This is about the man, whose heart was splayed by a bullet. Whose blood spread on road like ink on paper.The irony about the man is that , he had stolen money to sustain the life that was slipping away before his very eyes. And he wasn't dying a noble man. What do you think would be his final thoughts ? Would he desperately pray to an imaginary diety, would he think about the faces of the people he had loved, if any ? would he repent ? Would he lose control.  Would he stop thinking because..it is pointless to argue with uncertainty. It has no face. It is everywhere, clouding everything a man thinks he owns.

 Then Would he let it go?  Learning to let go. The unwanted lesson life teaches us so often.  Wouldn't letting go of life, dim every sense, every memory , every feeling he ever felt. Wouldn't he laugh at the efforts of writers and poets to grasp that which is so mediocre, so plain, so without taste  of anything extra ordinary. 

Just a simple act of ..seeing your life abandon you. like falling asleep. Is death eventually that uneventful ?

Interrupting the flow of an ordinary day, the wellness advocates distributed self-help material among the doctors. I felt that people were at best, nonchalant, and at worst, suspicious of any self-help material being shared with them. I realized that many people look at the self-help industry with derision and disrespect. I agree with the criticism this disrespect stems from, I just don’t think it’s the entire picture. I will present my internal dialogue about it:

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 First, something about someone telling you how to live your life, with their own accomplishment being solely the book that they sold to you about how to live your life, is very fake. It sounds like such a lucky chance and nothing merit-based in the first place.

But not all motivational speakers have made their life out of such a thing. There are charlatans here like in every other trade, it doesn’t mean you can’t find valuable gems of truth therein. You can find many people who excelled in their life sharing valuable insight on how you could do that too.  Also, a blanket criticism of something is almost always a bad idea.

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Second, all these companies are pushing these messages on you to ‘pamper yourself’.  Why? ‘Because you deserve it’.  It’s very opportunistic. They are grabbing the opportunity to make money off of you under the name of self-help and self-care. It’s just true.

It’s true that when a company sells you a product, it is doing that to make profit, and not to pamper you.  But they are not taking your money for nothing. It’s a classic ‘give and take’ trade, based on your own desire for the object they are offering. What you can do to fight it is, examine the value of happiness you get by acquiring their product in your life and if you don’t find it worthwhile, apply corrective actions. 

It doesn’t absolve the companies of having a disproportionately profit-centric approach and there is a place for this discussion where it must be had, but in your personal life, you can only change what you can.

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Third, it has arisen in many minds, and I must confess that this thought is not foreign to my own heart , that something about the fact that a therapist is a person paid to care about you, feels very worthless and mechanical. We want something more organic and real that motivates us for growth.

Actually, only the first part of this statement is true. A therapist is paid, but not to ‘care’.  A therapist is a person paid to analyze your thought process and emotional life with a degree of objectivity you yourself, and people connected to you wouldn’t be capable of. Their value in your life must be judged on how well they do it, how introspective they make you, or the self growth they make possible.

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Fourth, even if we were to believe all those success stories of people who made it, what does the motivational speaker have to say about the graveyard of broken dreams of all the people who worked just as hard and consistently as the few ones who made it?

The fact that there is a graveyard of broken dreams and yes there is one there, shouldn’t discourage you from trying. Why? Because there are two parts to achieving a dream, the journey and the destination. if you have lived a journey with passion and authenticity, it’s itself satisfactory, such has been my experience and so I have been told. If, however you disagree with me and the outcome of your efforts does matter a great deal to you, you can choose safer, more viable options instead of those risky dreams. You must have no shame in giving up a dream anymore than you should have in pursuing it. It’s your life, and your own quality of experience. What’s important is to pick a choice and not stay in the limbo of desiring one thing and doing another.

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Fifth, some people duly note that at this point of collapse of family system, we should be taught more about caring for others, instead of focusing on ourselves. 

Caring for others and caring for yourself doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive at all! In fact, the most secure form of love you can offer people is when you love yourself in the first place.

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Sixth point, and the conversation takes a philosophical turn here, what even is the point of doing all this and putting up so much struggle? 

