Tuesday 26 June 2012

communication, huh?

I can relate to the frustration of talking to a person about something but seem to not get through. The feeling can be described as when two people talk with each other, but they are having two totally different conversations. The reason for this can possibly be attribute to a misalignment in communication between the two.

Communicating is one of the ways we interact with people around us. The mode of communication we use most is that of speaking a language. We talk and communicate with the people around us easily by this mode which we take alot of the time for granted. We feel that we have an adequate hold onto a language so that we may communicate clearly with another person. This is true when we talk with people around us and the type of people we grew up with as they learnt the same expressions and meanings of most of the same words we know, but this may not be true everywhere.

In many countries we find there are a multitude of languages spoken. From this many languages, we all learn to speak one of the many common languages from our teachers and communities and as such, we learn the understanding of the language from them.

It is widely known that there are many variations of languages all around the world, and thus the interpretation of it as well. Let's use English, since thats the language i understand and communicate in. There are many ways people use the English they know and tie it up with their understanding of things around them. Eg, a person who learns English in America, may be able to adequately communicate in general terms with another from South Africa, though the same understanding might not be appreciated when a South African would make an English reference to something specific to him.

This can be extended in general to all people and when we try to communicate assuming that the next person understands us clearly. This can be a grave mistake since we may say something which should mean good, though it can be interpreted wrongly.

We all know that in all out relationships, we can say things and they get misinterpreted. This is common and can happen to anyone. What we need to exercise and realize is that we are susceptible to it and make ourselves aware. This will help us communicate more clearly and understand people better.


Thursday 21 June 2012

when you are down

When you are down, sadness covers you like a blanket. Looking for all the possible reasons you are in this situation, all the possible reasons you may have missed and overlooked. The first of the many that come up may comprise of feelings of feeling bad for yourself, thinking you are the center of everything that has gone wrong. The feelings of everyone against you, or perhaps that the universe is acting opposing you in all forms and ways.

In life, scientifically or religiously, people feel sad and depressed a lot of the time as a reaction to the way things around them proceed and develop. It is a fact in life and we each deal with these thing in our own ways. I do feel that different people can handle different thing in their own ways and has a capacity of how much they can manage with.

Being sad and depressed may feel like you heart in sinking, drowning in some kind of darkness and may also be associated with hurt and pain emotionally. We spend a lot of time during these feelings lost in thought and memories, trying to recall our steps and make sense of the reason things happen to be as they are. People who have gentle hearts may cry and try to get away from everything, while there are also some people who are almost not phased by it at all, though they may keep to themselves.

The way we react to situations and the place we allows ourselves to be put in is the cause for most of our sadness. We do not necessarily know before hand how situations would turn out and the effect it would have on us, but what we can learn to do is learn to deal with it.

We deal with sadness if different way such as forgetting it, or ignoring it and hoping it to go away. A lot of psychologists say that we should face our worries to best solve them and move on, but certainly one of the way i found is that 'time heals'. When we are sad, we shouldn't just give in, since there are so many things that we overlook and take for granted. We can spend sometime taking in our situations and also remember all the things for which we are fortunate for.

A person who overcomes despair, i feel after it is overcome, they come out stronger than when they went in. We learn more about ourselves and capacity during these kind of times. We also learn to appreciate our times of need and appreciate it when others are there as well. When we are sad and depressed, we need to stop, think and make a resolve to carry on, since life goes on, willing or not, so should we.

Without facing despair and sadness, we wouldn't be able to really face reality. I think that a person can work harder towards their goals after they are faced with difficulty and appreciate why they are working towards something.


Monday 18 June 2012

distinct CHANGES

The way i see it, i feel that change happens constantly in small increments which we don't really pay much heed to. We would realize and appreciate better how much change has happened when we reflect back to a point in our lives and compare it to where we are at the present. This can be seen easily when we look at pictures of ourselves from our past and compare them to us now.. some of us perhaps changed little, and some more dramatically, but in the end we don't 'feel' this change as much.

In our lives our bodies change and at the same time so does our minds. We sometimes change our minds as often as we change our clothes or even more frequent than that even! There are somethings for which we choose not to change our minds about and that is because we can be stubborn at times and even when we realize that our understanding may be erroneous.

When we find that we question things in our minds, it does not mean we do not believe in things but it more shows that we are trying to find a better understanding for what we choose to believe. These questions might not always be in our minds as we might take certain things for granted, such as if we believe that we are created and divinity, then when we ask ourselves of the concept of evolution, we might find ourselves questioning things about what we believe. It does not mean it isn't true what we believe, but shows that we are open to think about it and find a better appreciation for what we think about it.

