower, often a blind one as well.

    Such followers are easily capable of deflecting attention away from their negative attitude by offering ideas and suggestions indicating support and constructive input about how those hurdles and obstacles can be navigated. Worse than this, they probably don’t even realise what limitations they’re placing on themselves by focusing on the probability factors only, which makes it even more sad. But the reality is, they’ll help you fight the good fight, but they’ll never take you into new territory. Within the workplace, they will be the optimisers and renovators but never the innovators.

    If you start out looking at what is the ideal, and considering what is possible, ignoring the hurdles and the obstacles, chances are good that you’ll find ways to sell that vision to others in a way that will give them reason to stop being so fixated on the distractions and instead, to use their skills at navigating around obstacles to help you achieve the common vision. Chances are, you’ll find yourself leading others through situations that would seem daunting to most. By default, a focus on possibilities emphasises a grounding in principles, which ultimately sets the foundation for leadership. Like someone said recently, leaders take you to places that you weren’t going to before.

    I’ve always subscribed to the simple philosophy of starting out with the ideal in mind. Once that ideal vision has been created, then only tamper it with reality and practicality, but don’t sell it short just because others don’t see what you see. At times when the overwhelming majority are ready to throw in the towel because the probability of success is low, that’s when it’s important to revisit the vision you first embraced and to re-energise yourself around what is possible so that you can look beyond the probabilities of failure that you’re facing at that point.

  • When I chose to be educated by the school of life, little did I know that my mentor would turn out to be my tormentor

  • Why Time Travel is Probably Not Possible

    The concept of time travel, in my opinion, is more a desire founded in the weakness of us because of our collective regret over missed opportunities rather than a practical and needed solution to any of mankind’s ills. We struggle to live in  the present, to be conscious, and to be grounded because of the constant distraction of what we have yet to do or achieve, which makes it quite ironical that one of those distractions is our pursuit of the ability to travel back in time so that we can right the wrongs we spawned when wondering about some other time or place.

    The more I contemplate the concept of time travel from a purely logical perspective, the less likely the possibility of achieving it appears to be. There are a number of theories that abound by respected scientists that suggest that it is physically possible, but they remain theories, and hence what prompted me to develop my own theories to disprove this misconception that serves as nothing more than a fairy tale.

    I find it difficult to believe that we’ll ever be able to travel faster than instantaneous. What I mean is, we may be able to break barrier of the speed of light, but in doing so, we will only ever get as close as is humanly possible to moving from one place to another in an instant, or moment, or split second, however you wish to measure it; but we’ll never get there before we’ve left our point of departure.

    The entire concept of the speed of light being the holy grail for time travel is mistaken. We assume that simply because the light reflected off an object has not reached us yet, it means that it exists in a different dimension. It doesn’t. The fact that the light is still en route does not change the fact that the object is still physically in the same location. Stated differently, if I were to accelerate faster than the speed of light, chances are that I will find myself in a place of darkness because the light that I left behind is still catching up with me. Imagine the disappointment on the face of the man that eventually breaks the speed of light only to find himself bumping into objects that he can’t see because the light reflected off them has not reached him yet?

    In fact, even in that scenario there are flaws. That would assume that the objects whose reflected light can no longer be seen are all located in close proximity to the origin of his travels. Think about it this way. If I were to travel faster than the speed of light in a horizontal direction, only light emanating from sources in a similar trajectory (so to speak) would be left behind. However, and light traveling vertically would still reach me because I would be crossing their paths and not traveling away from them. So in order for me to reach that point of darkness, I would need to be traveling away from every light source in every direction simultaneously, or else I’ll always be crashing into other light sources.

    That all sounds really complicated so perhaps here is an easier way to explain my point of view. Traveling faster than the speed of light will only make me outrun the light itself, and will not make me travel through time, since time itself is not even measured by the presence or quantity of light. Time is simply a constructed unit of measure that is independent of our definition of it. We could call it 50 other names and define 100 different units of measure to measure it as opposed to the standard seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on, but it would not change the very essence of time itself.

