An Open Letter to MYSELF

An Open Letter to MYSELF !!

From 25 year old me to 50 year old me.
Hi Jaini,

This obviously applies If I am still alive and reading it.

WOW you made it. You went through all these years and made it to your half century. Consider yourself a lucky women. And if you have relatively good health, a roof, a fridge full of food and a family to love you just proved that you made it through the rough times. Maybe when you are reading this at 50 you may be laughing and saying to yourself what was I thinking writing this letter to myself. Life must be completely different for you right now, you probably don’t remember how you were when you were 25, and so let me take you down to a journey to your twenties. Your early twenties were tough, maybe not compared to what you must have seen so far but they were the toughest you had seen thus far.

At 22 you graduated from your bachelors, big deal. But it all came crumpling down when you couldn’t land a job in the next coming months. You worked minimum paid job, cleaned shit of clients and got punched and knives thrown at you. But hey, you took it as a challenge and understood that if you are going to be a behaviour analyst you got to take the shit. You came out of that and then you landed your first professional job but the only problem was it was thousands of miles away from family. For someone who had never travelled alone, to move to a foreign land without any support at such an age is tough. It meant to leave behind the only family that you had, the few people you loved, your friends behind, and the place you called home from the past ten years. It was probably the toughest decision you had to make at that point in life but you had promised yourself that no matter what the obstacle you will take it to make it big in your career. When you got to the foreign land, everything changed from your weather, to your comfort, your peers and your lifestyle. You were sleeping on the bare floor with just a blanket for 6 months, you were travelling in -55 degree Celsius on the bus waiting outside for it sometimes to a stretch of an hour. The only one to call friend was your phone and the television. You went to the theatre on your own on your bday to celebrate it. You finally realized what it meant for thousands of people when they migrated to different places to better their lives, just like your parents did, to give you the life you have. The distance between your parents and you made you even closer. The friends you took for granted to be around all of sudden became the greatest gift.

Apart from the obvious hardships, you also realized that the career wasn’t for you. You liked the bits and pieces of the career but you weren’t truly living your potential and you decided to go back to family and figure yourself out. This was the exciting part, being reunited with the ones you love. But you didn’t know that you were about to embark on the worst year so far. You got back with a hope to further your study, and meanwhile continuing working towards slowly shifting your career. Trying to change your career is never an easy route. You must have applied to hundreds of jobs, oh how dreadful that was. You didn’t even get a response, let alone rejections. You had set out goals for yourself, and you were getting disappointed as days passed by without any of them being even close to completion.

Tired and frustrated you started lashing on the same people that you claimed to love so much. But as someone who had been in the field of psychology for so long you knew that the changes were happening and to deal with it you started a completely different course. You had nothing to do with it, but you knew that while you searched for jobs and applied for masters you had to do something or else you would definitely go crazy. This new course gave you a sense of achievement because you were able to meet people from different walks of life and having passed through the same troubles as you were. You didn’t feel as distraught as you had before because you found that you were not alone. As you are writing this you are coming to an end of this course, and you have finished applying for masters, and you are working part time with an offer waiting for you once you graduate that may lead you to your desired career path.

This was just the beginning of your career and now on to your personal life. Being from an Indian descent you knew early on that if you didn’t find yourself a partner someone else for sure will. I am sure you remember ALL the pieces of art work you had to meet and go through before you landed on the one you did (I hope you have someone, If not I guess all of them turned out to be pieces of abstract art work). It was hard for you to have a current mind set where you wanted to know someone for a long time, fall in love and then get married as supposed to your parents wanting you to meet three times and boom you are engaged. You constantly had to fight with them to make them come in the middle. You met some really amazing guys who were perfect for you theoretically but god damn it they did nothing for your heart to pump. Then you met some that my god all everything was just red flags but you were swooned by them temporarily. And then there were ones that everything was perfect but the time just didn’t work out. You were getting frustrated with this process as time lapsed, pressure built and “biological” clock started kicking. But one day you realized that hey who the hell cares. When it is meant to happen it will. Keep meeting the douchebags, the bad boys , the nerds, the commitment phobic, the creeps, but one day if it’s meant to work out you will end up with your own weirdo that fits in with your weird life and you shall call it a true find ;).

This was your life at 25. I don’t know if your life is any better now, but what the 25 year old Jaini had figured out was that no matter what happened in her life, she had her family and her friends right where she wanted them. She had her confidence that she will do ok, everything will be fine just as the bad times came so will the good. She learnt that the greatest gift of time is letting go.



So if you are stressing right now, let it go. Live and enjoy what you have right now. The clock will turn around and you will find happiness, and if you are really happy right now enjoy it to the utmost gratefulness.



And more than anything keep respecting yourself, and love yourself.

Your own reflection,

Jaini from 2015

I had a DREAM !!

I had a DREAM !!