Our understanding and the way we learn to interpret things in our lives are determined by the way we choose to think. We can be rational and figure that things always have answers which only makes sense to us. We can be intuitive and think of situations and how things that don't make sense should fit with us. To carry this out successfully, i feel that we need to realize that we are expected to change all the time. We should be open to think and question the way we do things and the way we carry out ourselves.

Knowing that a person can change might seem as being unstable, but i feel that a person becomes more understandable and can make solid decisions about things. They can be fair in their thoughts as well as being fair to their beliefs.

Change the way you think and try to understand that you would never understand everything. We should do as much as we have capacity for, but lets not criticize when other people have questions, but rather help them (and yourselves) in understanding better. Change for the better.

Wednesday 13 June 2012

a virtue called patience

In all the things we learn in life, one of the lessons we keep coming across is patience. Patience is related to time, as we know that not everything can get done instantly. We practice patience when we have to, though at the same time we want certain things to go by faster than they can and this is when we are being hasty or rather impatient.

In all the things we do, we learn and appreciate things. We learn to savor the things we yearn for and rush through the things we find as an annoyance. There are many proverbs which got to do with patience and its mostly about how virtuous it is.

I relate a the value of patience to calmness and the picture with a serene setting. By just thinking of patience,we physically express things slower and spend more time on these thoughts. Our mind works as such, that they work and calculate somethings to understand it and this process needs time. Some more than others.

Methods used from ancient times to think about stuff can be found to be all different types of meditation. The main reasons for carrying out a meditation is to get clarity of mind and thoughts. Meditation always involves a lot of patience to get the required results.

In day to day lives we come across lots of things which test our patience such as selfish people, taxi drivers, incompetent people and even evident lazy people. We get annoyed and act instinctively getting angry and upset. As Ive mentioned before, we can choose how to react when we can clearly decide what matters more to us, example: when a taxi happens to cut you off, instead of upsetting your mood and getting upset (doesn't change the fact that the taxi cut you off) you can choose to concentrate on other things that matter more.

Virtues are qualities which determine the quality of the lives we choose to live. Although there are many people in our world who don't have the same virtuous views in life, it does not mean we shouldn't. I feel that there is always a way and a reason for things that happen and as such, when we choose to be patient about things, we can learn to make the right choices, not only for ourselves but the people around us as well.

Ive read up on of the ways people meditate and found an interesting article on the art on bonsai which talks of how, while doing that, we learn to look at things differently and we would never look at certain things the same way. Eg. when we do bonsai, we learn to look at the details in the trees and look for the qualities in everything around us. We relate this to everything else, and even to the things people usually pay no extra heed to. In this same way we can learn to appreciate and look at things differently.

Practice patience and learn of things you do not know of.


Friday 8 June 2012

Makes life interesting

Who can relate when i say that the internet connection always seems a tad too slow, or that why can our phones not do as much as we want them to do (even though we do not know how to use half the features)?

Although we are in a place where we have many technologies which make our lives simpler and easier to live than previously, we sometimes get caught up and end up looking at small things which we understand to criticize on. mostly we fail to appreciate the difference that it makes to our lives and we seem to not be satisfied. As i mentioned before, this is indeed human nature as we always strive for whats better. Where we fail though is that most of us have a lazy attitude towards things and feel its fine that we know of the shortfalls and that someone else would look at it.

We fail to understand that unless we make a change to doing things or put into action how we feel, then most probably everyone else feels the same. What we discover about things such as small inefficiencies, we can fix and feel better about it. If we keep complaining and decide that it is someone elses problem, we shall never  find a solution and at the same time we would always be annoyed with it until someone does something about it.

What im getting at is the fact that we sometimes feel that we are satisfied with what we know and how much we do. We feel that since we work the entire day (for our company goals) we deserve to do nothing else and that anything that isnt in our scope of work that we get paid for, is some other persons problem. Leading a life like this we can fall into a habit that will last till the day we die.

We can however change this and make a difference in our lives.We can change from leading a boring life full of complaints to one which is rather full of new concepts, ideas and ways of doing things. When we become pro active, we not only make our own lives better but at the same time the lives of those around us.

When we think we have learnt enough or we are satisfied with where we are, there is no reason for us to continue. We all have to make our lives interesting by always looking what we can do to add value and change things we feel are inadequate.

We may start fights and argue with people at times, but the reason for these sort of things may be for us to realize that some things need to change and be changed. We need to accept that nothing remains the same forever, then we shall lead an interesting life!


Wednesday 6 June 2012

level of respect

Respect. An aspect we learn of and we look for in many different ways for many different things. Respect of the knowledge we hold, respect of the people we know, respect for the value we add to a company and even respect for the amount of authority we command.

Growing, we learn that we need to respect the people around us, our surroundings as well as the thoughts and feelings of everyone. It is probably learnt by our subconscious to respect our parents from our admiration of them and the fact that they provide for us when we are at our most fragile and vulnerable state. As we learn the way of things however, we constantly push the limits and test our parents by being defiant and rebellious. It forms part of our growing up, which we will learn and appreciate better of later.

