Reflection

       Yucky with sense though. Man should be like cockroach! Like the roaches which can hold their breath for 40 minutes, we too, should hold our temper for 40 minutes, or even more, before anger becomes overwhelming. Like roaches 3 pair of legs that substantially function, we too,should go forth before time overrun us like the roaches back legs that never tired pushing forward. We should be flexible to move back for reflection to make every decision effective, and move forward again,like the roaches front legs that works back and forth.But most of all, we should have time to take a break in prayers, to replenish our heart and soul and invigorate for the next race, just like the roaches middle legs that  act like brakes when the roach runs.

Beyond Silence

     Here I am again excited to write another masterpiece of my mind. I would like to discuss further approximating what you hear in silence. How important it is. Sometimes, we don’t appreciate it, but there’s a lot of unspoken treasure with it. 

When you are in love, it is  in the heart, that even when you have thousand of words to say, still you can’t find the right word to magnify the every minute details of reason of how you felt. But it’s in silence where you listen attentively to your partner’s eyes. According to Dr. Hyle, some of the most beautiful expression of love are expressed in silence. Well I am a person who talks a lot but silence for me is important when I am too much full of thoughts and emotions, because when one is in love, there’s only 3 words to summarize all, that’s “I love you”. The loving heart exudes love in silence. Silence between friends and lover’s says that one’s presence is enough. There are thousands of places that one could choose, but if he chooses to be with you from all other places, and from all other people, even his silence speaks volumes of tender expressions of love. In such silent moments in private sanctuaries one’s silence says “ your presence is enough. When one is dismayed and disappointed, by just merely holding each others hands in silence is enough. It is like saying “ we will be okay”. True love need not to be confirmed daily but it is perennially spoken and demonstrated in silence of assurance. When you keep asking “ do you love me? It is somehow, partly, asking because you are not convinced so well.

When you care, be it in friendship or romantic attachments, the kind of silence says something else. You don’t have to gain an assurance by words because assurance is shown so well through actions. True friendship need not be reconfirmed daily, because even when you are far from each other, the silence you both experience is a thriving factor of needing each other. True relationship does not everyday, every week, every month. Because when God places in the heart of one true love, one true friendship for another, peace , assurance and security is offered-these are spoken is silence.

When we are angry, even though, it won’t seem like obviously simple, silence is needed. But let’s clear the distinction between anger, hurt or irritated. In some level they have common ground but they different. Anger is a common to everybody. We feel hurt or irritated when someone of something obstructs our desires. In its technical sense, anger comes in when one has the desire “to get even with” – that is to take revenge- the cause of the hurt or irritation. When adrenaline pumps to your bloodstream, when your heart rate jumps, when your blood pressure surges, you need to listen to your veins shaking in anger in order to control yourself. Silencing is self-mastery during this time. When you don’t control your emotion, your horn grows, you give a dirty look, but at least you control the scenario by preventing the fight. That’s why silence is important. There are far better ways to cope with hurt and insult other than anger. Because in reality, anger itself acts like poison to your heart that ultimately degrades the quality of your life as much as it hurts life of another person.

      Many expression of love, gratitude and affection are always offered, but there are significant silence that are left unappreciated, but they made up strong relationships. The silence of a quite meal ( like in Betania retreat house, where I only hear the sound of chinawares) is acknowledging God’s bounty, the silence of a busy partner who is a teacher, computing grades while the husband suddenly came with a glass of milk is enough, the silence that is broken by only the twinkle of an eye, the touch of an arm, the squeeze of a hand is more than words. We are lucky! Thanks God that in these noisy and chaos world, God design another way to express our emotion in silence.

Man's Quest for Happiness!

Everybody was always seeking for happiness in many angles and corners in life, be it on a person, in a work, and even on places. People jump from one decision to another in search of true meaning of life where happiness lies. When man is finally in the verge of happiness, eventually he will seek for more and willfully budge on another adventure that will add to his happiness. And when what he is doing is not answering his need for happiness, he will end up sad, alone and crying. It’s because, man by nature is not contented. That’s why, searching for real happiness is some kind of just only a page of a book, only one climax, all the rest are just expositions, then, the end is denouement . In fact, sometimes, the ending is a question, leading to another episode in life, sometimes, comedy, and worst-tragedy.