We all have dreams, some we remember and some we don’t. I particular have this gift sometimes not so much of a gift that I have elaborate dreams and then I seem to vividly remember them.  A couple of nights ago I had such a dream.  In this dream I had gone camping with a lot of random people, I seem to have made new friends in my dream. While camping with my new found friends we decided to go for a walk in the woods, and while walking we come across this pond/lake, as I am lacking of that particular detail let’s say it was a body of water. So we all go to the shore of the water body and look into it. The water seemed opaque, but this wasn't the odd part. Whenever any of us looked into the water, instead of seeing our reflections we saw a series of images passing by us.  When looked closely it seemed to be images from our past being reflected back to us. All of us in awe couldn't believe what our eyes were seeing. But the image we saw was our very recent past. So we were very familiar with it. One of my adventurous friends decided to take a leap into the water and tread it deeper. Though in real life I believe being a pessimist I would have stopped him from doing such a thing. I decided otherwise in my dream, I encouraged him to take that leap. As he tread through the water deeper, he began to get excited and kept on going deeper. But he seemed to be so excited to tell us what he saw that he came back out.  He told us that as he tread deeper into the water he was able to see more images from his past, the deeper he went the more he saw, but he said something else to. According to him as he swam further into the water, it seem to get slimier, he wasn't able to swim well as he went further. One of my other dream friends not believing this decided to tread deeper. And this time she swam deep enough that we saw her struggling to come a float.   At this point all of us got worried and through the help of a large stick tried to pull her out of the water. Panicking and almost breathless she said she thought she would be stuck in the water forever. Of course after this incident none of my adventurous friends decide to go anywhere near the water.

I finally awoke from this elaborate dream. Waking up from it, I began to have a really eerie feeling. I wondered what this dream could possibly mean. Though it’s not necessary that your dreams have to have a meaning, but I decided to learn from this particular one.   From this dream though, I learnt that one should always peep into the past, just to stay connected to a piece of us. But don’t keep going back to it, and start living in the past. Because the further you go into the past, the harder it will become for you to look ahead, and you will be stuck there, and it will become impossible to pull you out of that trance.

“Peep into your past, live in your present, and build your future”

Hope you like it!

Skeptical Self 

Unexpected

As it has been clear that I have been inactive for the last couple of months, so in this I have broken a promise to myself of writing a blog every month. I won't really justify the reasons to why I have not been able to write one but I had a huge writers block. I don't know if its gone completely yet, but its an attempt to write one because a few of you have requested that I write something. 

The biggest adventure for me these months was travelling to India. After eleven long years of being privileged to live in a great nation like Canada I had the opportunity to dig up my roots again. As I landed. I saw a swamp of people waiting outside the airport, probably more than the people that actually landed. In that instant I realized I landed in a place with not only greater population by numbers but by hearts. A place where greeting a person comes a whole family. Among the crowd I was trying to find my familiar face. My family that I left behind so long ago that the faces that I remember were young full of life. Forgetting that years had passed by, and what I was searching for now was older,  and a little more grayer. I greeted my family with tears of joy in my eyes, or it could be the heat and pollution but I would like to this it was joy.  

This country is divided in two segments, one side where the roads are smoother than any other nations, and the others where you still have to walk with obstacles. One where there are homes touching the sky and others where the ground is all they have. There is noise, there is pollution, and no one has any traffic sense what so ever. You would think there would be numerous accidents and ridiculous stress in this country. In my entire month there I saw two accidents, while in a developed countries I have been to I have seen 2 accidents probably a day. 

I promise I am getting to a point with these short blobs of mine. 

My entire trip to India  if I had to describe in a word would be unexpected. 

Past two months of my life have been unexpected. In these two months I have discovered every emotion there is a human can possibly feel. I have felt excited yet extremely stationary, Love and disgust, extreme joy and extreme sorrows. Just how India is, and being there made me realize that we all have our own world where everything exists, the matter is just the revelations of those parts of your world. India is a chaotic country, but still people have balanced there individual life in this chaos. They drive with absolute zero traffic sense, but they know how to avoid messes, they have learnt to communicate with the chaos. They suffer from insufficient water, drainage, and in general hygiene. They have learnt to work around it.  Similarly in our lives we have chaos called emotions. We have love with hate, happy with sad, anger with patience, etc. We just need to learn to manage the chaos, learn to work around it, expect that with time there will be more coming your way and you just got to smile and take it as it is. This is a lesson to be learnt from people who have way less materialistically then we do. Inner peace can never be achieved from the things outside. True joy of life is to smile in the sorrows and rise in the fallings. It taught me that I stress about the low internet speed, and not having an office job, to water being colder than usual one of the days, and snow not being shoveled on time. Things that will be solved eventually stresses me out leaving a permanent damage on my mental peace. So India's chaos taught me to calm down, enjoy every moment in my life and no matter if there is a tomorrow or not, stop and enjoy today.  My family had aged from when I saw them last, but only the exterior, the youthfullness was still exuberant, yet I became 10 years older than my age, the stresses in my life that haven't even begun yet started affecting me, and that aged me faster. 

