The Power of Now

2012/11/05 - Author: Marco Neves

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!

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Hope and Faith

- Author: Marco Neves

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.

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the Power of Faith

- Author: Marco Neves

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.

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the Box of Pandora

2012/11/04 - Author: Marco Neves

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.

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Agnostic Atheist

- Author: Marco Neves

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.

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