Posted by: Vivant June 17, 2014
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Evanescense,
It is always a treat to read all the food for thought that you put out. You have expressed deep and complex thoughts in an attractively simple way. I agree with everything you have said, pretty much sentence for sentence, word for word, thought for thought.
A couple of thoughts I'd like to submit:
"If you don’t have friends, go out and make some"
That's the key to becoming the well-adjusted person that society expects us to be. Without friends, we risk turning into misfits and outcasts, things that most of us don't want to be seen as but at some deep level may already have become. :)
The trick, as cliched as this might sound, is to seek out quality over quantity. Many people make the mistake of compensating for their loneliness by seeking friends without being selective about who they befriend and in the process collect friends who turn out to be bad for them. Which can be more ruinous that not having friends. Some people maybe conscious of that danger and avoid bending too much to attract friendship but I think that is one of the most common social mistakes everyone makes at some stage of discovering and exploring their inner self.
The other thing I have realized is sometimes the people you are closest to - your childhood best friend, close cousins whose company you enjoy, the few real friends you have in the foreign land that you are currently in, and dare I say even your own siblings and parents in some cases - come with their own mental and psychological baggage and we often fail to recognize that. It is easier to recognize the baggages of classmates, colleagues, acquaintances than of those you are emotionally and socially attached to. That's why we fail to protect ourselves from those who we don't feel vulnerable towards but who in essence have the biggest effect on our emotions.
Lastly, on another note, I recently re-watched "The Never Ending Story" from the 1980s. Not sure if you've seen it. Highly recommended if you haven't. It was a great piece of cinema for its time - in every respect from the story line to the special effects to the sheer audacity of the writers imagination. Like how they say all modern American writing can somehow be traced back to Hemingway, I feel much of the fantasy movies that followed, can, at some level, be tied back to the Never Ending Story. The theme was refreshingly simple : when you lose hope, there is despair, and despair creates a negative "nothing", which consumes us all. Even though it is a children's fantasy, the allegorical references to life's struggles, ups and downs are astoundingly brilliant and serve to remind that life is only as complex as you make it and fulfillment lies in simplifying your feelings and thoughts. Reading your piece reminded me of the movies's take-aways.
Keep writing, you need to be paid for this ;)
It is always a treat to read all the food for thought that you put out. You have expressed deep and complex thoughts in an attractively simple way. I agree with everything you have said, pretty much sentence for sentence, word for word, thought for thought.
A couple of thoughts I'd like to submit:
"If you don’t have friends, go out and make some"
That's the key to becoming the well-adjusted person that society expects us to be. Without friends, we risk turning into misfits and outcasts, things that most of us don't want to be seen as but at some deep level may already have become. :)
The trick, as cliched as this might sound, is to seek out quality over quantity. Many people make the mistake of compensating for their loneliness by seeking friends without being selective about who they befriend and in the process collect friends who turn out to be bad for them. Which can be more ruinous that not having friends. Some people maybe conscious of that danger and avoid bending too much to attract friendship but I think that is one of the most common social mistakes everyone makes at some stage of discovering and exploring their inner self.
The other thing I have realized is sometimes the people you are closest to - your childhood best friend, close cousins whose company you enjoy, the few real friends you have in the foreign land that you are currently in, and dare I say even your own siblings and parents in some cases - come with their own mental and psychological baggage and we often fail to recognize that. It is easier to recognize the baggages of classmates, colleagues, acquaintances than of those you are emotionally and socially attached to. That's why we fail to protect ourselves from those who we don't feel vulnerable towards but who in essence have the biggest effect on our emotions.
Lastly, on another note, I recently re-watched "The Never Ending Story" from the 1980s. Not sure if you've seen it. Highly recommended if you haven't. It was a great piece of cinema for its time - in every respect from the story line to the special effects to the sheer audacity of the writers imagination. Like how they say all modern American writing can somehow be traced back to Hemingway, I feel much of the fantasy movies that followed, can, at some level, be tied back to the Never Ending Story. The theme was refreshingly simple : when you lose hope, there is despair, and despair creates a negative "nothing", which consumes us all. Even though it is a children's fantasy, the allegorical references to life's struggles, ups and downs are astoundingly brilliant and serve to remind that life is only as complex as you make it and fulfillment lies in simplifying your feelings and thoughts. Reading your piece reminded me of the movies's take-aways.
Keep writing, you need to be paid for this ;)