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Could you imagine a day when you wouldn’t expect others to behave according to your rules- none of your rules?
A day when you wouldn’t think less of anyone who don’t follow any of your rules – no matter how important you think those rules are?
Can you imagine a day when you would see all your rules as guidelines and allow yourself to bend one just a little bit?
Could that day be today?
No Comments - Categories: Life
How often do you catch yourself just spending time, doing things that don’t need to be done and that don’t add anything new?
It’s no checking facebook or twitter, it’s refreshing and rechecking facebook and twitter again, after you checked it for 10 times already in the last 10 minutes.
It’s not seeing TV, it is staying in front of the TV even if everything that is being broadcasted doesn’t interest you, or you saw it already and are not really interested in viewing it again.
It’s not reading a book, it is looking at the book as if reading it while your mind travels trough time and space, to what was or was not, or to what can or can’t be.
But, the true is that there is nothing else you could be doing with your time, with your life – that’s you.
At least until you find the one rule that you think you can’t break and that is holding you – and you go and break it. At least until you find the one person that you need to get to and tell her/him to go pound sand. At least until you find the one thing that you would really love to do and you do it. At least until you met that one person that will light your eyes. At least until you…
It doesn’t matter. Your luck will change someday. It doesn’t matter that you don’t do anything to change your luck, it doesn’t matter that you don’t do anything to meet new people, it doesn’t matter that you don’t try to do anything.
Your luck will change someday… just because by you wish it does.
Do you really believe that crap? Do you want your life to change? Get you butt out of the couch and change it!
Your life is what you make of it. You can’t go to college? Go to the library! Don’t get a job? Start a business. Do have have someone who love you? Love the world, love Life!
Yes, I know, it is hard! So hard that is not worth trying! And that’s why you keep spending time on facebook, on twitter, on tv, instead of starting something useful, something you would like, something someone else would pay to have, to use.
Yes, I know, you’re tired, you’ll start it tomorrow, when you are less tired. I know you only have a little bit of time now, it’s not enough, you’ll start it later when you have more time.
You know what… go and read the power of now. It seem that you didn’t read it yet!
And when you are done with that, go and start something. NOW!
No Comments - Categories: Life
Through our life we hear thousands of small stories and anecdotes. And somehow some of those resonate with us while others barely touch us.
We are, mostly, the result of those stories.
And the more we get exposed to different stories, the more stories we have to choose from, the more we can improve ourselves.
No Comments - Categories: Definitions
Morals are a special type of traditions. What sets morals apart from other types of traditions is that they divide things and, specially, behaviors in right and wrong.
A cookbook is a collection of traditions, a long list of ways to prepare food, but each person can choose the dishes (s)he likes (or prefer) and only cook those. There are no right or wrong recipes, only preferences. Some may be more popular, other less, but they are all acceptable.
However, a man wearing a skirt is wrong in most western societies. Not going to church is wrong in most catholic communities. A woman using the hair short is wrong in some communities.
Even if not all morals are born equal – a woman having short hair is probably easily accepted than not going to the church in service day.
Nothing wrong with morals by themselves, but in the global and diverse society most people live today morals are often doing the opposite of what they were initially supposed to do.
Morals, like most traditions, started as a way to protect the community and the people in it, as well as a way to make sure everyone knew what to expect from everyone else.
Some rules were created in the mist of power games that never served the community (or the society) and were kept in place the same way. But most of them – I believe – were born from good and recognized practices – guidelines, if you wish – and after some time the surprise of seeing someone doing things differently resulted in a “that’s wrong” judgement – our mind likes right and wrong a lot – and with that a good practice becomes a moral rule.
Left unobserved our mind judges most things pretty quickly. Right and wrong, good and bad, love and hate, us and them… Dividing, judgmental labels are favorites of our minds.
Even today that ability of our mind to make a quick judgement about almost anything is an important skill to our individual survival.
The quick judge that today makes us cross the street because he doesn’t like the group in front of us, avoiding with that being robed is the same that kept us safe from predators and enemies across the millennia.
However, in our current society, us and them is a lot more complex division then it used to be.
Today, most of us are part of a big enough number of groups that very fast not a single person we know is part of them all.
And that is one of the reason why so often a lot of subjects are taboo, not open for discussion. Because we now know that a lot of people don’t agree with us and we don’t want to be wrong.
