Rights

What's on my mind? Rights. The so-called inalienable rights, natural rights, god-given rights, etc. etc... whatever you call them ... you know, right to life, happiness, and such.

I do not believe there are any such things, but only those which we afford to each other. And that changes in time and space.

So let's not cloak ourselves in such foolishness and claim that we have rights given by some force outside of ourselves.

BTW, I am fully fireproof :-).

adagio for souls

They come from nowhere, to nowhere they return. As they travel they glow, they dance, they smile, they tumble and twist but go they do. They, the souls on their eternal journey from the unknown to the unknown. Briefly they can see each other through the veils of mysterious fogs, they whisper words of amazement, of enchantment, and they go along. "Hi," they say in passing. They turn around for one last look before the darkness welcomes them back into its rich bosom, but it is no more. They reach, they stretch, they strain, they call, they sing one last adagio and they go. As they go, they leave a trace, a small, weak trace of their golden, shimmering dust, colors of all sorts, glistening, suspended in the vacuum of reality, like the trails should be. "I was here," they say. Can anyone hear them? Those souls of ours. And go they do.

The road from the top

The road from the top is always down. The road from anywhere else is your choice - could be down, could be up, could stay leveled! Where do you want to go?

So refreshing, if you ask me

Ah, it felt so good to read the following few sentences from cnet news this morning:

Pop quiz: Which one is the true tablet? Apple iPad, JooJoo, Dell Streak, or HP Slate? If you guessed any of them you're right. Or you're wrong. Because the answer seems to depend on whom you ask.

And the reason for my excitement may not be what you would expect. It is not about the question raised or the answer (I) provided, or the comments - as clever as they are, comments, that is.

It is that the writer used "whom you ask" instead of the usual - and wrong - "who you ask." I read it and read it again and couldn't stop admiring what I saw. So there! Thank you Erica.

two minds

I have been born with two minds - one rational where all roads are connected and lead somewhere, where there is a beginning and an end, where 2+2 is always 4, where up is up and down is down. The other, that other mind thinks in riddles and feels in circles which never end, clouds which never rain, songs which never die.

How did they ever come together, those two minds? and why? to torment each other? or to help each other navigate life's mysteries? Whatever their fuel may be, they tease each other and play games, in constant mixing and melting and molding, miming, saddening and rejoicing in an eternal gasp called life. What am I to make out of it? Well, go for a ride and write home frequently.

reminiscing

I took my last war-time trip to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in May 1994. My mother had passed on in January, my daughter started living a more normal life in Osijek, my good friend Mira had been out of the nightmare of the war for a few years now, but I still had friends and family in the city. So, I undertook this last trip meaning to visit and bring a few goodies from the outside world to those stuck in Sarajevo.

It is not hard to understand what it meant to those inside to be visited, to be assured that they were not forgotten. I visited with my cousin (I wrote a little story about that experience - "The Other Side of The Mirror"). On my way back, I boarded a military plane (I had a press pass), took off from Sarajevo airport where just a year and a half before I ran for my life under fire to get into Sarajevo and landed in Split in Croatia short 20 or so minutes later.

What caught my attention was the contrast between the two cities so close but yet so far. Sarajevo, a city under siege and fire, and Split, a city in the swing of the oncoming summer with sidewalk cafes and lightweight fun seekers basking in the afternoon sun, sipping their cappuccinos. That contrast brought home the understanding of how easy it is to ignore the suffering of others when they are not seen, not close.

Purpose - part 1

During my second year of a rigorous graduate program in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University in late 70s, making my way through numerous contentious jousting with my fellow students while presenting cases, working on various projects, studying, taking exams, and feeling all the ups of triumphs and downs of defeats which left me feeling mostly empty, I started questioning it all with a fundamental question, what is life, and followed by even more significant question, what is the purpose of my life.

The struggles of my daily graduate student life just did not make sense to me since they only lead to more such struggles to follow during my supposed career after graduation. When I questioned the borderline brutal treatment encouraged and dished out by the faculty, I was told that it is in preparation for the "reality out there." Well, I thought I did not like that "reality out there." I just was not getting a stable satisfaction of doing what I liked to do as I thought I should. Stress seemed to be a prevalent state of being.

Thus those questions of life and my purpose in it were pushing themselves front and center, beckoning for attention. I started asking around, reading, thinking, discussing my nascent ideas with others. But, central to that process was a conviction that I must come to answers to those questions on my own, without subscribing to any existing ideology or theology, as a result of going as far and as deep as I can go with derivative questions, making sure that my conclusions maintain inner integrity and self-consistency, until such time I came to a place where I could not develop further answers. I was continuously pushing that boundary and testing my evolving system against new information.

The results are quite simple. My purpose in life is to discover and develop my distinguishing abilities to their maximum, apply them in my daily life and experience the process. Quite simple. Coincidentally, I believe that all life has that same purpose.

Now, I can take a U-turn and touch the first question – what is life.