So the people of this world, "slow down, take a deep breathe and say everything will be okay eventually, whenever eventually maybe but till then I am smiling in my sorrows and rising in my falls"

Hope you like this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. The chaos in my writing shall eventually make sense to all of you.

Skeptical Self :)

Magnificent Tree!!!

I know I always continue to say in all of my posts that it was extremely difficult to write one, similarly I shall save you the trouble of reading it again. But this time my inspiration for this blog was derived from my walk in the hallways of my university. Four years I walked those hallways every day, and believe you me it’s a long time for someone to realize what the painting was trying to convey. That painting hangs where we enter the university leading towards our classes. I remember seeing it the first time, and I laughed at it because it clearly looked like it was hanging upside down. Then after looking at it for a couple of more minutes it intrigued me, and then I concluded that it was abstract modern art trying to convey something useless that I have no time to think about. 

After approximately two years post-graduation I was visiting my university, and as usually I glances at it and walked passed it. But this time around I found myself looking back and turning around towards the painting. I wasn't consciously doing so until I once again stood in front of it starring at its face. Blankly looking at it while a rush of students, old and new passed by me and probably getting irritated that I was blocking their way from quickly trying to reach their classes. This time around I truly understood why that painting hangs in the entrance of the university, I truly (well at least I think)  know that meaning of that painting in our lives.  The painting is a huge leafless tree and a house in the background, but the interesting part of painting is that it’s upside down. The trunks of the tree are at the top and the branches at the bottom. 

Its seems like a simple portrait of a tree, it’s the simplicity of this painting is what makes its so magnificent. To begin with the tree’s roots are at the top and branches at the bottom. This in general is indicative of how we learn throughout our lives. We learn the simply rules, basics of life at first. The superficial knowledge is as fragile as branches, it seems beautifully simple as leaves, but as you grow older and go more in-depth of the field the true sources subside. You learn depths (roots) of the topic. Which is usually very uninteresting and dry, just like the roots of a tree, but we all know without it there will be no tree. But most importantly what is interesting about this painting is, that doesn’t matter how hard I tried looking at the painting with a straight head, I always ended up tilting my head to look at the tree in the upright position.  This is the exact replication of life. Until our heads are a little tilted, until we strain our necks, until we look at the view from a different perspective we never see the true solution to the problems that we face.

So after a long journey through university, I truly realized that the purpose of an University is to teach us how to look a the same problem that we have been facing from a while in a different perspective. So don’t be afraid to strain you necks a little if the fruit is finding the solution you have been looking for.


The Magnificent tree !! 

Your's truly,

Skeptical Self 

A PEN IT IS

This is my third attempt of writing the blog for this month. I just don’t seem to get around writing something that is intriguing and I believe then came my “eureka” moment. I was scribbling with my pen and then I made a mistake and tried to scratch it as much as I can so it was no longer visible. The harder I tried to scratch it out the more indenting it got and started ripping through the paper. I suppose you may know where I might be going with this analogy.

Back tracking my story to when I was a wee little kid extremely excited to learn how to inscribe words beautifully with an ink pen I didn’t think that there were going to be ramification of me being able to use this beautiful thing. I was just learning how to use the instrument so the importance of holding it never occurred to me. When I had a pencil my life seemed dull, black and white while the ones who held a pen, colourful and vibrant. But now that I am all grown up I understand that as kids why we are not allowed to use pen (it could be that kids put everything in their mouth and might get intoxicated by the ink). It’s because a pencil always comes with an eraser.  Eraser means that no matter what mistake you make in life you are able to track back and restart. This privilege no longer prevails when you use a pen. Yes it’s beautiful, and Yes it looks vibrant, but once you make a mistake with a pen it’s there forever.  You may scratch it, you may try the so called ink erasers ( and let me tell you those erasers are crap !), but still the mark will always remain. Children, as they say in psychology are table a rasa (a clean slate). They are still learning our world’s way, they need that privilege to erase their mistake and learn new things while when we start growing up such opportunities no longer exist. We are held liable to what we do and we are expected to learn from our mistakes, and more importantly NEVER to repeat the same ones.

This is exactly where the negative trait of a pen comes in handy. If one uses a pencil to write and makes a mistake you are able to erase it this can easily forget the mistake that was initially made and very easily repeat it. But with a pen you can merely scratch it out or make is foggy, but you are always able to look back and remind yourself that you are never to repeat the same mistake twice.  This serves a purpose in our lives, it lets us save time, and it helps us always stay grounded and reminds us how far we came since we started.  Trying to scratch your mistakes won’t help, anyone who has used a pen must know that scratching rips the paper.  Similarly trying extremely hard to undo your mistake harms you, drags you in your past, thus not letting you move forward and achieve things.

