Improving The Quality Of Your Life

Our only security is our ability to change.
— John Lilly

Whether you want a better car, a better paying job, a bigger house, or a fluffier cat, you will have to face one big ugly spiky scary thing:  change. It’s not that scary though.

As living beings, we are constantly changing in order to adapt to our environment and live good thriving lives in it. Some changes are massive and difficult to make, while others are small and simple. But no matter the size of the change, there is a common pool of factors affecting almost all individual changes: Read the rest of this entry »

The Gay* Science

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Greatest Weight. — What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Read the rest of this entry »

“If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.” - Randy Pausch

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium.

In his moving presentation, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

On July 25, 2008, Pausch died at his home in Virginia, university spokeswoman Anne Watzman said. Pausch and his family moved there last fall to be closer to his wife’s relatives.

May he rest in peace.

Read the full story.

photo by: jmartinovici

People with brilliant minds and extraordinary capacities think little of admitting or exposing their weaknesses and faults. For them, they represent something for which they have paid, something that they deserve to have. They might even feel that their errors do them honor and help define them better.

On the other hand there are the mediocre minds, who would rather conceal and hide their few little faults, as they are very sensitive to any references that are made to them. This happens because the mediocre mind has another scale of values, one in which a person’s worth is defined by its lack of defects or errors, and not by its brilliant capacities or results — which is absurd, for we all know that no man is perfect. Hence, when the faults of the mediocre come to light, they are immediately held in less esteem, for they have lost that which gave them value.

No one can know what capacities he possesses for doing, happiness or suffering, until an opportunity arises to bring them into play.

Without such opportunity, the best anyone can do is speculate. And that speculation is often times exaggerated, as almost every person wishes, hopes and dreams, or distorts the reality with other, more pessimistic ideas and beliefs.

Those preaching that human beings have unlimited capacities are both true and false at the same time. They are true in the abstract and false in practice, for in the realm of the living we all obey nature’s laws without exception.

If you want to know what you are capable of doing, don’t listen to the well-wishers or the pessimists; look for the correct opportunity to test your capacities. That will provide the only true answer.

Photo by: carf