That is often true for religion, but religion don’t have the exclusivity on taboos. Also sex, money, politics are often taboo topics, and some others.
Our main problem is not that others do things in a different way than we do – or that they do different things or have different believes. Our problem is our always quick judging mind, jumping to conclusion – were no conclusions are deserved or necessary – and saying that our way it the right one and that any other way must be wrong – and, so, other are wrong.
For some time I believed that this was something that happened a lot more with older people, or with less educated people, that us, the newer generations, us who grow up with the computers, with the internet – we know better – I believed – but no, that is not true.
We may know that there is a social context that may have a big impact on what people believe, on how they present themselves, on what they eat or how they speak or spend their free time, but, still, we jump to conclusions, we label them ignorant, or stupid, or gay, or …
We know people that have different sexual orientations, people that choose to be single or non-monogamic or monogamic – but still we keep pointing them apart from those who made the same choices we made.
But not only that. We also assume. Even if we know that we are different from everyone else, until something tell us different we project our choices on everyone else.
But we are not running away from wild predators anymore, so it is time to train our brain to just make a simple judgement – is (s)he dangerous at this moment? If not stop judging and let us ask – let’s ask what they believe in, what they love, what tell them apart from us, but more importantly what get us together.
There is nothing wrong with our believes, there is nothing wrong with our traditions, there is nothing wrong with our choices. But it is time to stop expecting everyone else to believe the same, do the same and choose the same.
It is time we – as a society and as individuals – understand that each and everyone of us had a unique live, that resulted in an unique experience, unique believes, unique ways.
It is time we give ourselves permission to be wrong, to learn, from others, but more than that, to be different and be ourselves.
And it is also time that we stop expecting others to be the result of our lives – and that is the only way they would be like us.
No Comments - Categories: (A)Morality
Seth Godin have a small post about how associations have impact on you:
Who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with.
And the collisions and the dreams lead to your changes.
And the changes are what you become.
Change the outcome by changing your circle.
No Comments - Categories: Links
The origin of our specie is entangled with the evolution of our planet for thousands of years and traditions are a basic part of our culture, most likely from the beginning of our existence – traditions are observable is most (all?) primate species.
But where do traditions come from? Well, before that I would like to tell you a story.
A group of three monkeys was kept in a cage and a branch of bananas was hang on the cage with the monkeys, but when any of the monkeys tried to get bananas from it all the monkeys in that cage would be fired upon with jets of water.
After repeating that procedure a few times, any time a monkey tried to get bananas from that branch the other monkeys would beat him. At some point the testers stopped using the jets of water, but the beatings remained. Anytime a monkey tried to get bananas the would would beat him, no matter that the jets of water were not being used anymore.
But, to make it more interesting, one of the monkeys was replaced with another monkey. A monkey that was never wet because other monkey tried to get to the bananas.
As soon as the new monkey tried to get some of the bananas, the other two monkeys started beating him, and after some of this spankings the new monkey starts to join in beating the other monkeys when trey try to get bananas.
At this point another of the original monkeys was replaced by a new one that was never attacked with water. When this new monkey tried to get to the bananas, he was beaten by the other two and soon after also this new monkey would start beating the other when they tried to get to the bananas.
At some point the last of the original monkeys was also replaced by a new one. Now, in this cage, there is not a single monkey that suffered the original punishment for getting to the bananas and, still, when the new monkey tried to get to the bananas, he was punished by the other monkeys, and soon he also would join in as a punisher.
This illustrates how traditions are born.
At some point in time one individual does something that have an impact (real or perceived – most often than not just perceived) in the live of others or in the live of the community. And when that happens rules and/or rituals are created to prevent or repeat that event.
Where do we find traditions around us, in our lives? Everywhere, in almost everything.
From the way people say hello to each other – and other similar interactions – to how commerce works. From what you eat to how you eat it. From how you interact with friends to how you interact with people you cross with in the street and never met before.
Traditions are, in the end, habits that are common to the majority of a group and, most importantly, that are not renegotiated every time, just assumed and used.
At some point in the past, I used to be part of a group that would have dinner every Wednesday, and have some fun after that. That was a tradition, not everyone would join every week, but every week there was a group that would go out for dinner – dinner out become our Wednesday tradition.
In some western cultures it’s also tradition that men will take the first step and approach women they are interest in.
Tradition defined a lot of our daily interactions and in some places tradition have value of law in the absence of other laws.
