"If you don’t take risks, you’ll have a wasted soul"
There is no question that email is a powerful tool for exchanging ideas and answering questions fast. But email is also motionless and leaves a lot of room for interpretation because the tone of conversation is missing.
There is a famous saying in the legal community that says: if you can whisper, don’t talk and if you can talk, don’t email!
Last Monday, I had a long conversation with one of my friends. She has this tendency to make me colonize everything I convey. The topic of our conversation was self-awareness and the importance attached to it. We were talking about how self-awareness can broadcast itself to every aspect of our personal and social life.
I think there is another layer between our personal and social life which is connected to both: our imagination. It’s such an underestimated facet of our lives because of its fancy nature. I think we would be able to know everyone much better if we could somehow dig up their imaginations (if they got one that is).
It is in our imaginations where we deliberate what we would like to have/do beyond our daily needs and wants. It’d be nice to know if we would ever think about anything that doesn’t immediately benefit us. That way we would know how self-aware, selfless, or selfish we are.
By searching thru our imaginations … we would know how far out we dream. We would know what "love" means to us beyond our emotional and physical needs, and more importantly beyond our fears. We would know if the outer calm is the reflection of inner peace. We would know if we are passionate or passive, growing or grown, fulfilled or foiled.
– I love cooking. Specially slow-cooking when you spend hours in the kitchen
– I was drafted by a professional soccer team when I was 15 years old
– I have lost 3 best friends so far. They are all in the better place. Sad but true …
– I have an Independent Filmmaker (producer) diploma from Hollywood Film Institute
– I don’t like white truffles. I don’t know why they are so expensive
– I want to have four children – all girls
– My dad says "My great grandfather was Russian". I don’t believe him … it’s yet to be proven 🙂
What to do when people you consider friends continuously rail you with impressions of insincerity?
Friendships are the byproduct of human-beings being stuck to live together. The most crucial element of a friendship is "trust". If there is no trust there could be no relationship of any sort.
Human nature has a huge tendency towards aggression and stepping over the boundaries. That’s a fact. Period! Responsible parents control their kids by the virtue of proportional reward and punishment, healthy societies require governing laws to control the public in order to keep them honest, but what controls the aggression and insincerity in a mutually-governed friendship where there is no statement of superiority?
The answer is "Manners". Manners are our awareness of the feelings of others. In friendships, there is no tangible tool to control the other party’s behavior, so level-headedness and balanced behavior become individuals’ responsibilities. Believe it or not, in modern days your friendships are the only venues available to you to realize whether or not you’d be a fair, just, and adequate queen if you were born a princess. Tough luck! You were not born a princess but at least you can choose to be sincere and unpretentious.
It’s a simple and random act of kindness that can touch people and make the world a better place. Everyone seems so busy trying to be the biggest, best, and the most famous for what? The world is always trying to prove to each other who is superior. The simple act of a hug knows no barriers and the only language it speaks is love. Hugging doesn’t discriminate. Stop and give a hug this holiday season and all year long. You will see what a difference a hug makes. I’m convinced my dream will come true one day!
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams … – Eleanor Roosevelt
Hug you all,
In Seattle, fall and winter are breakup time. Almost everyone breaks up with his/her mate specially if they have been dating more than a couple of years. People go thru such cliché relationships not knowing why they got into it in the first place and they get out of it not knowing what just happened.
They tend to call these hormonally-charged emotions "Love". They break up saying such tacky Hollywood phrases like "I love you but I’m not in love with you". It makes me puke when I see how Seattleites abuse such strong and profound word like "Love".
Having read another article about stages of love, I tried to document my observations about the whole "Love" situation. This is "Love" the way I see it:
1- Falling in Love: In the beginning the world is great. The sun is shining. Couples love each other because they make each other Feel good. Accomplishments are considered huge even if the guy’s job is flipping burgers. Flaws are cute even if the girl has an attitude bitchier than Courtney Love.
2- Being in Love: The accepted rule is that Giving to each other, makes each person happy. So couples give little gifts to each other at this stage. They invent stupid cute names for each other like "Boomi" or "Parpar". They love each other for who they are not how they feel.
3- Expecting Love: They feel safe, protected, secure, content. They are not afraid to reveal their vulnerabilities to each other. So they Expect each other to understand or guess certain things without communication. They have come to expect certain actions, reaffirmations, and validations.
4- Hiding from Love: One withdraws from the other, forming a impenetrable wall of protection from the pain s/he feels. The pain and hurt one feels that one gave of one’s love so freely, and did not have it neither validated nor appreciated.
5- Falling Out of Love: One’s heart is heavy and empty. S/he feels betrayed, hurt, resentful. The sun has stopped shining. S/he has fallen out of love.
There is a proverb that says "men fall in love thru eyes, and women fall in love thru ears". Regardless of the gender and who falls in love how, keeping a relationship is the art of those little touches that not many people have. In my view, long-lasting relationships are the ones where couples hang in the cycle of "Being in Love" and "Expecting Love". If one gets close to the stage of Hiding Love from another, it’s all over.
Hey Ashley: you want a long-lasting love? Hang in there, don’t cut-and-run from "Boomi" …
Science is a matter of repeatable evidence. Science is not the only form of knowledge. For instance, poetry is knowledge, human cravings are knowledge.
Reasoning faith says "Don’t accept everything and you have to question". One of the things you have to do in dealing with faith is to know that you don’t know all that much. If it’s god, you don’t know and if you know it’s not god. What we know about god is symbolic, it’s a matter of partial revelation, and partial knowledge. The time will come when the things we know will not worth anything … everything will disappear, the knowledge, the prophesy, the hope will all disappear and nothing will be left but love. About the only thing we can be really sure about god, is love. Faith on the other hand is the matter of trying to cope with mystery. (Garry Wills – 11/30/2006)
I vividly remember the fall of 1998 when I was walking back to my condominium from Indigo bookstore (Canadian version of Barnes and Nobles) on Yonge street (the longest street in the world) in Toronto. I was deep in my thoughts, thinking about my career. The main question on my mind was “Where the hell do I want to see myself in five years?”
I was passionately enjoying my job in the IT department of an investment company back then. The problem was I was involved in everything including IP networking, Database, programming, OS, and everything else. But I knew for a fact that I could not go far by lacking concentration and focus.
I finally made a decision thru a process of elimination. I knew I didn’t want to be and infrastructure person so that immediately ruled out IP networking and to some extent OS. I however did love data movement and transformation in applications. So I made a decision to be a data guy because I thought the necessity (and hence the demand) for data management has always been there and will never go away.
To my own surprise I was right. “Surprise” because I’ve never predicted anything that came out right. Or better said, I’ve always learned by making mistakes. However in this case and as the internet is going thru its versions (1.0, 2.0, and now 3.0) it is becoming more and more about data.
Web 1.0: I have some data let me show you.
Web 2.0: I have some data, you have some data, let’s share it with each other thru soap.
Web 3.0: I have gigantic amount of data. My application can navigate thru it and do the thinking for your application.
I know this is too much simplicity but there is some veracity in it.
Relatively Speaking 