So use your pen wisely, think before you inscribe, and if you make a mistake just cross it out and move forward but no matter what happens keep inscribing. One should only stop when they cease to exist.  It might seem like a big deal when it’s made, but in the grand scheme of your life it will just seem like a little mark that defines your long and beautifully vibrant journey.

“Life is like those cool multicoloured pens, in one click you are sad, then angry, and then beautifully green.” – Jaini

A pleasant experience

For this month I had so much to share, it was a battle between the experiences this summer and a strangely pleasant experience I had yesterday while walking home. So I ended up choosing my rather pleasant experience.

Yesterday after an exhausting day at work, and by exhausting I mean running after 8 clients who have various developmental challenges. It was straining and draining. I decided that doesn’t matter how tired I am, it’s Friday and I need to be happy. So when I got out of the bus I had my headphones on and I spotted a pinecone. It was half broken and swooshed yet something about it intrigued me. I decided to play little soccer game with it and started tossing it forward and back with my foot while I walked. Initially it kept me entertained but there came a point where I wanted to abandon the pinecone and just walk straight home. But I took it as a challenge to take this piece of pine cone directly to my house. Doing so meant that my travel will take twice its time because it was really hard to maneuver such a small piece of object with my feet.  So I kicked and kicked, it got frustrating and tiring, people passing by stared at me strangely, a few laughed, and believe it or not a few even stopped pointed and laughed. At the stop light when I picked up the pine cone crossed the road and threw it on the side walk and once again started kicking, people started peeping out of their cars to stare at what was so important to me that I picked up and then laughed when they saw what it really was. Through this journey with my pine cone I realized that life is a resemblance of this one single experience of mine.  That piece of pine cone, no matter how small and worthless it looked it was still something I aspired for so it was my goal/dream. To others it was worthless, stupid and a sense of mockery. So when we walk the path of life with our own dreams with a vision of our finish line we will meet a lot of people in our lives that will laugh at us for having such a goal, might even intimidate us to stop our paths and change our ways but we must keep on moving. Because the way we saw our end goal, the way we envisioned our lives is not the way they see it. Our dreams are our own creation, and there will come a point where it will become close to impossible for you to continue any longer, you will start questioning your choices. In no ways is it bad to analyze and refurbish your dreams but never change its coarse because you think it’s taking too long or it’s something you cannot and should not aspire. Believe me a small goal like getting the pine cone home made me the happiest girl in the block. It was so uplifting because I finished what I had started.

From this extremely strange yet uplifting experience I have learned that life is about patience, it’s about believing in your dreams and it’s about moving forward no matter what the obstacle.

“Dream like you have forever to achieve it, strive for it like you have today”

Hope you enjoy it !!..If you like it that is :)

Skeptical Self :)

Our past

I didn't know that when I was committing to write a new blog every month I was going to have such a hard time trying to come up with a topic. Its not that I don't have things to talk about, believe me there is a LOT of things. But its difficult to put into a coherent thought format and make it sound interesting.
Since it is the last day of the month I have no choice but to squeeze in this piece of writing today.


“The past is never where you think you left it.” 

― Katherine Anne Porter

Learning history in school, for the most of us was a dreaded task. All it felt like was memorizing dates and names of people that we think made no significant impact to our lives. What history pretty much boils downs to in schools is, a point of view through which the teacher wants us to see our past. The way its presented to us makes it interesting or something completely worthless to learn about. In general though, however much all of us might want to deny the fact that knowing our past is useful, it can be determined that without knowing where we began , our end is uncertain & undetermined.
Our past battles define us, the scars and the bruises are a reminder of what we actually fought for and what was important for us to fight for. History doesn't only teach us about our fights but studying the characters of history teaches us about human behavioural patterns, our communicative methods, our thresholds for knowledge and webs of interactions and empathy for others. There is so much to learn from the people who have left us with a treasure of knowledge.  Knowledge isn't considered important when it teaches you how to do things, but also the mistakes that were made by our predecessor also teaches us how not to do things. History saves our future some trouble of re-discovering everything. That is why a person who learns from their mistakes is called smart, a person who repeats his own mistake a fool, BUT a person who learns from other's mistake WISE. As humans who have the organ called brain, must use it, take advantage of what our past and other's past have taught us and imply it.
By doing this, it does not mean that you stop using your own brain. it definitely does not mean that what did not work in the past will never work. It will boil down to looking at the probability of the effectiveness of the method and decipher your step. Use it as a guide, a navigational system, which can lead you to a path that is better, but does not stop you from discovering your own.
For example.
Gandhi taught us patience for our battles, but also taught us not to make emotional decisions.