    Whether or not the light of an object is visible does not stop the entropy experienced by the object. In other words, I won’t remain forever young if I simply lived in a dark room all my life. So the fact that the light that should otherwise be reflected from my body is not visible, does not make me absent. It simply makes me out of sight but still present. So this entire focus on the speed of light to make time travel possible is simply absurd. We measure changes by the elapsed time of the event. We improve our productivity by more meaningfully using the time we have available. And then we delude ourselves into believing that we’re getting better at time management, when in fact we’re getting better at managing our lethargy and procrastination.

    Time is not what we need to conquer, but rather ourselves, our arrogance, and our pride that suggests that we’re so powerful and infinitely resourceful that we have the wit, the intelligence, and the capability to conquer any physical construct we find in our path. Time is not physical. It is not a liquid, a gas, a solid, or any other variation of matter in between. In fact, it’s not even matter, and doesn’t matter either. It’s the actions we do in the moments that pass that determine how well those moments were spent. When we lose sight of that, we end up trying to find ways to escape the reality of death by believing that we are capable of cheating it, starting yet another cycle of lethargy and procrastination to do that which matters, while falsely assuming that we’re engaged in endeavours that will improve the quality of life of mankind.

  • No Forever Afters

    It’s natural sometimes to feel fear when life suddenly takes a turn for the better,  because a history of disappointment or challenges conditions us to expect the worst.  So instead of embracing our new experiences,  we end up bracing ourselves for what we expect might happen.  It’s part of our survival instinct. However, because we’re protecting ourselves from a threat that is not present,  our body takes strain because of the imbalance it causes, which results in poor health and dysfunction. Unfortunately, at that point, the ill health causes us to turn to the modern medical professional first, instead of last.

    You see, when we have this imbalance that causes ill health, we’re conditioned to believe that something external to us has suddenly created an internal problem. A problem that we’re incapable of rectifying unless we bombard our bodies with chemical cocktails that will strip the paint off the wall if applied correctly. But tonight I don’t quite care about the stupidity of current mainstream health regimens. I don’t quite care for much at all actually.

    For some time now I’ve looked around and realised that no matter how much effort or expense is invested in the maintenance and upkeep of the structures around us, the moment that effort is complete, the decay starts setting in to prepare us for the next bout of maintenance. Everything in this world, including us, was designed to perish, to decay, to disintegrate into nothing at the end of being something. It’s a fruitless endeavour to focus on embellishing this world, or this life, but the fickleness of my nature always distracts me towards enticing challenges that lure me towards them under the pretence of it being an expression of my creativity, or in other cases, an opportunity to make the lives of others more comfortable or pleasant.

    Nothing lasts, not the intensity of the emotions felt when love is most inflamed, nor the bitter anger of the betrayal of that same love when it fades. It all dissolves into nothing as time erodes its memory, but yet we pursue the concept of forever after as if it was truly experienced in this world. It never was, and never will be. There are no forever afters, nor are there any fail safe remedies to outlast this world. All we can ever do is delay the inevitable, but the inevitable is inevitable, or else it would not be called the inevitable, yet, inevitably, we seem not to get it. It really is as absurd as that sounded.

    I know that I should be taking the lighter load for the road ahead. I know that the lighter load means less indulgences in materialism, and more in spiritualism. I also know that finishing my latest gardening project adds to that load, but my obstinacy, or perhaps my weakness, is that it is easier to feed my feeble sense of self-worth through accomplishing these celebrated goals, rather than to draw comfort from the fact that I would have successfully detached myself from this world a little more when I walked past that beautiful water feature without reaching to see if my credit card was in my wallet.

    This same weakness within me is what I despise in others. I often despise it even more because being surrounded with a similar weakness leaves me without a handhold to lift myself out of the quagmire of materialism. Living comfortably is a lie. A horrible lie that is unachievable. By our very nature we will constantly seek to improve what we have because that is the yardstick of success. Only those whose primary focus is a goal external to their immediate circle of influence or responsibility will stand any chance of overcoming such a weakness. Unfortunately such philanthropic or altruistic endeavours are also plagued with indulgence of the spiritual self because of our need to be acknowledged and validated.

    This world cannot come to an end soon enough.

  • There was a time when I didn’t care about the title of my post, or if it even had a title. It was more reflective of the understated life I lead. Over time I seem to have grown too familiar with the attention from strangers, or admiring critics to the point where I’ve lost touch with myself, or even what the purpose of my bleeding at the keyboard is supposed to be. The purge it used to offer is now just a constipated grumble of a system in a state of angst.