Tradition can take a lot of forms, and be transmitted in the more diverse ways. From the aggravated look your neighbor gives you whenever you cross him in the street because of your long hair – tradition says that men are use the hair short – to the yelling – and beating if you are one of the unlucky ones – your parents gave you whenever they felt you were disrespecting some rule, to the cookbooks you can find today in most bookstores, and an huge amount of other practices, all contribute to get you in alignment with tradition.
Tradition, like almost everything else, if you want to take it all, have good and bad things. But unlike a lot of other things, with tradition you can pick what works for you and what doesn’t, you can choose what you want to keep, what you want to practice, and what you want to skip.
Traditions were mostly created to make life in society better, to make it simpler. But times change, and so do practice, knowledge and ambitious. Traditions, however, don’t change themselves, it take the will of people to change them, it takes a few people to step forward and say – those are not my traditions – and a few more more to follow them.
It takes you to ask yourself “Is this behavior, that society thinks is important, working for me or am I working for it? Where did it come from? Does it still make sense or is it an outdated concept?”
In the end, you can let society choose how you should behave, or you can choose for yourself which ways you follow inlive.
Which traditions you think are outdated and should be abandoned? Which would you rather keep above all?
No Comments - Categories: Definitions
Now is the time, the only time you have.
You may think you are a busy person, and that you’ll have time later for the things you want to do, but you don’t.
Or you may think that is it not urgent, that you can do it later, but you can’t.
Later never come. Later will become further apart from you as time passes. You only have now. And now you will not be able to do everything you may want.
Now you can choose any single thing and do it.
Often enough we juggle with several tasks at once, and most of the time the only thing that results from it is that all those tasks continue keeping us busy longer than they should, far longer than they needed to.
Other times we keep doing meaningless tasks, keeping ourselves occupied to avoid getting started with what can really make a difference in our lives.
We know, deep down, what we should be doing, what needs to be done. But we don’t always want to face our fears, we don’t always want to find out if we can indeed be happier if we make that change, we are often afraid of what changes can come from completing a project, from doing the next step toward our dreams, in the direction of our goals.
We can create long lists of things that we would like to do, big and small projects that will make us rich, that will make us famous – and then keep getting small, meaningless tasks in front of those projects – always find good reasons to do something else.
We all have things in our lives that we feel are not perfect, things that we would like to change, places we would like to visit, people we would like to know, words we would like to say, kisses we want to give. And all of us keep saying ourselves that now is not the time, that later it will be better.
But Now is the time. The time we look at all of that and pick one thing – just one – on thing that will make us happier, that remove some pain from our lives, that will get us closer to some goal – and DO IT!
Now is the time to do it. And just for a moment we leave everything else behind. Just for a moment we forget everything else.
Now, not later, not after a coffe or right after smoking, or after checking the email or facebook.
Now! And if now the thing we want to do is get a coffee or check the email, we do it fully, we do it because we believe that it is the one thing that we want to do now, because it is the one thing that can make us a bit happier, because that is the one thing we want to do now!
Now is the time, the only time we have to do what we want, what needs to be done.
If we don’t do it now, we will never do it!
No Comments - Categories: Produtivity
I told you about Hope – in Pandora’s Box – and about Faith – in the Power of Faith.
Because it is usual to mix hope and faith, let me explain why they are so different and how to tell one from the other.
Hope is, mostly, wishful thinking. You are being guided by your hope whenever you place your destiny completely in someone else’s hands.
The best example is when you pick a set of numbers, fill a paper and spend a few coins to play lotto or lottery. You are hopping that the numbers you chosen are the ones that will end being selected.
It is really unlikely that they are. In most weeks there is a winner – not all weeks – and for each winner there are millions of persons that just lost their money.
That’s just the nature of most games, for someone to win, someone else must lose. And that is specially true, whenever there is someone who always wins – casino, state, brokers, …
You are having hope whenever you do something you did several times before and expect a different result.
You keep hoping whenever you consistently repeat a risk behavior and expect never being called on it – you are doing this when you drive over the speed limit, you are doing this when you travel on public transports without paying for it, you are doing this when you have unprotected sex with people whose health conditions you are not aware of.
Luck, or coincidence if you prefer, have some impact on everyone’s live, you can’t predict the weather, you can’t predict where you’ll meet someone special, you can’t predict where you’lkl find the job of your dreams, you can’t predict… well, you can get the idea. You can’t predict the future and what it will bring your way.