This was rather a tedious post, scattered thoughts it may seem, but at the end of the day this post will become my past and I shall learn from it :P:P

" Our past battles scar us, and sometimes they may seem worthless, but there will come a point in life when you will look back and see that you walked on a morbid path yet you came out alive" Skeptical self

Hope you like it !!


Skeptical Self  :)

"When the mind is constantly trying to survive, the heart has no time to feel"

As I start my day off by travelling to the core, downtown of my city everyday all I do is mindlessly walk on the same routes to reach my workplace. Every day its the same routine at the same time. Looking at life at this moment  it  can be truly said that my life is controlled completely by the fate of time. But on one odd day even though I was walking on the same route at the same time, I looked up. I managed to glance at the path, my surrounding and the people. It was close to impossible to believe the amount of people I saw that were walking faced down, just rushing to get to their end spot where they will be for the rest of the day. I realized that we fail to notice the familiarity that surrounds us. I remember my parents telling me that they have met the best of people while their travel to work. My dad met his pen pal for years to come through his daily visits to work in the same route, same time. Its because back in his day there was no one and nothing stopping them from looking up and noticing the faces around them .Nowadays the sole ruling power is technology. Either people are texting, talking or watching stuff on their tablets. And the few off us are sleeping because we were too busy the night before using the same device. It seems like we fear to face people but ironically we are fantasizing and building tactics to fight the zombie apocalypse. In fact the apocalypse is already here and we clearly are failing to beat it.  More than anything its the time when we decide to look up and notice what's happening in our surroundings. The day we notice what's happening around us is the day we will decide to take actions to fix what's broken, to mend what is bend. At this moment us looking down is hindering our sight, our vision and we are all following each other's foot steps in crossing the road, not knowing if the leader is taking us to the right place or walking into a collision.

So for this very messy post of mine, I would like to propose that all of us even if not all the time, occasionally look up to see what needs to be seen. The day we interact with real human emotions, feel the compassion is the day we will thrive as humans. There is so much more to life than just mindlessly texting and playing games.

Don't just love life ...live the life that you will love


To a very confusing sets of thought,

Skeptical self

Hope you understood something i wrote above..hahaha :):)

As the famous saying "The only thing in life that is certain is its uncertainty" - 

As I graduated approximately a year ago I knew it was not going to be easy to deal with the change. But as I graduated and stood on that podium to accept my degree I had set goals in life, what I wanted to achieve and by what time I wanted to do it. I was also aware that goals are never achieved in the time frame you decide them to be achieved at, because no matter how much you deny it destiny will play a role in your life. As I mentioned before that I am at a stage of my life where a lot of major changes are due; personal, career, and physical. Each change is important in its own way and it’s the peak time where it needs to happen. Knowing these facts its stresses one, and so does it for me. I am stressed that when and how am I going to rise above in my career when the jobs are so scarce to find, the opportunity for me to meet someone interesting is close to eliminated, and my body from now on will only be weaker as the day passes. The last one I sound like I am in my mid 30’s but in this day and age of the kind of food and stress, the new mid 30’s are the mid 20’s.

While all these issues were going on in my mind, my bday was approaching and like every year this year it was no different. Every year I get extremely depressed around the week of my bday because I start reminiscing the past year and what I have achieved and as a new grad from university sitting at home from almost 9 months this year was at its lowest. I was going to turn 23 and I had achieved close to nothing or at least taken the step to achieve what I wanted to. But then one day while sitting on the bus it occurred to me that we all get so busy in life thinking about the end goals in life that we miss out all the little things that we always wanted to do. So I sought out for the little things that I always wanted to do, in fact always talk about yet never manage to achieve them.

This is when I wrote the 25 things in life that I really want to do before I turn 25, one of the things including writing a blog every month till I turn 25. So here is the first one. Every time I check off one of the things on the list I shall mention it at the end of the blog,

Coming back to the point I was trying to make was, fretting over the big things in life that take long times to achieve will only get you further away from your goals. Because the more stressing you do the less time you give yourself in strategy making for your goals. Also by achieving the little things you are giving yourself an ego boost from self achievement and fulfillment, and the bonus is you most likely are going to enjoy doing it. Another thing is sharing these goals with friends only makes them permanent, gives them validity. Since someone else knows what you want to achieve it drives you to achieve it faster to prove not only to yourself but to the one’s that know.

Goal achieved – Go clubbing once!! (it sounds like a silly one, but hey I went to it once and now I know why I shall never be excited to go again. But as I said friends help achieve it and this one goes out to my friends who took me out for clubbing ...and made sure I didn’t run out of the place ....hahaha).

“Goals are what you make of them, you can either have them or you can achieve them. There is no middle ground” – Jaini  

Emotions

An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words. 