Our life is like that. Even if traverse the road where we think is right, sometimes the road is not ours. So we are in the wrong track. Oftentimes, in the world where we are confronted with many obstacles, we tend to take the instant giver of happiness that somehow ruin our life, such as vices, abuse, alcohol etc… all these are just depressant, they make us experience ecstasy, but when it subsides, we are again doomed into a life full of hate and bitterness where happiness has no room to stay in our heart. The most frustrating part is when, we take the road less travelled, where we stumble on big stones , tormented with sharp grasses and clean up the road to leave a good trace, sometime, life is just harsh enough that  all the effort are just left in vain. You may think that you have finally found happiness, but no, because other forces pull you down and made you unhappy.

It is said, happiness is choice. True, it is  a wise choice. However, when deciding what to do and what to decide, whether to buy an ice cream or a chocolate, to stay or to go to party, to accept or not to accept an offer, etc, first, believe or not, our decision is cored in the yearning to be happy, or at least happier than now. Second, there’s a good chance that the decision we jump into, may be wrong, thus, it will make us unhappy. There’s only two greater chances that shares the same probability-to get happiness or unhappiness. A coin somehow will not stand as you throw. You know what I mean.

According to Harvard Psychologist, its not for the lack of trying. The declaration of Independence affirms that we have an inalienable right to pursue happiness. See? We look for newer, fresher, bigger, cutest, finest, the best, stuff like that. But many of us believe that “ stuffs” can’t buy happiness. For most, man’s imagination is positioned to think of happy-ever-after scenarios. But neither sadness and joy will last long as we expect. Because even those who sleep with money on their bed, don’t guarantee total happiness. Remember, happiness has many levels. It depends on how much you love things, people, events. Accordingly, you can’t love without happiness and you can’t be happy without love in some degree.

So.. to sum it up, happiness is just within us. Those outside forces were just stimulus that even our response can be manipulated. If “they” can’t make us happy, we can make other things happy from and of us. We can make insignificant  things bring about happiness by simply appreciating that thy exist. The cheapest cell phone that we have, unless damaged, serves its purpose to let us connect to our love ones, thus, it deserves to get a good smile from us. The simple food that we share on the table(  while others don’t have food to eat)  should at least make us appreciate life, happy that we can make our stomach full each day. The people who stayed with us, lovingly cared for us, emptying themselves for us, are worth millions of happiness, why? because you can’t just find these on the road like candy wraps.

Happiness is indeed within us, We only have to appreciate things as they are. It is not found anywhere. It’s just right before our eyes that we don’t notice. It’s just right on our nose that our eyes can’t see but can feel.

( PS. I will sleep happily now )

Famous Quotes from Famous Personalities

 Lines from famous people somehow will serve us our  channel and funnel in improving ourselves.Here are some collections:


1."It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression."- Alfred North Whitehead

2."Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."- G. K. Chesterton

This book is not to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.- Dorothy Parker

3.Read in order to live. – Gustave Flaubert

4. “A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.”- Thomas Carruthers

5.“A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.” Cicero

6. “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” –Smith and Jones

7. “You can't teach a hunter it's wrong to kill.”- Hari Dass Baba

8. “The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.”- Norman Doughlas

9. “Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”- Denis Dedirot

10. “First he wrought, and afterward he taught.”- Geoffrey Chaucer

11. “I can find my biography in every fable that I read.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

12. “The walls are the publishers of the poor.”- Eduardo Galeano

13. “In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.”- Aldous Huxley

14. “Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse.”- Joseph Roux

15. “A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.”- Stendhal

16. “Perish those who said our good things before we did.”- Donutos

17. “Education is the state-controlled manufacture of echoes.”- Alexandre Dumas Fils

18. “A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.”- Maz Eastman

19. “There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.”- Allan Bloom

20. “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.”- Russell Green

21. “Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.”- Cyril Connolly

22. “Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.”-Georges Simenon

23. “For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”- Herman Melville

24. “Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.”- John Morley

25. “Literature is the immortality of speech.”- August Wilhelm Von Sshlegel

26. “. . . A man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.”- Thomas Babington Macauly

27. “The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.”- Sarah Ban Breathnach

28. “Change your thoughts, and you change your world”- Norman Vincent Peale

29. “The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough.”- Bede Jarrett

30. “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”- Albert Einstein

31. “The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”J.R.R. Tolkien

32. "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."- William Gibson

33. "I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man, I think my liver hurts."Fyodor Dostoyevsky

34. All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.-Frank Herbert

35. It is not that power corrupts but that power is a magnet to the corruptible.- Frank Herbert

36. “Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.” William J. Durant

37. “The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.” Francis Bacon

39. “When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.”Erwin Bourdet

Expecting - The Bottom line is Love

           Let’s now be serious and sober of looking backward on scenarios on the valid reason why we EXPECT  from things- from our job, friendship, and especially on relationship-be it ordinary or romantic attachments.