 Nobody is qualified to answer this question on behalf of someone else. You may find validation or answers that resonate with you in different philosophical schools of thought or belief systems. My personal idea about it is that If you have to do a thing, why not do it beautifully? And if you have to live a life, why not do it wonderfully? Looking for happiness or meaning, is a matter of choice. 

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In the foreground of this dialogue already existing in my mind, when I filled out the self-help questionnaire with a commitment to truth I try to uphold in the surveys, I felt very sad about the results. Because it made the need for some self-care very evident.

 Indeed all of this is real. My weaknesses are real. My unresolved pain is real. And it’s visceral, and it’s raw, and If I suppress it, it still raises its head like a stubborn mole in the game of whack-a-mole. 

When I move away from my story, I am able to see that it’s not as much my desires as my pain and fears that write my story. And the bottom-line of this write-up is that, you shouldn’t feel guilty for feeling the pain and discomfort you feel in your life.  There is a lot of fake self help and all those things out there that you are right to hold disrespect for, but there is a lot of real one which is needed in your life. 

The need for feeling is there.

The need for healing is there.

 It’s not an act of being strong or brave or being anything. It’s an act of being truthful to yourself. And no person in the history of world can escape this journey unless they are masterful in the art of telling lies to themselves. ( But they feel it)

 I shall do my bit. 

"In the end, no one remembers Krebs cycle"

 We spend so much time studying the metabolism of fats, but in the end, we dont remember its details. That's true. I don't think anyone does.

A formal education, by the end of which you get a degree, serves mostly to familiarise you with the core concepts. You don't remember most of it.

  I was always ready to be intimated by the idea that people can google their medical condition and seem to know more about the problem than the doctor they go to, simply because the doctor doesn't essentially remember all the nitty gritty details of this one specific disease. But here a distinction becomes relevant.

  A doctor during the course of his training studies the medical sciences from the very basics of physiology, biochemistry and anatomy. They start from how the chemical reactions work inside the body and how electrical impulses make the heart beat to how a disease manifests grossly in a person. And although all they  have currently might be some lingering vestiges of that knowledge, they are familiar with, or are at least aware of the existence of the explanations behind what's going on in the body. Studying a course in its entirety , like Medicine, gives you an aerial or a bird eye view of a city. On the other hand, if you are a layperson and you don't have the underlying knowledge of basics or any familiarity with it, you can still google a certain disease and you can be really literate in it. It is as if you have gone to one house in the city and explored it thoroughly , you can give any doctor a tough time with your questions about it. As you should!  But you don't have the concept  in your mind of where this particular house lies on the grand map of the city, you don't have a web of connections about how this one disease or symptom relates with the others, that knowledge or intuition is only possible with training in the basics and related disciplines.

  I give the example of a doctor only because Medicine is my subject. Otherwise I find it relevant for all other fields. Many times when I feel that I have a good understanding of a concept from another field , I end up learning a thing or two about it from the experts, and I am humbled by the magnitude of the things I had overlooked. 

  There are people capable of cross-overs into other fields, and there are self taught specialists in a field, like Elon Musk who built a rocket that way. But such people are exceptions, not the rule.

moral or a dilemma?

In childhood, I read this story about a poor man who was gifted a small house. When he got into the house, he had an option to open a green door to another house, which could be more beautiful or not, or the opposite. But whichever choice he made, he could not reverse it.

The man chose to open the door, and he found himself in a more beautiful house. He chose the green door again  and got into an even more beautiful house again which had all the things he didn't even know he needed. That way he found himself in more pleasing situations one after the other. It went on until the 6th time when he opened the door and found himself in a dilapidated waste land. Now there was no green door. And there was no option to go back. The man was stuck.

In the childhood, the story had the outlined moral that our greed will lead us to be discontent with our current circumstances and it may lead us to lose what we have.

But I read it in the shade of a dilemma.

As much as there is a chance of you discovering a wasteland on the other side of the green door, there is also a danger of settling for far less for yourself if you stay where you are. I would argue that greed is understandable in being a  product of not knowing what you want and hoping that something out there is going to make you happy. In the sequence of events that were happening to the poor man, it was not that unreasonable for him to expect that things will keep improving as he kept knocking on one door after another. I don't blame him. There is no smarter way to choose better.