    My focus on providing, or at least feeling a need to express my opinion on the issues plaguing others has led to me being distanced from my own. It has always been easier to formulate an opinion on the challenges faced by others because it leaves me feeling somewhat smugly deluded into believing that I have a handle on this life thing that’s happening to me. That thing that goes on at an ever more rapid pace than before often leaving me overwhelmed with the realisation of how little I’ve achieved relative to what I know needs to be done.

    I look around these days wondering why the world seems to be so alluring when the reality that has proven itself billions of times before confirms that it’s nothing but the blink of an eye when compared to the true nature of our being. The cycles we go through on a daily basis become more contaminated with responsibility and its associated distractions, even though the allotment of time remains the same. We constantly try to master the art of productivity, and in so doing, we’re distracted from what we should be doing, yet still believing that in achieving a higher level of productivity it will free up some of that time for the important things. It never does.

    The important things are often set aside because of the compelling nature of responsibility. Responsibility compels us to act in a worldly manner, while…while we type away some meaningless post believing that the very effort brings us closer to our true purpose. I used to be able to close my eyes in the middle of writing one of these things, take a long drawn breath that wasn’t deep but wasn’t shallow either, and without having to apply my mind to it, more thoughts would tumble out of my mind without me summoning them. That doesn’t happen any longer. Now when I close my eyes, the movie in my head simply shifts into 3D and the noises from around me, including the cooing of the doves outside my window, serve to distract me from any sense of serenity, even though their morning serenades were often a source of comfort and wonder before.

    Perhaps there is a comfort in labels after all. At times like these, when faced with a vacuous sense of purpose or focus, holding on to a label may very well be therapeutic, albeit in a deceptive way. Perhaps all these delusions collude to give us a sense of peace and purpose while we’re distracting ourselves from the truth that we’re destined not to achieve anything of significance in this world except that by which others may be collectively distracted. When we achieve things that are not communally subscribed to, we assume that it lacks purpose or value. This sense of exclusion that I’ve felt for most, no, all of my life has led to what currently seems to be my saving grace of delusions. Perhaps my writing, as insignificant and pedestrian as it may seem, will influence a handful of those that have the natural ability to relate to the collective delusions of the world, and in so doing, I would be influential beyond my immediate sphere of influence without being celebrated, while being pleasantly surprised on the day of reckoning to be presented with a record of beneficence that would be completely unattested to by my mediocre life.

    Perhaps these ramblings have finally evolved into the delusions of a madman, and thereby becoming what it was always intended to be.

  • Licensed to Drive

    Most people can relate to an analogy about cars, so here’s one relating to mental health that I thought would be able to demonstrate my point about the main stream approach to dealing with depression and other so-called mental illnesses (hopefully you have the patience to read it to the end).

    Imagine that the accelerator pedal of the car is your ability to express positive emotions, and the brake pedal was negative emotions, and you are the driver. One day, while driving along minding your own business you get hit by another driver that wasn’t paying attention. The crash isn’t serious enough to write off your car, but it did cause problems with your accelerator and your brake system. More than this, there was some damage done to your car’s appearance.

    So off you went and replaced some of the damaged parts, did some repairs on those parts that couldn’t be replaced, and gave it a coat of spray that made it look just like new again. Only, it wasn’t new, because you knew how much went into getting the outside to look perfect again, while under the paint work, you knew how many wrinkles and scratches were covered up. But everyone told you how great the car looked again, so you ignored the defects and made a point of getting back into your car to get to all the places you wanted to go.

    However, you didn’t do such a good job of the accelerator and the brake pedal. At times, the brakes would feel spongy and unreliable, so whenever you needed to use it, you doubted, until eventually the doubt grew so strong that you started driving slower than ever to avoid using it at all. Then you realises that the accelerator doesn’t feel the way it used to either. It used to feel firm and responsive, almost as decisive as you were, and it used to cause the car to lunge forward when you needed to, and to just cruise when it felt good to do so as well. But now, the accelerator was also unpredictable. At times it would accelerate beautifully, but without warning, the car would slow down almost to a halt for no reason. No matter how much you wanted it to move, pressing your foot on that pedal just wouldn’t get it to go.