Our parents provide for us in so many ways making sacrifices and facing times of hardship, though few of us would remember the hardships as they have during the very same time. When we get older, we take it out on them, and since they are older, they know that we are growing and would also have to learn this. The take all our defiance and rebelliousness, yet they always remain our parents. We learn they are always there for us, through our bad choices and our good ones as well. The respect that they deserve, we usually only realize a bit too late most of the time and live with regret.

When at school, we take the respect we learn at home and give it to our teachers in exchange for the skills and knowledge they pass onto us. We also find friends as well as enemy's of all types. We learn to earn respect, and we learn to take respect. Our methods might not always be the nicest types, but we know what it feels like to have respect.

I feel that while earning respect or imposing it onto other people, there must always be a reason for them to do such. Real respect is found when you can really do something that is impressionable and can be looked up by others. Most people that earn respect from others freely, get it by being humble people who we can relate to. To me, a humble person should earn the most respect as they would have your best interests in consideration as well.

The most humble people in most peoples lives are their parents as they do whats best for their children in their capacities.

To have respect, is to earn it. To earn it, we need to find humility.



Monday 4 June 2012

between two covers

A place where words become places, history, images of cities and far away isolated places. A place which we know nothing of, places where there exist things we can barely imagine and the things we would never really see with our eyes or experience in our lives.

The text which lie on the pages bound between two covers can have endless possibilities. A book is a medium in which we, as a human race record things such as ideas, events and findings. As we are knowledgeable, we have ideas in our minds and we use this for calculating and computing stuff, though we do not have the capacity to remember everything or experience everything in our lifetimes.

The most efficient way of storing these many things by the human race are in books (eBooks as well). Everything from facts, to ideas, to imaginary things. We documents these things so we are able to record or thoughts and share it with the people around us. Storing and sharing of this knowledge helps us with exposing our ideas to more people over distances as well as time. When we ask questions, nobody alive might know the answers, though thinkers from another generation come across the very same questions at another point in time to solve it, then record it and share this as well.

I like to read books which are mostly fantasy since they make up things which do not, and would not exist. They are made up in the minds of the authors and and recorded and translated for us to read. We can read these type of books which opens our minds to the possibilities of understanding things which we have not experienced yet or never will. A fantasy is made entirely in our imaginations and the words in these type of books help our minds sculpt images of places and times.

By allowing the mind to think of things differently, i feel that we can leave the monotonous lifestyles that some of us find ourselves caught up in and think about things from different perspectives. The books we read directly affect us as we relate and learn from the different thing we read about. Example, if we read a book based on some Japanese samurai, we will learn about their honor and perhaps since we would then appreciate it and what it means, we may also adapt that to our lives.

With books, we can learn of experiences, cultures, thought processes and the list is endless. We can record, store and share whatever we want with them. Reading also has other effects that i find specifically. When reading, its usually in a quite place with very little distraction from the outside, so we can almost in fact be drawn into another world. Concentration and a calmness is the most distinct types of feelings i find whilst reading.

To read is to learn and as i quoted previously, we need to "seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave". So read a book, learn something and share the knowledge.


 

Friday 1 June 2012

the future we provide

When we think of things that have passed, they cannot be altered in anyway except in our minds and how we feel about them. As we know, we have the ability to remember things such as numbers, places, people and images. These type of things we store in our minds are reflect on them at other times. They make up our memories.

As humans, we can only remember and make memories of things we come into contact with and are exposed to. If we haven't had any exposure of certain things, we cannot have any understanding of their nature or existence for that matter. Since this is true, and we have a finite amount of time to be alive, we also live by memories stored by others in books, songs, drawings and nowadays all types of digital format.. Memories of sickness, hardship, difficulty, discovery and many other such things.

With this already learnt and proven (over time) memories of how our surroundings act around us, we learn and progress on what we know. Sometimes we still make mistakes even though we know what to expect and we discover again what was learnt previously on a firsthand basis.

Looking further, we can notice distinct patterns with relation to people across our worlds. Some of our technologies were different, but we all progressed in different areas. We can say that the people in Europe were the first to record history and philosophize etc, but that is what we know of what was recorded. However, we do know that the rate of learning increases exponentially over time and where we were previously, we find ourselves in a totally new situation, where we find that we can go anywhere, do what we want and the possibilities are almost endless.

Looking back we notice of the deficiencies of our past generations and the capabilities and we sometimes think what if they had what we have, what would the outcomes be? Well, i feel that is exactly what we can do. We need to make the most of what we got, and use the past as a guideline in terms of how we go ahead in life.

We need to keep searching, keep living for who knows what our future holds except for the past which we will provide them with.