          First, here are the common questions leading to the answer. What do we expect? What are to be expected? What did we do to make us expect? How and what do other people say  to make us expect from them? Tough ahuhh..

           It’s so ironic to say that we should love without expecting something in  return. Well, we are not angels fallen from heaven  who believed in a dogmatic kind of relationship. Because in the real sense, we expect because we invested our Mind, Heart and Soul. Let me cite  to you some commonplace situations to get across the vista of issue of expectation.

          We empty our self to our work to get gratification and satisfaction. IF we are not satisfied, then why do we demand?  Who else here would say, “I just would love to work even paid less. This is only germane for those rich whose work is just  a play. This is where expecting comes.

          In a relationship, we expect because our time and effort are equally important as money.  Who else would love to just be ignored by a person, a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, husband and wife,  after fetching her/him, after helping out on his/her works, after involving ourselves to meet deadlines which is not ours but theirs? Who else here would be happy , when the person is around during his difficult time and gone with the wind when we need him, and eventually we hear his merriment with other people while we are left behind, waiting for his call, wondering what happen, not even a single text? Oh common,,, Remember, there are 24 hours a day. 60 minutes an hour and it wouldn’t take a minute to say “ I am just here” Here is where expectation comes in

            In mathematical probability theory, expectation is the value of  every action. We expect because it’s the value of our action.  When we act, we consider the ups and downs that we encounter, we look from right to left  hazards before we the step and most of all every action is a risk and every  risk involves our HEART , MIND and SOUL.  That’s we expect.

          On the other side of the coin, perhaps the discussion is somehow connected to the ASSURANCE that people pledged , that’s why we expect. Do they also realized, we expect because they assure us? And How many promised are broken each day? How many assurances are failed? How many lies are there from people who have mastered this art?

           Your attitude is an expression of your values, beliefs and expectations." This quote by Brian Tracy, a self-help author and motivational speaker, . says it all. It all boils down into REAL LOVE. Why? Because if  our employers  LOVE us in return, they would never fail to provide us with ample benefits that we so we deserve from working hard. If our partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband , and wife truly love us, THEY would never act anything that would disappoint us. We will never demand for more if we are gratified. And we wont expect for more, if we felt we are treated special and LOVED.

            May God Bless Us ALL!

The Act of Loving

I remember a line from the poem written by a girl” I give you love in an open hand, nothing but that.” And let quote from the book The road less traveled, it is the love where are no gems around. It’s just love all alone with no decorations at all. Love ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt. There were many moments that I have felt genuine fulfillment . But the question is, is it love? real love?

            In the world of so much misery, loneliness and need, I have felt real love from people - not the substitute that sometimes passes for love. There are people who have captured beautifully a lot of things that love is all about: unselfishness, communicating, helping, giving. Because of them who teach  us real  love  and  essential action  of  love, We can’t just curl up in the corner and tell the world how miserable and terrible our life is. We have to go out of myself  to something or someone beyond our self because this is how loving people give out of being loved. 

  I have realized the greatest act of help and love, of course is the act of healing. There's nothing greater than having a comforting bestfriend, mentor, lover etc..With them, everything seems easy, every pain seems easy to heal and bearable. The very little sacrifice we can make for them is nothing compared to all things they significantly do to support us, to console us, to be there for us, and love us truly through thick and thinl

      Be it in friendship or romantic attachments, If we are not compatible, that’s a good sign. It’s actually very good, because it challenges understanding and giving. When there are lot of differences between us, we’ve got to do a lot of talking. We’ve got to be patient with each others difference. We can’t always dominate and do it our way. Sometimes we have to give in and do it their  way. All the patience and the talking  and all the giving makes the real love because  they make for unselfishness and concern for other. “ Take care for me Hon”, be good, sleep well please, Please pray for us, I don’t want you get hurt” These were just few words that sometimes get uncommunicated but I am sure the meaning is the same- I love you". 

          We,  as lovers at the same time, should always tell our loveones to get on living and loving. Let's be lovable and we will be loved.