   

 If we are to face dilemmas like this frequently and the questions such as what we want and how much of that we want, are going to be confusing and uncertain as hell, in some of those situations, another factor arises.  Sometimes , something in our life may be so absolutely, glaringly, mind numbingly wrong that we may still determine with a reasonable degree of certainty that it is NOT right for us. We can rule out, if we cannot rule in. We can venture and risk everything . It will be a respectable and authentic journey even if it leads to barren wastelands and even if to others, it may appear as a cautionary tale.

She is touching her hair as she talks to you. When she is similing, her eyes smile along with her.

You know a lot about how to interpret body language. You know she is very likely to be flirting with you.

I point this out to her, just the fact that she touches her hair too often. She becomes self conscious.

''Am i touching my hair too often? Lol, It's just a habit I guess. I need something to play with always. Until you mentioned it to me, I didn't even realize I do that. ''

I guess sometimes we can be reading too much into something. As for her, maybe I have created an unnecessary amount of strain around a casual habit, or maybe i was right and she is just bluffing now. How will i know!

Dee and Mee are playing poker at the table. Despite the mastered art of keeping a poker face, a sense of agitation emanates from Mee's tapping foot under the table.

Dee is quick to pick it up. He thinks that Mee is in trouble. He doesn't have a good set of cards on him anymore.

Feeling confident in his assumption, Dee makes his next move and to his great disappointment , it becomes clear to him that he was wrong in his assumption.

That or maybe Mee had reversed his natural body language to confuse him. How do you ever know!

The problems with trying to figure people out by what you know of human psychology is that when you try, there are three possibilities:

What you interpret is true.

What you interpret, lets say a habit or behavior which is known to mean something in Psychology, is just a casual or benign habit of an individual that may be nothing to them, may conceal no hidden trauma or inner motivations, and may just be a force of habit they picked up randomly.

What you interpret is wrong because people may reverse their natural reaction/body language to fool you. ( This in turn, can be done for both bad and harmless intentions. An example of latter is that women usually learn to communicate messages in implicit communication instead of explicit communication, which can be misleading to someone who puts emphasis only on overt communication. And many a times, in social situations, all of us are expected to display emotions contrary to what we may be feeling. E.g : masking a sense of unease about someone's victory when your own spirit is down in the dumps.)

The odds of being wrong in your interpretation are great anyway. As long as a living, breathing human being exists in the confines of his own body separte from you, you will not have access to all his feelings, thoughts, aspirations.

Your efforts in this regard will be exasperating, even if they do not lead you to the wrong conclusion which they often will.

There are harms to overdiagnosing things just as there are harms in underdiagnosing them. Just as there is harm in being manipulated and fooled for a long time, there is a significant degree of harm in reading too much into people's actions and speech. Just as you may sentence yourself to a life of unhappiness, by being around people who are secretly manipulating you , you may just deeply hurt and lose the people who never had the malignant intentions you attributed to them or sensed about them.

Then what do you do? Do you just give in to the grey area where you trust these living, breathing, bags of lies?

No, you understand that they cannot be trusted. But you keep an open mind. You don't try to figure them out that much. That's all.

To me this is the concept of vulnerability. By keeping your mind and heart open, you expose yourself to people who are there to get you , but it is only by keeping your heart open and the possibilities alive, that you also meet the people who give you the only true connection in your life.

The answer to these confusions, no one can approach with certainty. But accepting this uncertainty is better than attempting to approach certainty for the sake of it. Certainty is an experience we are not allowed.

There is no option except to let people be.

Ok, so this post better be very specific:

If you are not good at something, you treat it as a mountain-like task, but then you do it and sometimes the task is not mountain-size. It's a mound-size task, and it was the hesitation that built the tiny bricks of doubt into this insurmountable barrier that has now begun to define your identity.

You kind of have to break free from it. Sometimes, it is not the task itself, but the decision to break free from it, which is the decisive  important step to take. 

I feel this way because of my long-standing hesitation around the procedures which are done in internal medicine. 

