Tag: philosophy

  • Advice and Death

    Advice given by one in a moment of adversity is often sincerest. Death visits us at times that are not always of our choosing. We’re often left bewildered because we live with the endless optimism that today will not be our day. And because of this reality, when death does strike close to us, it shakes our core because even at that point of denial, we’re mourning the loss of someone close to us, when in fact we should be mourning our own lives that are fraught with missed opportunities. 

    Apart from just taking the time to appreciate others while they’re here, do we appreciate what we need to do to part in good standing, or are we always leaving for tomorrow that part of our lives or estates that we should have resolved yesterday? At times when we’re reminded of death, we should look at the state of those left behind and consider whether they were left burdened, or blessed. We live lives of probability, otherwise we’d be too worry-stricken to be functional. We survive death on a daily basis, several times a day. When I’m not distracted, which is on rare occasions, I consider the probability of being within inches of death every single time I pass an oncoming car on the road. But I’ve survived passing them so often, that it hardly ever strikes me as a moment that could end my life before I completed my next breath.

    By design, we take life for granted even when faced with death often.

  • A few random thoughts

    The ‘anything goes’ mentality is far more extremist than those that stand by moderation. It requires an extremist to allow anything to pass as acceptable without restraint, whereas it requires conscious thought, conviction, and balance to apply one’s mind to moderation. Yet the duplicity of society would incline you to believe that those that seek moderation are extremists, whilst the liberals are the free thinkers. Free thinking is often a phrase brandished about by those that seek affirmation and acceptance rather than those that are willing to stand for what they believe in without fear of ridicule or earning the ire of those they admire. 

    What’s worse is when this same thinking of supposed extremism is passed down to each following generation, resulting in ever more wayward teenagers with misguided passions. At some point, a generation dropped the baton. What should have been passed down as ageless wisdom was abandoned in the name of liberalism and social freedom, and none of the subsequent generations have been willing to stop the rot. For this reason, we find ourselves amongst teenage sages and pubescent gurus, neither of which have had sufficient life experiences to become the authorities they pretend to be on life, love, and philosophy. Such misguidance cannot be blamed on the students, but rather on the absence of teachers. 

    In the absence of role models and leaders, the youth are left to fend for themselves under the delusion of guidance from adults who are often too self-absorbed to realise that they are failing in their duty to raise adults, not children. Adults are often so insecure about their own worth, that they’re more focused on earning the social acceptance of their children by trying to be ‘cool’ parents, while the kids are distracted by their ‘cool-ness’ only to realise that they are ill prepared for life. 

    The inevitable result is the proliferation of labels that abdicate responsibility for our state of mind, and result in people living out the expectations of society based on the label attached to the specific permutation of their insecurity, rather than just realising that it is nothing more than an insecurity due to lack of knowledge or guidance that leaves us with so many troubled souls. Before we try to label the mindset of others that act out their insecurities in cryptic ways, we should make a simple but sincere effort to understand the source of insecurity that pretends to be bipolar, borderline, or any other contemporary term used to appease the conscience of absent parents. 

  • It takes a tortured soul to write about beauty because a beautiful soul has no need for such expression

    Zaid Ismail

  • Random thoughts about people and me

    I’ve often felt like life was a losing battle. No matter how often I would extend myself to those that I accepted as significant in my life, I found myself grovelling rather than being appreciated. Grovelling for attention or reciprocation that is. The more I extended myself, the less I was appreciated, which in some twisted way actually makes sense.

    We take for granted that which is most readily available. We only appreciate and nurture things that we realise are precious and hard to come by. Otherwise we kick into consumerism mode and forget about the blessings at hand (I hate the fact that I can’t even use the word ‘blessings’ and similar words without feeling like I’m being a religious zealot simply because of all the scripture-thumpers out there).

    Anyway, at the risk of sounding cryptic, I think that focusing on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of ourselves is more important than focusing on external factors that we cannot control. What I mean is the ‘what’ should be our decision about what is or isn’t truly important in the bigger scheme of our own lives, right? While the ‘how’ is our decision regarding how we choose to accept or achieve how the ‘what’ plays out in our lives.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that if the focus is on making conscious decisions regarding what affects us, and learning to accept the things we cannot influence about the behaviours and decisions of others, we’ll find ourselves less often in a position to be trampled upon or taken for granted. This approach, whilst it took forever to realise, has worked well for me. At times it threatened to isolate me from people that I wasn’t willing to let go of, but it also made me realise that if I was significant at all to them, they would realise the potential loss and do something about it to avoid the rift from happening.

