Things that matter

“There is only one thing people like that is good for them; a good night’s sleep” – Edgar Watson Howe

A good night’s sleep is an essential biological need. Without it, you can’t be your best during the day – at work, at home, in the car, or anyplace else.

Our behavior, moods, our ability to make decisions and even our eating habits are hugely affected by the quality and quantity of sleep that we get. Sleep experts recommend eight hours of sleep each night to maintain good sleep health, but in its 2001 Omnibus “Sleep In America” Poll, the U.S. National Sleep Foundation reported that one-third of adults (31%) don’t even get seven hours of sleep per night. The same poll also reported that 22% of respondents said they are so sleepy during the day that it interfered with their daily activities at least a few days every week.

If ignored, sleep problems can also contribute to significant health problems, such as strokes, heart attacks, high blood pressure, clinical depression, diabetes and other serious conditions.

Sleep issues can have a deep impact over an individual’s professional life, personal activities and general well-being.

However, getting a good night’s sleep is easier said than done, the hardest thing to do being right there at the beginning; falling asleep.

“How do people go to sleep? I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the nightlight. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember” – Dorothy Parker

No, no, that’s not it.
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As I wrote in an older article, laughing is good. Of course, that is if you don’t laugh all day long – some might say.

If one laughs too much, one is considered abnormal. But to really understand what abnormal is, we have to understand its root, normal. Here are some definitions for normal:

• conforming with or constituting a norm or standard or level or type or social norm;
• in accordance with scientific laws
• being approximately average or within certain limits in e.g. intelligence and development;
• convention: something regarded as a normative example;

As you see, the abnormality of laughing too much has nothing to do with the ideas associated with abnormality; laughing too much is simply different from what most other people are doing.

Now, do you consider yourself to be normal or abnormal?

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How wise is it to call something good and wonderful without looking into the future and asking, “where could it lead me?”

Not too wise. And yet we do it all the time.

When someone earns more, he feels that it’s a good thing. When someone enjoys life more, he feels that it’s a good thing. When someone buys a new car, he feels that it’s a good thing. Et cetera.

But what is that which we catalog as being good? It is our perceived experience of a single moment belonging to a stretch. And more often than not, we ignore the fact that we are not living in that single moment, but in the stretch. And so it means that we get caught up in the smallest of the details; most of the time.

There is a little Zen story that I’d like to share with you on this topic. I don’t know how it is called or where I have heard of it, but it goes like this. Read the rest of this entry »

“Know thyself,” the English translation for the Greek “gnothi seauton,” is the famous inscription in the pronaos of the Delhi temple. An inscription that stands to remind generations of the importance of self-awareness and understanding of the human behavior, morals and thought.

We probably all know how important that is, but do we actually do something about it? There are some of us who are working on it, but the vast majority of people simply hold the thought in the back of their minds, without taking any action to put it into practice. Not good.

One other important piece of wisdom is the one saying that history has a way of repeating itself. Those who don’t learn from the mistakes of the past are destined to repeat them; which is what humankind constantly does. History is not a straight line going from a beginning to an end, it loops and swirls, eventually finding its way back to places its been before. The funny thing is that most of us tend to make the same mistake in our personal history as well. We repeat past mistakes and errors, we arrive at the “wrong” destination and then we wonder what went wrong along the way; but we rarely bother to make a “map” to remember us of our past mistakes and their results.

All of the above means that we (the humankind as a whole) don’t really know ourselves or the results of our habits and actions, which leads to lives lived in repeat mode. A life in repeat mode is a life in which one individual constantly repeats a certain period of one’s past, until the end comes and breaks the cycle.

Kind of sad, but that’s what most of us do. Not something to be proud of.

However, there are solutions to that problem. And in this article I’m going to share one such solution with you. It’s something that you’re not going to find anyplace else, as it is an “invention” of mine. I hope it will prove useful, or at least interesting.

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