Can Real Love Develop from Chatroom and SMS?

Building relationship and trust from a perfect stranger is not an easy task as peeling banana.Maintaining these new found relationship or friendship can be difficult though and getting to know someone well over the Internet and creating a lasting friendship is a hard task.They say, people with common interests attract, but for me, it wasn't our sameness that attracts each other, but the difference that push two people in love to get interested to knowing each other.Unlike poles attract each other and maybe few of  conflicting interests do the trick.There is no overnight recipe to great friendship. In my experience, i just open myself as a book and let him read. Reading myself made him appreciate and anxious to read one page to another. Reading the whole book shouldn't be in  a hurry.It is a process and takes its own sweet time. However, it is worth going through that process and being rewarded with a lifetime friend.Eventually that will be the start of the evolution of love- from friendship to real love.

       There had been innumerable comments and questions with regards to the survival of long distance relationship. It can't be denied that the outbreak of technology played a great character in communication, the edge to connect people from different places and races all over the world.  Thus, this so called "love over the net" sprouted like mushrooms worldwide. Well, i leave that to you, if you believe that there can be real love from the so called relationship over the net.

          Let's face the reality that there were successful marriages that started from internet. Their relationship has been tested through times and the  pledge of commitment is engraved in a stone that even the crash of heavy rain  wouldn't disfigure love. It would only make love grow each day as they hurdle problems together. That i wouldn't hesitate to say " till death do us part" if i will  know and feel that he is  the man whom i would love to be with for the rest of my life, regardless of where our relationship had started. I know that the real covenant is in our hearts. "not, from texting, not from net, but from the heart.

      So, now.. a piece of thought.. Love is everywhere.

Build Human, Not Monsters

Yeah, we must admit that facebook has been the best gift technology as offered us. It has become a link to connect friends, relatives and even strangers in the most convenient time. I agree that it has also become a gauge of understanding people's preferences and social status. I think no question about that. However, everything in this world has its corresponding negativity when things are use beyond its limit, beyond its purpose.

       Let me quote back again the line which i once posted in my facebook account which vehemently expressed how disappointed i am with the things i have recently seen on fb walls. 

         "For God-sake! Could you use this FB as a venue for others to communicate, reflect, learn, laugh and love? I do respect peoples thoughts and feelings for whatever motivation they have in posting and sharing pictures here, but.. golly,, know what and what's not! Would u like your kith and kins, nearest and dearest to disrespect and demean your dignity as a person?none of my business though but its sad to know kids are able to read "f--k, I--t, plus these pictures that aren't appropriate for public viewing. sorry for my sentiments.


          Well, i don't want to sound antagonist of people's happiness and gratification on posting those nude pictures.It's their life anyway. It's also not my real concern on those explicit words we read. Perhaps one consideration is the so called " sociolinguistics" that somehow these people speak of the "same language" as the themselves understand, grow at the same understanding and interpretation.


      The risks now lies on the public viewers who were most of young generation- the young ones who were aggressive enough second chance of Fb-ing even while on jeepney, bus, even in the classroom ( nobody knows!)
       
       Considering the common characteristics of adolescents and teenagers? Do you think they will along with curiosity as soon as they explicitly seen those obscenities on facebook which is the chief source of social networking this time? 
    
       "In social terms, the adolescent needs more than simply to belong within the peer group; now there is a need to single out particular individuals with whom one can have an intimate relationship. In their social interactions and in their play, adolescents express a compelling need for communication. Finally, the adolescent is engaged in a struggle to create a stable and permanent sense of self-to achieve a degree of self-awareness and self-acceptance"


        What does it mean? Somehow they may feel that exposing themselves with those "unpleasant sights" on Fb will make them " in" in this society. They feel they are accepted in the society and even with their peers when they are part of the so-called trend, which they thought is right, but not,

      In many ways, we are part and partial in the corruption of mind of our growing youth today. We are not building who will be useful in the community in the future. We are not building people who were God-fearing and people who love humanity.


     Somehow, it's a reflection of us who are leaving our footsteps behind to our kins. We can't just let our loveone's life ruin due to exploitation which other people have unduly created.


     There have been many critiques about this, and i am one of those who thumbs up in the advocacy of bringing up and reviving morality issues simply by posting worth reading reflection on facebook. In my own way, it may not too great to fight, but at least i have contributed a little in building humans, not monsters.