It's usually said that a man's aptitude is judged by how he treats his inferiors. I'd disagree. Pity and sympathy are relatively ''easier'' sentiments to have. As for dealing with the superiors at any given point of life, it is even harder to form an opinion about  a person based on how 'nice' he is around the boss. In that situation, the lines between flattery and genuine warmth or inspiration are usually blurred.
  What i find to be the true indicator of a person's character, is how he deals with his peers. It is the single most important thing that reveals to me how the person sees his competition. Peers are the people we are most likely to be hostile with, or jealous of. Competition is not easy to handle ; when you are not getting any benefit out of a relation, or it is not clear who has the lead, the space between you is a potential battlefield. Many lives have been spent on this battlefield, it has existed between the best scientists of the world, the biggest celebrities ( of course) , the business tycoons of all times ; it has existed between nations on a large scale, and on the small scale  it has manifested its potential in the hidden fact that some people are best friends only as long as they feel secure in the same level of achievement ( or lack thereof)
  Some unlucky people take this imagined competition down to their grave, in their mind they never win. It is unfortunate but not unnatural. When you find yourself in a net like this, you must break it with conscious effort.
  Some of the best people are those who are cognizant of their own shortcomings. We may always feel trivializing emotions. But if your jealousy stays YOUR jealousy and does not become a blame against the other person for achieving something you could not, you are an exceptional person.

I want to escape the gloom of the night, from the memories of the beautiful times and the ghosts that have now been left in place. I want to see the black fade into blue, and the orange to smear the horizon like the saffron between the parted hair of a new bride. I want the sounds of the morning to claim my senses, which have barely been surviving on the sad lullabies of the night stars. I want the trip back into the past with the horn of the school van, the noisy silencer of the milk man's motorcycle, the sound of getting up, of rustling sheets, the incredible relaxation of stretching and the tempting comfort of the final yawn, the indistinct smell of food in the air , the sight of the morning walkers choosing to prolong their lives , or controlling as many variables of it as there are in their hands, the people waking up to a new day at work which they possibly hate, the people fearing for their voices to be drowned by their superiors, the people for whom the corporate culture is like an ill-fitting glove and those who have eased into their roles as if it  was all they meant to do since the first time they were asked what they wanted to be, though they must not have said it, the sight of the first door opening into a deserted office , the first spore of work politics finding its way to the toxic air as one door opens too late, the mother whose motherhood has seeped into her love, life arranging cutlery at the dining table, the father being the love child of his own wife , basking in adoration before pasting a smile on his face for a good part of the day, helping people with their crises of abundance at banks , the children who are too young to know that the hard things in life, like waking up early are among the right things to do, the adolescents taking the liberties of being given direction in life for the last few years without knowing it,  the knocks at the door, the buzz of the morning, the conundrum of the beginning,reassuring me that the cycle of the life that ceased to exist for some hours continues.
It's just some ticks of clocks away.

The right of being angry

What hurts me about lonely people and orphans is that they may get the basic facilities , even a fixed amount of love and care by a state institution or an NGO. But they don't have anyone to be angry with.
  How many times in life, despite keeping our emotions in check, we sometimes , wrongly , become a little mean to the person whose love we can count on, only to be reassured. We want, i'd say even NEED that moment of weakness that displays the raw human-ness of our bad side;  To be loved despite that.

From SOMEONE, we want the love which is biased in our favor. We get that from parents , our life partners,  or our friends sometimes. We'd be fooling ourselves if we said we always wanted justice in the love and attention we received. We want to be favorites for someone. We want some eyes to scan just for us at the school gate. Our needs are far more than just physical.Sometimes, just sometimes we want immunity for our behavior. And the people who love us can forget about being right sometimes:  To let us be.

Who does it for the people who don't  have anyone ?
  A child throws tantrums now and then , and the mother may admonish him/ her but doesn't let anyone else do it.
A child gets a scolding for his wrong behavior but the parent makes up for nothing but the feeling that the child has, when the storm has passed. For someone getting equal care, the punishment is just that , a punishment. No one tip toes to their room in night to watch them sleep.