I usually write when i am in my philosophical mood but for once i am writing because i am extremely emotional lately. I believe that i am pretty strong minded person and will not tear up easily. But then i realized that the things that affect me is not personal things but rather things that affect my surroundings. I know that makes no sense and i am confusing you. What i mean is that i cry when someone says that i hurt their feelings, i cry when my country gets attacked by terrorist and i cry when an old people get mistreated by there children, i cry when young girls get sexually harassed and i cry when i see malnutrition kids in the world when the richie rich waste food everyday. I know it probably seems like i am trying to boast myself up but it truly gets to me. Come to think of it, its probably because these incidences shine upon the fact that I am so powerless. I am not able to help enough, I don't hold the power to make any significant changes in anyone's life. It reminds me daily that I am blessed in so many ways, yet I do not make the effort to ever get out and do something that will be helpful to end a lot of supposed "evil" out there. It could be many reasons for example I think of my well being before others, I feel like I wont be able to make any difference, or simply I am just a thinker and not someone who takes action. I don't know what the reason is but this feeling always recurs in my mind and depresses me. 

This is a poem that I wrote many years back and it might do justice to what I am trying to say at the moment a little better!!

What My Heart Desires 

What my heart desires,
is my own reflection
I have lost myself in the clutter of life
I exist but, I cease to live
What my heart desires 
is the art of music
the art of writing,
the art in me.
I have lost myself in the darkness of the night.
In the night that never ends,
in the starts that never shine,
in the moons never glows,
The night that never inspires.
I have lost my muse.
What my heart desires is the feeling of self-fulfillment
something is incomplete, 
I am incomplete. 
I am lost in the ocean of sadness,
the sadness of illiteracy,
the sadness of helplessness, 
the sadness that I am disabled more than any
I am incomplete,
What my heart desires is to be Complete!!!! 

Enjoy ...if u like it that is 

Skeptical self :)

Insipiration is us.

Today after attending a wonderfully organized TEDx event made me think about a lot of the issues and ideas that were brought forward by the speakers. They were really good prominent speakers and had to say things that could greatly impact our lives. Some of us might even say that they were inspirational speakers. Though I am not against that statement, i  would like to state otherwise. I think that they were all very influential speakers but i think inspiration comes from within. A lot of the speakers today said that we get inspired by people and inspired by things in our surrounding. According to me we get inspired by that one significant event in our lives to change the way we think. To aspire of what we believe in. All the speakers today attributed their success to their inspiration and the rest to their dedication but no one could really point out what their inspiration was. That is the case because what inspires US is US.  What influential speakers and prominent figures in our society do to us is make us think. They force us to believe that great things can be achieved. We all go out from influential speeches and tell ourselves we are going to do this from now on but none of us really follow through. The time that we follow through when we truly inspire ourselves from our conscious and critical think about the issue and then creatively act on it (as one of our speakers mentioned this scenarios today). When we inspire ourselves is when we rise in our self confidence and we begin to achieve great things and dedicate ourselves to great things. But some how in today's world it is really hard to inspire ourselves because we are constantly bombarded with ideas, images and a standard of how we should live our lives that we forget to look into the mirror and asks ourselves how we might want to live our lives. We forget to ask why we want to live our lives the way we do. So this was me thinking about all this during the conference was going on and while i was crossing the street i realized something
Our life is just like crossing a street (j-walking). "We have to estimate the distance between the nearest car to the farthest car, avoiding the nearest car and going ahead of the farthest car. The nearest car is our past that we try to avoid and crossing the street before farthest car gets to us is us seeing our future pass by as we want."

That was my little thought hope u enjoy it....if u like it that is

sincerely,

Skeptical Self

p.s. Thanks for a commendable effort to the TEDx Ryerson U team

Beginnings

To be born is to start the journey towards death.
Madeleine L’Engle 

Those who say, that starting a new beginning is for those who are brave, and those that only look at the end always fail!!. This philosophy maybe true and maybe false, but at the end of the day the person who looses the most is the person who always fears to begin. I have been wondering a lot now a days...sometimes about rubbish issues and sometimes about issues that gives me goosebumps. We all go through a lot in our lives. Certainly some people have more hardships than others but I think we all have our share ( i think). Anyways so I have been wanting to start everything over. Leave everything behind. By everything i mean everything. The country, the people, and the possessions. But then those are just physical objects in the universe. I may be able to the country but not its streets, I may be able to leave the people but not their memories and i may leave the possessions but not their need. So it all spirals down to the fact that the "thing" you want to leave behind the most is yourself and nothing else. Its seems practically impossible for obvious reasons. So i basically one can never escape the "soul" in themselves. Because there lies all the scares, the memories and the wisdom. Brings me back to saying that there are no true beginnings, that is just a metaphorical term used so one can please the self into thinking that our past will not influence our future. Truly what we mean by new beginnings is the process of substitution and then elimination. Simple basic math or perhaps the process of erosion and evolution basic biology or chromatography basic chemistry. Mathematically speaking one has to have more experiences in life in order to substitute the old ones thus eliminating them from our memories. One has to let the scares to slowly erode and then evolve on the newer experience and one has to let the heavier bogged down memories to lag behind as the more recent memories move to our frontal cortex. Moving away from boring scientific explanations i hope that i have not ruined anyone's beliefs about beginnings. I wish they existed. Well they do if you have amnesia :P...not that i m advocating that one should have amnesia to move forward in life.