    So you eventually decided that maybe the damage was more than you were capable of fixing, so you decided to go out looking for a mechanic, especially since all your friends and family kept telling you how great they are. The mechanic looks at the symptoms and quite quickly lets you know that with some work, it can be back to what it was, and with your consent, he set about fixing and upgrading the brakes to perform even better than before. Then he looked at the accelerator and found the cable to be loose. So he tightened the nut, and adjusted the cable and once again, the car was able to accelerate without any problems. He also tuned the car with some new equipment that wasn’t previously available, which made the car lighter on fuel, and faster than before.

    However, having had too many close shaves with the brakes and accelerator being faulty, and still remembering the impact of the accident, you keep holding back, wanting to reduce the risk of getting into another accident. The memory of the dents and scratches hidden by the new coat of paint still fresh in your mind, you start driving more cautiously than you ever did before. You slow down for no reason other than just in case, and you don’t even drive at the speed limit any longer, even though the car is perfectly capable of handling it. In fact, the car is now capable of performing better than it did when it was brand new because of the new technology they put in, yet you still drive it slower than ever.

    The crash caused by the other driver is what happens in life. They’re the people around us that we trust, but they end up being mindless in their actions that results in damage in our lives that they’re most often oblivious to. They move on and focus on their own lives, while we wait for someone to come along an fix us. The mechanic is modern medicine. A necessary intervention strategy, but nothing more. Able to recover most physical aspects of our health, but failing to remedy the emotional ravages of what took place.

    The wrinkles and scratches beneath the bright shiny paint work is the memories that haunt us, while the paint work is the face we show to the world when we pretend that everything is perfect. The new technologies are the life lessons learnt, that allows us to deal with future encounters more effectively and maturely, but we refuse to use it because of the fear of getting hit by another reckless driver. So instead, we plod along at a fraction of our capability from before the traumatic incident so that we can reduce as much as possible any potential for another impact that could send us spiralling out of control.

    The psychiatrist that so many believe in blindly have tools to re-establish mental pathways, but they don’t have the tools to make you use it. Again, at times, a necessary intervention strategy, but not a long term solution.

    Then there is you, the driver. Focused on the impact that hit you from nowhere, and too afraid to even consider having to deal with such an impact again. All the while, the distraction of that memory causes you not to notice that with the lessons learnt, your ability to avoid such impacts in future was significantly improved (upgrade of brakes and accelerator, knowledge of how situations like that occur, and what choices could have been taken differently, or could have been more informed), but instead of leveraging that knowledge that you have acquired through the experience for improving the way you navigate your way through life in future, you choose to avoid it instead. Your avoidance of those life experiences, of people, of interactions, is what causes you to slip into a depression where you refuse to acknowledge the tools and abilities you have at your disposal because you suddenly don’t trust yourself due to you blaming yourself for the reckless behaviour of that others.

    The thought almost always comes before the chemical reaction. And in cases where the chemical reaction may have been preventing the thought patterns to occur, the intervention strategies that are available provides us with the ability to kick start that process. Once that process is kick started, we have to apply our minds actively rather than rely on the intervention strategy to sustain us. The problem that many face these days is that they’re being told that the intervention strategy is in fact a long term dependency that they have no choice in. When we give up the choice to take control, only then does the intervention become the mechanism for survival, or even just to cope.

    Our inability to believe in ourselves is the most profitable outcome for the pharmaceutical companies quite possibly in the history of modern medicine. But we have drugs to distract us from that sad reality, that’s why we don’t even have the presence of mind to realise what it is that we’re capable of.

    I once heard someone say that the only way to cheat old age is to continue learning. The more we learn, the greater our ability to acquire new knowledge. Therefore, it is easier for someone with more knowledge to appreciate and intelligently apply new concepts, than it is for someone that hasn’t applied their minds much towards the acquisition of knowledge. When we discard our life experiences as bad memories that we’d rather forget, we effectively throw away priceless knowledge that could never be acquired through any other means. Books and doctors can only give you facts and assumptions, but only you will ever know the truth about you. Don’t suppress that truth, embrace it, and use it to build yourself up from strength to strength, realising that you decide what your limits are, not society.