At any cost, we should not break the commitments we made to ourselves. Decided to write an essay, run 5 miles, clean up the mess in the room, read a book, or whatever that might be, once you have made an agreement with yourself, make sure to honor it without breaking it. It is critical to your confidence and overall self-esteem. Think twice before the decision if you may, but once agreed upon, there shouldn’t be going back.
Love/Power
Oftentimes, power is masqueraded as love. Whether it is a parent imposing their wish on a child or a partner influencing the choice of spouse, we can observe a subtle soft power-based imposition rather than a sweet love. Because love calls for unconditional freedom which is usually robbed away when a free choice is violated by people who claim to shower affection.
Difficult at the top
It is easy for anyone to be above average in any field. Dedicated sitting and concentration along with a bit of motivation will take you there. However, past this stage, things get really hard. The stage between good and the best is nerve-wracking and difficult. Here, the insights are really hard to get and come at a snail’s pace. The work too requires extreme focus to get any novelty, if there’s any. Doubts creep in and question your ability and the feeling of being stuck haunts us daily.
But that is how we can come to the peak. This is not to prove something to others but discover our own potentiality which otherwise would have remained dormant and that would alter our life into something else.
Scarcity
One of the important rules for the success of any task we undertake is a paucity of time. Enough time makes you lazy and comfortable. The lack of time gives you focus, prioritisation, and optimal utilization of energy and resources.
People often complain but with scarcity, you put your 100% and try to capture every microsecond that’s available and is given to us.
Serenity
The most practical question we can ask about a difficult situation is: Is it
in our control or is it not? Sweating over situations that aren’t in our
control isn’t the right choice on any given day.
Relationship
If your friend calls you stupid, most probably you shrug it off or say something even more stupid depending on your mood and energy at that moment. However, your shoulders and a big heart cannot tolerate if some stranger calls you that especially when he cuts you off on a highway.
I think based on our relationship with the speaker we determine what kind of meaning and emotional weight words have. For instance, when relatives or family members say even something very trivial we get hurt and decide to abandon them but if the same is done by our partner, we think about how cute those words are. Or if it is by our brother or sister then in fact we take delight in those insensitive words.
So, what we want to take from words and to what extent should we get affected is based on our relationships with the talker.
The Whale
Normally movies aren’t supposed to make you cry because they are fictitious. Any tragedy that we see isn’t real and is well crafted by dummies and good music but some come along to make an exception. Despite being a “beautiful fraud” we somehow resonate with the pain that a character goes through even when we are separated by facts, frames, and different life situations. This is because we all experience the same human emotions and feel similar nausea to use Sartre’s lingo.
Naturally, we all seek comfort to lessen either the damp reality or imagined anguish in many ways. One finds it on the cross, and some find it in drugs. Of course, there are many paths to it. People overwork, overindulge in entertainment, and so on and so forth. However, Charlie, the English teacher here tries to hide his pain of the death of his boyfriend, and downhill relationship with his daughter by eating pizza, chocolates, and Moby dick’s essay.
At first, we rush to judge him. Who hasn’t got problems anyway? we blame Charlie for his congestive heart failure, wheezing, and blood pressure of 238 over 134. Adding to this, Charlie doesn’t want to go to hospitals, or therapy and puts in practically no effort to come out of the mess he is in. The man wants to die.
But as the film picks pace, we understand his agony. Losing love and coming back to normalcy or pretending that death is natural for all sapiens might be easy for some of us but not for all. Here’s where the universality stops and the individuality of a crisis comes up. The objective judgements, solutions, and psychological evaluations we offer might not be the answer for all. The hard truth of not being saved either by religion or replacement-addictions ultimately just invokes deep empathy and a few tears. No intelligence to offer but perhaps a love that can transcend cinematic walls.
In the same movie, his daughter develops anger because her father abandoned her when she was 8 as a defense mechanism. This shows the sad state of kids who get abandoned or thrown into foster homes when their parents get divorced. The adults seek love yet they plant the seeds of hate in the home they left. Kids pay the ultimate price.
In one scene, the pizza delivery guy sees the fat body of Charlie and runs away without saying a word. May be judged, or maybe not. Art ultimately depends on your interpretation but the reaction of Charlie is hard to watch. The stress/fear/sorrow eating shows how we cope with difficult emotions. This portrays how each of us channelize our insecurities and fears in our own different and separate ways.
The sofa existence of Charlie however showcases how beautiful one’s own soul is with his sweet voice and sense of hope despite the outer layers of flabby fat. And the friend’s role is exactly how it is supposed to be. No pep talks but changing sheets of the sofa, bathroom tissues, food in the kitchen, and sitting beside him to watch dumb t.v.
Opening ears and heart but not the head to add more weight to the problems.
Lastly when Charlie tells his students to do some honest writing and throws away the laptop, metaphorically he indicates to us to live authentically, free of falsities that either we create or handed to us by society. He points to the simple fact of what writing is: an effort made to be yourself one last time when the whole world doesn’t let you be.
Biographies
Make sure that at least kids read biographies of people if not grown-up adults because young minds need to know what kind of obstacles, anxieties, fears, questions, and doubts people face when they embark on a difficult journey. And they also remind them about the potential that each one of us has and the kind of character we should embrace to live in this world. They show lives with all their flaws, hopes, and shortcomings. This prepares them for the tides of life.
Aging
As we accumulate grey hair, we should also get multiple interests/hobbies/likings/things we love to do/engagements/pastimes/fancy amusements to make life more interesting, or else couch sitting or armchair thinking will surely prepone death and dullness. If you are passionate about music/poetry/movies/old coins/stamps/documentaries/books or anything else of that sort by 60-70 and do something about them then surely life will have more vigor and passion.
Else we are lost in the gossip of the neighborhood, meaningless political debates, and involved way too much in the lives of grandkids.
Triangle
Culture, conditioning, and childhood. These are the three things that a man carries throughout his/her life. Any possible freedom in mind begins only with their annihilation. Our reality, reactions, and responses are their prisoners, and cleaning our mental slate is almost next to impossible as one or the other influences our thought processes, actions, and resultant circumstances. The whole edifice of our karma is their blessing or curse.
Thy Vox 