. .  If you don't have that love, that shelter  above your head , anyone can say anything and you have to grow a thick callus where your skin is. And you have to become a fighter. You have to be what world perceives as selfish.
Because when there is no one else looking for your interests, you HAVE to look for them or be run over by the stampede. Perhaps it is the only survival choice in many circumstances.
 
  Usually in life we are in a defence mode and we don't let anyone be cross with us. It happens a lot with me too. I am just cognizant of the fact that I am at a certain advantage. And that my standard of 'goodness' may not apply to everyone else. Maybe i was better loved than they ever were. I find it to be an important reminder.

Nostalgia

The reason why we don't do most of the stuff we used to in 90s or before that is because we know better. The reason we are not rewinding cassettes with pencils is because we can now fast forward a track with a tap of a finger , the reason we are not taking the guests who come over to stay to all the major attractions in the city is because there is more work to do, the reason we are not eating nargisi koftay with home made naans for lunch is because women are working too , and that's good and just not for the women? Why ? Because Pakistan has had an insane dependency ratio all this while. It is a society where a man has to break his back to bear the financial burden of  a large family and he has been forgetting to live life , caught up in the worries from marrying away his sisters to his daughters ,  and now it's changing and women are working, affording a living for themselves, finding a voice , it is obviously good for them because being a housewife , you have NO security , and this should change but until it does and the woman who stays home to cook and clean gets as much appreciation as her partner who works outside, has job benefits , perks , security and most importantly financial independence, home making will not be as coveted a job as a career in a field of your choice.
And we have moved on from Ainak wala jinn because mercifully we have far better technology , plots , and myriad of advancements in movies and dramas. We have avengers and superheroes and we have had Harry potter!!!!!  We are reminiscent about older tunes and ignoring that there is still soulful music being produced, we just have a crazy number of options.
From having a tv set which aired 3 channels and the transmissions which ended on 12 am we have access to the worldwide network of private tv channels and it may be strange , overwhelming , less simple but by no objective means is it worse. Only better.

Nostalgia is a trap and life is lived forwards. Instead of living yours reminiscing about what you had in a small fraction of your life , make new memories with this time and you will have some genuine things to share on a dinner table 40 years from now which stir excitement instead of regret over a long lost yesterday.  ( which is not the point of living in the moment but it a true reflection of the fact that nostalgia makes you lazy initially and boring eventually. Don't have that outlook! ) 

Nostalgia is a trap and it paints things to be sweeter than they were. I literally miss the times I hated when I was in them so wherever you are , you are here NOW for a reason and don't be insipid. And you will even miss this time you are here doing nothing but remembering the past because perhaps you miss ALL the times you have been in except the grief periods. Perhaps nostalgia is the tax you pay for not living each moment of your life fully ! Don't borrow from the past that it creeps up on your present .

Over the course of few days , I have run into some experiences that have marked my psyche in a tangible way. I have concurred that a person of exceptional talent or insight , if he/ she does not keep track of the abilities and uniqueness of their experience , it is very likely for them to be swallowed by the majority, which I wouldn't call unthinking , but their preoccupations  would be decidedly different. The likely possibility for such a person is that they would carve out an identity in antagonism, and that identity does not serve the creative or inquisitive nature of that mind. I see it as settling for a lot less.
We are all time bound for our existence here and as we age, the ego trips start giving away one by one .  A truly wise person would then have to jump past the pitfall of instant gratification, the compliments , the easy praise , the validation which is one upload away , the agreements without discourse, for the things which actually add value to life beyond the instantaneous happiness of comfortable choices. Otherwise, the person  stands to lose the distinction that he has from others. The is the test for intellectuals of the new age.