But you can live with it, protect your self and what is important to you the best you can, prepare for the most likely events and walk the next meter, take the next step.
Most of the time you don’t need to guess what live is sending your way, you can see it coming. Often enough your previous actions took you where you are. You don’t just happen to get to the side of a street you want to cross. You got there somehow. And, more that the side of a street, you shouldn’t often just appear in the middle of it. Most likely you started somewhere else, got to the side of the street, and then you started crossing it. If you are at least as aware of how streets work as 90% of the people who cross streets, you looked for cars before starting crossing. And this is how it should be.
If you just cross the street and expect that it will be ‘okay”, you are not having faith – even if you think that some god will protect you. That is not faith, that is hope.
Hope is wishful thinking. Faith is wishing for the best, but reducing the risks as much as possible, and making our best to improve our odds. Faith only starts when we do our part, otherwise is just hope, just wishful thinking.
No Comments - Categories: Faith
Faith moves mountains. That’s not an actual quote, but is the most common way it is expressed.
Faith is a word that makes most people think about religion, about god. But I want to invoke a broader meaning for it.
Faith, as I see it, is that warm feeling that make us believe that is possible.
If you belong to a theist religion you may believe that it is possible because god will help you, but being atheist don’t make faith an impossible mental state for you.
You just need to find a new target for your faith.
Faith, with or without god, is a mental state. It’s, if you like, an altered state of mind that gets our brains looking for solutions for the problems we believe we can solve.
Faith can be our best tool or our worst nightmare. It can be the sail using the wind to move us along or the anchor keeping us docked. It can be the most powerful thing we have at our disposal, or the most anavoidable force in our lives.
The most important thing about faith is that we can choose our believes, but we will always have believes, doesn’t matter if we choose them or not.
Often believes we don’t choose become an important part of our live. Whenever we start thinking too often that we are something, we start believing it, and that can become more real in our lives than we being that or not.
If you believe that you are smart your mind will play more with the knowledge you have and you’ll start to see the things you don’t know as opportunities to learn more. But if you know the same and believe that you are not that smart your brain will see anything that you don’t know as a prove that you are indeed dumb.
I’m not saying that we are all born equal. What I am saying is that two persons with similar abilities can have completely different lives because of their believes alone.
But, is faith just wishful thinking? Well, wishful thinking is an important part of faith. Your wishes are what directs you and your faith. It’s useless to believe that you can understand quantum physics if all you want to achieve is painting realistic portraits.
But if wishful thinking is an important part of a effective faith, there are two other important components on it.
The second one is hard work. Faith is the light that allow you to find the next phase of your journey, but are your feet that have to take the next step. Faith may tell you that the wrong result in an exercise only shows you what you have to study again, but are your hands that have to get the books again, your eyes are the ones that have to read it and your brain have to make the effort to understand and memorize it. Faith, in the end, allow you to see what is the next task in your path, but it’s your job to do it.
The third part of faith can be described with a popular saying: “Divide to conquer”.
Faith may move mountains, but it will unlikely move your first mountain in a single try. If you try to go from knowing very little about a subject to as expert in a single day, there is no faith that can help you. But if you focus yourself on improving your knowledge on the subject a bit everyday, the faith that you can keep improving and that you can keep improving and that at some point you’ll cross the threshold that separates the amateurs from the professional, that separates the curious from the true experts.
But the true changes, when you dress yourself with faith is even more profound, so profound that it can be seen by everyone else.
If you believe you can do something, your brain will put the full power of your mind and body at your disposal, you’ll find the answers you need faster and even if you need your body to help – because it requires strength, or agility or precision – it’ll also perform at it’s best, because you believe it will.
But if you believe you can’t do something, your mind will also try it’s best to find reason why you can’t, why you shouldn’t, and and even your body will start complaining earlier, with a lot less effort being asked of it.
Believe you can. It doesn’t matter if you believe you can because you trained hard, because you studied it all and you have the needed abilities, or because you have some god helping you.
Do you part and believe. You can do it.
No Comments - Categories: Faith
Pandora’s box story is wrong! It always has been. Here is why it is wrong, and the revised version.
The story (as usually told) says that Zeus, the Greek god, gave a box to Pandora, and told her to never open it, no matter what happened.
Told not to do something, Pandora had no option but to open it – as her curiosity would not accept any other option – and when she did, all the worst evils in the world – who were previously locked in the box – escaped and started pestering the mankind.