Anyways i was filled up with emotions and thought i should write crap so i did.

Hope you enjoyed it :)...if u like it that is....

my innovative quote for the writing - " One's true liberation only comes with death ...everything in between is a mere illusion to achieve it  " ...wow super lame and sinical 

Utopia

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin~GUNTER GRASS

So i have final exams and can't seem to concentrate. As usual who likes studying. But recently they keep in telecasting stupid movies on Sony about the fight against evil by Indian police inspector. And weirdly enough it got me thinking of everyone's purpose on earth. Is it that people always want to strive for a Utopia or they actually want it. I might sound really cynical but i think i like the world we live in minus a few glitches. I know that there is crime and I know there is murder, terrorism, pollution, population, and not to mention OMG global warming. And we hear over and over again in the news we need to get rid of the criminal, we need to do this and we need to do that. But truthfully imagine a real Utopian society. What is a Utopian society. Even though there is a definition of an Utopian society in the dictionary i think Utopia is a figurative speech, a metaphor, or rather a extremely subjective perspective of looking at the world. Let me give you an example of what utopia is from different kinds of people. 


From a poor man: I think utopia would be when no one goes to sleep hungry, everyone has a place to live in and to  protect their loved ones.


From a rich man: I think a Utopia is when no one will steal my money and i continuously get this wealth and prosperity and no one in my family falls sick.


From a criminal: I think a Utopia is when the reason for my behaviour vanishes, and i get another chance to prove myself, where i m also treated with respect even though i made a mistake once.

From  a police Force: I think an Utopia is when i m able to catch all the criminals in the world and i get awarded for it. 


From a doctors point of view: Not necessarily fatally ill but i get patients


From an engineers point of view: i want to make machines but to the point they don't take over me.  


These are just few examples....doesn't mean its true that they have to think like that. But imagine that everyone is rich, that means the value of money will vanish, imagine if every criminal is in jail or respected then we don't need police man, imagine that everyone stay healthy, we won't need the entire health industry, and imagine engineers make a machine that is as smart as a human, who will then need emotional fools such as us. 


So the point of this long rant is that everyone's utopia is different, and one mans utopia is another man's dystopia, for a non doctor being healthy is a utopia but for a doctor its a dystopia. And omg i don't know about u all, but if i had to live in a world where nothing is happening and every is like this  :D:D:D:D:D:D:D...wow then telling a joke to a sad person would be no longer fun. Making someone realize there mistake will be no fun, parents will never have to teach their kids anything and lovers will have no reason to manai ( god can't find the English word for it....what i mean to say is u know when they get mad go and make them happy) each other . And to give a religious point of view for those religious ones out there.......if heaven is on earth no one will ever wanna leave earth......and no offence if someone doesn't die the earth might have problems sustaining next 8 billion more people...its already over limit.....just food for thought...hehehe
so this was my most unproffesional blog for u all....hopefully i didn't break anyone's bubble of utopia....i love this world minus the rapist and terrorist everything is dandy.....well it might be an hypocritical statement ....but comeon u don't need to rape someone to get pleasure (plenty of that available in the market) and terrorist what can i say they are just fools trying to show of power ....well buddies show your power off where its needed...goo plough some land ;).....
Okies so this was my really weird long first post of the year....and since there is noo summer school for me this year....hope to be writing soon :)....wish me luck for my exams :D


Enjoy: if you like it that is ;)


Skeptical self .....


p.s: my quote for the post:  " What you already have is exactly what you need...more is gonna be too much and less is going to hurt :)"

BOREDOM!!!

“Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.”

hmm....almost 2 in the morning ...obviously extremely bored and my friend suggested that i should blog more often.I am taking his suggestion obviously but then again i don't understand why i am i doing. We all are bored once in a while and some of us are bored quite often.Some say if you get bored easily that means you don't know how to enjoy the things around you, and some say if you get bored easily then you yourself are a boring person. But i have a different take at this boredom situation. I think when i get bored i believe that its the threshold where the brain starts becoming creative. Confusing one might say...but when i m bored to the extreme level i search for novelty. And historical evidence has shown that scientist have discovered great things on the search of novelty, creativity and the sheer joy of curiosity. Curiosity doesn't occur without boredom being there to ignite the spark and novelty doesn't come unless you are bored by what you have already seen. Recently while watching a play the character kept on saying compliment in disguise, similarly boredom is the push towards fun in disguise. So it seems like everything you do is a disguise of something that is in process to come.Not guaranteed that it will be good but definitely will take you out of your "boredom"

Last post of 2010 so let me leave you all with a quote ......definitely of my own creations :P

"like love  is disguise of  pain and light is disguise of dark , similarly i m a disguise of u and u of mine " ....hahah that was horrible because my horrible end is a disguise of .....u fill the rest up!!!!