I remember being awed by embryology when I was studying it in medical school. How a baby slowly gets all his wrappings and stuffing from his mother and lives inside her, becomes her appendage , listening to her, feeding off of her nutrients , and then is born through a process which is the most painful one that a human being endures in  natural course of life. Mothers are fiercely protective of their children and this can lead to fierce insecurity on their part when their children, their flesh and blood , begin to share their life with someone else. Just as children are conditioned to look at parents in a way that entirely disregards their individuality or persona that is independent of them , the children. Mothers are conditioned to look at the outsiders in their children's life as hostile agents until proven otherwise. In some people , we look for signs to be displeased with them and such is the case when children make new friends , choose life partners.
With this , I don't intend to lend legitimacy to the obnoxious and controlling behaviour of mothers and their interference in their children's married life but I do understand their reasons. And It makes them more humane.
We are all capable of great biases and oversights , and we are not usually as generous and kind as we wish to believe. If we struggle to understand people beyond the superficial layer of their daily platitudes with us , it will reveal them to be fairly vulnerable  and similar  if not easily bearable.

On raining and science

I was very young and it was a very hot summer in the place I lived. I wanted it to rain badly. Rain anywhere is a delight, but in those lush green, wide lawns and courtyards that circled our single storey houses , a downpour came to become one of the most amazing experiences of childhood. We had swings in our courtyard and you can only experience the thrill of riding one in rain if you have done it. We made paper boats before we knew it was called origami and it was a beautiful sight when rain restored color to all the surroundings. So I wanted rain really bad. One of my friends told me to kill an emmet, hang it by the thread on the clothesline, It would make rain. This trick was confirmed by two other girls who swore by it . So I did just that. But it didn't rain. It gave me something to think about.
The very next week we read about the water cycle in our science class. And I had an enlightening moment. I knew something about this made sense that hanging an emmet by a thread didn't do. It actually described the whole process. I went home, took the biggest tub I could find , filled it with water upto the brim , put it in the middle of our garden and waited for it to evaporate and make rain. As luck would have it , it rained.
-Ammi had made pakoras.  I thought I could say it always rains when she made pakoras but somehow i couldn't.
- She also complained that it rains always when she hangs the clothes to dry. I knew something was off about this observation. Rain couldn't possibly bother about all that.
In my own little, childish way I had learnt some things namely ;
- "CORELATION ISNT CAUSATION"
A concept that many  adults in my life still mix up all the time
-  CAUSE PRECEDES EFFECT. Rain led to Ammi making pakoras. Not vice versa.
-  CONFIRMATION BIAS. (This took me a while to understand). When you are really sure of your beliefs, you seek only to confirm them and in doing that you may overlook facts.( A tub full of water wouldn't have caused rain , it was too small a surface area. In my own mind though , I had proved the water cycle )
On the other hand , if conditions of your experiment aren't accurate, you cannot possibly testify a hypothesis. Had it not rained, it wouldn't have meant that water cycle is wrong. It would simply have meant I didn't use a tub that was large enough.

اخلاق پرور اور اخلاق باختہ معاشرے میں بہت فرق ہے۔ ایک شخصی آزادی کو ترجیح دیتا ہے۔ ایک خاندانی نظام کو انسان پر فوقیت دیتا ہے۔ ایک انسان کو اٹھاتا ہے۔ دوسرا اس کو دباتا ہے۔ ایک لوگوں کے بہکے ہوے رویوں کو قبول کرتا ہے۔ دوسرا ان کو چھپانے میں بہت فخر محسوس کرتا ہے۔  ایک میں انسان جو کرتا ہے ڈنکے کی چوٹ پر کرتا ہے ، دوسرے میں منافقت کے درپردہ۔ ایک دوسرے کی بے راہ روی کو اپنے اقدار کی درستگی کا ثبوت سمجھتا ہے۔ دوسرا انفرادیت کی نفی کو ایک بنیادی جرم تصور کرتا ہے۔  ایک کی غلطیوں کی نشاندہی کی جاے تو وہ اسے توہین سمجھتا ہے اور آواز اٹھانے والے کو ذلیل کر دیتا ہے ۔  دوسرا  اس بات کا ادراک رکھتا ہے کہ بہتری کی گنجایش ہر جگہ موجود ہے۔
  ایک ضدی ہے انا پرست ہے۔ اہک آوارہ ہے بے لگام ہے۔