And, the story goes on, when Pandora looked inside the box, only one thing remained inside the box – Hope.
Hope, the story says, was inside the box because Zeus did know that Pandora would open the box, so he thought that Hope would help the mankind better endure all the pain, all the suffering that would come from the released evils.
And this is where the story got it wrong. What is more likely to have happened is that while capturing Hope, Zeus was touched by her, and when giving the box to Pandora he hoped that she would not open it.
And that is where it all started. But not where it end.
When Pandora opened the box, mankind had still one more opportunity. Pandora could have close the box and leave Hope inside.
You ask why would Pandora leave Hope locked inside the box? Well, because Hope was never a gift. Wishing it was a gift was Hope already in action.
Hope was not just another of the many evils locked inside the box. It is the worst, the darkest, the biggest of them all.
Hope is a evil so big that it can’t move by itself. It needs someone to carry it along.
But, you ask, why is Hope that big evil you say? Isn’t Hope supposed to help ease a bit our pain in the hard moments?
You are right. Hope does indeed help us when life is difficult – it makes our pain a bit more bearable, and that is exactly what makes it so perverse.
Just by making life a bit easier to endure, it keeps us from reaching our breaking point and from being forced to find a solution to our problems, from investing the time, the energy – and sometimes the money – needed to make our life better.
Most of the time is hope that keep us in jobs that don’t make us happy, that don’t pay us enough to empower our lives, that have co-workers, bosses or clients we don’t tolerate. It’s the hope that the boss changes, that we get a special bonus or a special raise.
Most of the time it’s hope that keep us on relationships that don’t work – sometimes they don’t work anymore, but some relationships never really worked. But we don’t move on because of the hope that everything will get better, we have hope that in the end everything will be ok.
But life don’t change just because of wishful thinking. It takes your own effort to steer your life.
Before you ask, no, Hope is not the only thing that keep us from improving our lives, from doing what needs to be done. But lets keep fear for another time.
2 Comments - Categories: Hopeless
Agnostic Atheist? Aren’t those the same thing? – I was asked more than once, and even more I was looked with confusion when using the expression.
But no, Agnostic and Atheist are independent concepts and none of them imply the other.
Theist/Atheist are related with your believe in the existence of God(s). Gnostic/Agnostic are related with how sure you are of your believe.
One is theist if (s)he believes thar there is god(s) , and an atheist if (s)he believes no god exists. On the other hand gnostic is someone who knows that his believe is right and an agnostic is someone who really don’t know (s)he is right or wrong.
You can see this as a bi-dimensional plane, on which you can be anywhere. You can believe that there is god, and understand that this is just a ‘believe’, that you never had any acceptable evidence that god really exists – and that makes you and Agnostic Theist.
Or you can believe in God’s existence, pray for his help, see your problems fade and accept that as evidence that there is god – and that makes you a gnostic theist.
And all of that is ok, and all of that can help you have a better life and be a better person – by an average definition. Specially while you are in the middle of the plane – the pink circle in the middle of the diagram above.
The real trouble starts when you get closer to the extremes of the plane.
On one side, humans have a very difficult time telling strong believes and knowledge apart, and that makes most strong believers, both theists and atheists into gnostics – strong gnostics.
On the other axis, it is probably ok to be a strong agnostics – someone who really don’t know, and most likely don’t want to know. People usually don’t fight about what they know they don’t know. In the other extreme we have the gnostics, who, sometimes, are so sure that their version of the true is all that there is to know – and everyone who have a different opinion is wrong, and needs to be corrected.
And that is the begining of a lot of conflits.
But if theism and atheism are restricted to our believes related to the existence of god(s), Gnosticism can exist, and often do, outside of the religious context – and a lot more than theism/atheism, it is that certainty that our believes are the ultimate true that we must keep checking. It’s when we are really sure that we are right that we need to step back and verify that we are not mistaking believes for knowledge. Knowledge is something that everyone can verify independently and get the same results. But nor a lot of things in humanity culture are complete and untouchable trues. There are a lot of conventions – including language and mathematics, there are a lot of theories – functional theories that allow for a better understanding of the world, but still are theories.
Humans, however, need believes – faith is one of the most important psychologic tools we have at our disposal.
So… have faith, your own faith, whatever that faith is. Just let all others have their own.
3 Comments - Categories: Definitions