    But the devil in all this is our often low self-esteem. When we assume that we’re not worth the effort, we become victims and martyrs to situations and desires that we believe we will never acquire for ourselves unless we sacrifice ourselves in the process. It’s a self-fulfilled unfulfilling prophecy. And if this is still sounding cryptic, it’s because that’s how life is. It’s the biggest puzzle we’ll ever try to assemble, which reminds me that the best way to build one of those massive 5000 piece puzzles is to start from the outside and work your way in. I think the same is true with life. We need to start by determining what our boundaries are, what we’re willing to compromise and what is non-negotiable. Once we have that nailed, we need to decide how we’re going to go about filling in the pieces that will complete us.

    This all reminds me of a simple thought process I often share in my workshops with others regarding brainstorming. It comprises of three simple components, and talks directly to the puzzle analogy. Output, Method, Resource. If we start by defining what the objective (output) is that we desire, we can then understand what methods or actions would be needed to achieve it. And once we know that, it will be that much easier to determine the resources required to make it all happen. That’s the easy part. Once we have that plan drawn up, it takes courage and determination to act on it and make it happen. That’s usually where most of us suck because of that same demon called self-esteem. A healthy self-esteem really is the best gift any parent can give their child, ever!

  • The root of a tree is rarely, if ever as sweet as its fruit. As opposed to the sweetness of deception that always yields bitter fruit.

    Zaid Ismail

  • The best of kings are at the doors of scholars, and the worst of scholars are at the doors of kings.

  • Life

    I feel somewhat weepy today. Strange though, because I have no real reason to feel this way. No, this is not my feminine side showing, it’s my human side. At times the accumulation of life’s struggles creeps up on me without warning, and it’s when things are going well that I realise how bad it was before. It’s a strange sort of weightiness that I feel. I don’t feel weighed down, but I don’t feel lightened of my burdens either. 

    My endeavours to simplify my life have been somewhat fruitful, but the emptiness of space alongside me in bed still leaves me reaching out for something that isn’t there more often than I should. That’s probably the cause of my self-imposed insomnia, especially on Sunday evenings. Despite knowing that I will fall asleep the moment I lay my head down, I resist it with everything in me until I’m literally ready to pass out at my laptop before I begrudgingly drag myself over to the bed.

    At times the exhaustion at that point is so bad that I find myself slithering into place trying to shrug the blanket over me, because I barely have the energy to move my arms. But it’s all not lost, I guess. Outside of these moments I still feel resolute in my naivety, and my optimism still persists. One thing I have resolved never to do is assume that it can’t get any worse. I’ve made that mistake too often before. It can always get worse. 

    If nothing else, the lessons of my life, thus far, have taught me that even when it seems like the darkness is going to overcome me completely, it always only ever took a single split second of light to change that. The trick now is to remember that the next split second could be the one when that light will pierce through the morbidity and pain. It reminds me of so many defining moments in my life. Moments when everything seemed consistently headed in one direction, and in a split second, it all changed. The moment I received that phone call when my first wife died. The moment I received that phone call that I got a job after being out of work for seven months and having made the last payment of my mortgage from my credit card. 

    There is no guarantee what the next split second brings, but because I’m often a creature of probability more than possibility, I easily forget those defining moments in my life, because innately I’m a statistician by nature. And the statistics prove that the trends of my life are mostly mediocre and blandly predictable, rather than unpredictably beautiful. But that’s because I tend to have a jaundiced memory that holds on to those experiences that caused me the most pain rather than those that caused the greatest elation. As ungrateful as that may seem, it makes perfect sense.

    By design, I seek to protect myself from harm and pain, not happiness and joyful laughter. So it’s inevitable that I would be cautioned before I am encouraged. Perhaps that’s why it requires courage and effort to make a life beautiful, because it requires fighting against the very nature that I despise within me. 

  • Between Martyrdom and Cowardice

    Don’t confuse the actions of a martyr with those of a coward. There are many that profess to be martyrs, but in fact hide behind their fear as cowards by presenting their acts as selfless acts, when in fact it’s nothing more than spinelessness. I know of many that lament their inability to live according to their principles. Who with one breath despise the oppression of society and with the next uphold the repulsive social structures that feed such oppression.

    We profess to uphold religious principles and moral high grounds until we’re faced with the reality of choosing between principles and daddy’s wealth, or principles and mummy’s acceptance, even though we know that both are steeped in cultural arrogance and societal bigotry. We embellish our profiles with elaborate degrees of knowledge, prestigious accreditations of piety and align with the most respected nobles of society, but succumb to the simple pressure of choosing between a life of comfort and acceptance, and a life of modesty and principles. 

    Being romantic in words and cowardly in action is easy. Both feeds an insatiable ego. The world will always be greater than our greatest aspirations if focused outwardly, but will fade from view the moment we seek to overcome the frailties within. I despise cowards, and cowardliness, especially when accompanied by a pretentious mourn for sympathy and understanding. Those that indulge the cowards are only appeasing their own need for such affirmation. That’s why a true martyr is rare, more rare than a coward ever will be.