I get angry with my father for the smallest things. I am not so nice when he calls me 'tum', when he takes my name instead of using a term of endearment, when he doesn't look at me lovingly. Without there being a need to communicate this , he understands it later and always makes up for it. I never tell him, just become a little bit detached , give him his medicine hurriedly , don't joke as often for an hour or so and keep escaping his sight. He always figures it out. We can't stop bickering.
Every fathers day , and on every event when his shadow protects me everywhere , I feel so sad about the people who don't experience this anymore. We find some people selfish. But the way I look at it , somebody without parents HAS to be selfish . It is a matter of survival for them. We don't have to be selfish when we know someone is out there , guarding our interests , being selfish 'for' us. Being selfish is a necessity when you don't have anything to fall back on. Living without a parent matures you in a way that is incomprehensible for those who have the privilege to take their presence for granted.

Mirage

I love you but I will not get you the diamond ring you saw on someone else's finger . I won't  chase mirages for you because that will only feed your agony. Because the moment you are there,  you will realize there is no water, it's the hot sand , that,  like the mediocrity of this chase, keeps your feet restless. And your truth is never in reflection of others' dreams.
  Perhaps , the people for whom we harbor an envy, or malicious intent are the ones we think, are capable of great happiness. People look at it as a bad quality , but envy , to me is an almost innocent emotion. As children we are openly envious. With time we hide our feelings because between the moment when we cried at the top of our voice, contorting our face and calling for attention for the last time and the first time we cried in silent sobs , hiding our face  in our hands , we all grew up. And growing up , to a great extent , is about keeping appearances.
   So what to do about a heart that is intent on deriving pain from what others have instead of seeking happiness in what it has itself.  The people who are satisfied with ordinary explanations find it sufficient to hate the people they are envious of . But for the one for whom the desire for truth is greater than the desire for false comfort , envy is an affliction, a known enemy, and an ugly reflection in the mirror. No amount of philosophy can talk you out of it. Because competing against others has had a biological imperative.  Of which envy is the child. 
Perhaps in those moments this realization is important that The happiness you get from being a victor in a competition is only transitory. The next morning, the defeated has another chance to shine, and there is no end to the competitors as your eyes scan the horizon of possibilities. So is it worthwhile to be consumed by the desire to better ? When it is not even a realistic end. This futile competition that consumes us , can only be beaten , by not being a part of it. By realising at every moment what you are here to contribute , by being happy without measuring yourself up against others in society's eyesight.  Only then can you create , be genuine , inspire , and do justice to the gift of your existence that is bound to wilt otherwise.

I was always enchanted by the brides at weddings. I would steal glances at them through the keyhole of the powder room when they hadn't yet come on stage , sit close to them if I got a chance , play with their bangles , let their perfume rub off on me. I didn't know the price they had to pay for their moments of splendor.   I didn't know it was a thin line they had to walk. I didn't know about the effort that went into it. The fear, the emotional stress that came with starting something new , the fear of transition , the knowledge of living in a different place from then onwards , the uncertainty of  having no permanent place they could belong to freely . I didn't know being overwhelmed is not always a good feeling. The most unwelcome piece of knowledge that time gave me ;  I didn't know that beautiful was not just what gave you delight in the first look , whether or not someone was beautiful was a decision that was arrived at after intense scrutiny, i didnt know that just by being there , just by being present , they were primarily being judged for how beautiful they looked compared to the groom , to the previous brides , to the most beautiful girl in all the weddings of family. I didn't know they were being measured up every moment as they stood in the limelight.   To me they were all wonderful , and special. The kind of delightful that puts a full stop next to any thoughts.  I have never seen a bride who was not beautiful. I have never seen a bride who was not exotic.  I have never felt the need to pay heed to the variables of their appearance .
Can one day in someone's life be free from competition ? Can we let that stay between two people ?

What a beautiful thing it is that there is no hierarchy in Science. By its virtue , science does not admit any class system. It is based on objectivity . And when we expect that of humans , most of the negative attributes that come with being a person of today go into sideline. There have been rivalries and there have been frauds. There have been wars for patents. But those were personal shortcomings of a limited few, the pleasure a mind seeks from its true pursuit is beyond any worldly reward. A true scientist is beyond all that consumes the rest of the world . Today we are thankful to every mind that contributed to the body of science , without any bias.