BYE 2010 

and welcome 2011 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

Hope u enjoyed the post

have fun ....if u liked it tht is :P

skeptical self...adios...amigoss

commitment

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt. ~ Rollo May 


Whenever we here the word commitment we tend to get rather anxious. We believe that after we are committed to something our lives are gonna go into endless doom of despair. I am not talking about relationship commitment but more or less about every kind of commitment, something as simple as committing ourselves to not drink pop for a month. I always wondered why people are so afraid of commitments to a task. Why is it that before the commitment is made that same task is so much more fun to do and after the label is put upon you that you are committed to this task we all of a sudden loose interest in performing in it. I can understand to  some extent why this might be the case. Its basically the idea between having that element of surprise that constant level of adrenaline that happens when you don't know whats about to come. But its should be the same with committed task, the element of surprise is still there just in a different context. Its very complicated topic too tackle, but my theory on this would be that we are just afraid of failure. When i say theory i means that a general observation that i have seen in these committed situation. Fear of failure ...an nice alliteration...but nevertheless that is the case. Humans love conquering every task that they take on. They like to dominate over and succeed in everything they attempt to do .But when commitment comes into play the outcomes becomes known and definite. For e.g. if you promise yourself not to have a drink for a month and you get weaken by a stimulus and have a drink you failed in that task. Due to that failure you will be considered weak with no self control and someone who cannot achieve taken on tasks. This will in turn demean your authority as a superior being hence greatly affect your self esteem. All this sounds like gibberish but if you think about it to some extent this is true. Another example would be afraid to choose a major for your degree. We don't necessarily choose what we are interested in but rather what we think we might be successful in. If we only choose things we like and got committed to them than a lot of us would see the face of failure. If i wanted to become a famous guitar player and become committed to having a career in that than it is not necessary that will particularly happen. So when the big picture is looked upon we tend to bend towards things we are capable of succeeding in. You can also argue that what is failure and who decides failure. Well for this post all i gotta say is that failure is definitely relative and  different people have different perspective. 
A quote with a pun : "If i won't fail it , i will nail it ;P" ----Skeptical Self 


enjoy:)  hopefully that is 


Skeptical Self :)

Unconscious purpose

Its a friday night almost a sat morning, sitting in front of the computer absolutely wasting my time. Well you may wonder if i already know that this is waste of time why would i be doing it in the first place? Well there are lot of things that we think that are a waste of time but we do them nevertheless. For example watching the same movies over and over again, talking on the phone for hours saying stuff like " so umm yea wats new" once at least 5 minutes or checking facebook every 2 mins eventhough we know nothing new went on it. So why do we do these worthless time consuming, wasting energy and never benefit us? I have tried not doing these activities and being more productive like , reading textbooks, baking, cleaning but eventhough they are such highly productive activities they more or less felt like chores. And whenever something is joined to the label of chores it can never give you satisfaction. What truly gives people satisfaction is challenging their imaginative side, social self and thought provoking.Humans absolutely thrive on putting themselves into fictitious characters and imagining a life that they themselves cannot enjoy, thus reading novels and watching cheezy movies fulfills craving of living an interesting life is achieved. Social networks most definitely waste a lot of time of an individual through non-sense tags and games, but i am 100 percent sure that when ever we get tagged in a post especially the ones that include a less amount of people our self esteem take a leap for sure. It makes us feel like we are part of someones life and someone else thinks of us as an important member. According to big bang theory's character it might be a useless thing to wish for, but according to a Nativist we can explain that it is all evolutionary need. We all need to create contacts so human kind can procreate and when in time of need can call our "pact" to save the human kind :P....seems rather ironic since we are out to ruin our own kind and we are actually fulfilling that criteria pretty well. One side of the coin, make connections and socialize to get your ass saved when needed, but on the other side go behind the same people and shoot their brains out so they won't go against your beliefs and ideas.
               This post seems rather opinionated and messy and seems like a long boring essay. Well actually truthfully speaking rambling on about random topic and not really reaching a concise agreement to any matter is the biggest problem with a person who is OVERLY skeptical about anything. Coming up with a skeptical little conclusion to my post is that ......well wasting time seems useless but our chimpanzee brain is actually trying to make us more efficient creature that can possibly save our asses in the future, and also help us imagine a different life that we could live.

Enjoy !!!! hopefully that is:P

Skeptical mee ;P