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A part of doing creative arts , or science is that you accept the uniqueness of your discoveries and creations. They both had different approach towards matters of significance, Sigmund Freud couldn't have been Einstein. Shakespeare and Keats have their separate place. We all know it as something as basic as an intuition that comparing them is not only absurd, it is unnecessary, it is not a thing. Why does an average person hold himself up to different standards and comparisons and feel little ?
When you are following the crowd , when you are chasing the same things as everyone else , when you are not introducing your own unique perspective in the world , all you are left with is the same milestones and tags as everyone else. That is where you derive your self worth. You are a part of that competition because you have chosen that life.

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The preservation of Aha moments.  And why I can't ever tell anyone my favorite movie , book or song.

So you are just walking in a street , looking at the trees , wondering about their names , and something catches your eye and at that exact moment , you feel that your mind just 'lights up'. Or you are scrolling through your Facebook feed , and thinking different things about different posts and suddenly you feel you have an all encompassing opinion that totally clears some concept in your mind ! And you are changing stations on car radio and suddenly your ears pick up a beautiful tune you remember so passionately all of a sudden and you think wow this song was my absolute favorite ! These are moments of spontaneous genuineness. This is what inspiration is. Something that is not a result of the efforts of your conscious mind. If you are asked to write down ten of your favorite songs , unless you have already done this exercise , you will start thinking , start backtracking , you will exert yourself and eventually you will produce a list of songs that you like very much.  But I am willing to bet that you will feel something is missing.  You are suffering from retrieval failure which is because our brain does not catalog the list of our favorite songs , moments , videos , thoughts. It's all jumbled up unlike the side effects of parasympathetic drugs that you once memorized in series. So you lose hold of that. And it's  kind of scary , at least for me personally. There are so many interesting things happening in different cultures and different languages that I will never have access to. And to lose your own important discoveries ! Nooooo. I want to remember which particular line Neil De Grass Tyson spoke which soothed my heart and lit my brain up at the same time. And I want to remember the thought I had when I saw the courteous Chinese couple who held the door open for me.
I don't want to lose my aha moments and have to rediscover the truths of life. Or concepts which are truth to me.

The solution is simple , to write down each important and illuminating thought as you have it.  And to anyone to whom I could not suggest a movie ,or a book.
I had to take time to think.

'Pamper yourself'
Yes. But pampering can not only be done with spending money on things for an instant dopamine rush , in a capitalist economy with a crises of overabundance. Sorting out the things that you already have , and not just the things , all the matters , all the relations , all the ambitions , all the junk. It is a meditative task of introspection. I believe every good change in your life starts from taking stock of things, not hoarding more. If your threshold for buying something is that you buy anything which 'looks good' then you are trapped in an unrelenting web of consumerism , currently with an access to only a fraction of a percentage to everything the world has to offer in terms of material goods. In Malaysia , I have seen highly customised goods. I saw a pillow that had arm holes , for you to rest your head on it as you sat on a desk. I have never needed it. I don't need the travel pillow , it's just an additional thing to carry. I don't need a folding machine. I don't need the latest model of a phone that comes on the market. I use 10 percent of the things in own. And it's not an estimate but abject calculation.
It's a beautiful time for us to be alive. I know it's far from ideal with the wealth concentrated in some circles of the society and the poor not having access to clean water in some parts of the world. But without even taking the topic in that direction , for the matters of personal satisfaction , well being , and comfort. An average person of today needs to sit with himself / herself and question what he/She really needs. Perhaps malls are not the place you go for fun , perhaps they are somewhere you go for need. And YOU need to draw a line. Maybe you will be affluent enough to afford all the riches for all of your life, but you will never get anywhere if this is the focus of your life. Whatever we pursue in our life , we have an end point for it in our mind , a milestone , achieving what , we think will make us happy. Or there's some point at which we think we will do justice to it. With consumerism , there is an endless horizon. The market will always be flooded with newer , more customised goods and updated versions of what you are dying to have at the moment. Their profit is ensured by our obsession with having more , a behavior which reflects our oversight and has no productive outcome that will make us feel good some hours from 'buying that thing'.