LivinGology

My Favourite Quotes - Continued


Women hold up half the sky. Mao Zedong on gendercide

Married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking. Chinese Proverb

Invite all your fears to participate and you will see that there is somebody who cares. Allow the past to be in the past, the future is now, express yuor feelings and get to your point. Be authentic - this is the only fruitful connection with the others. Quote from a cartoon movie

Managing the Unmanageable

"Even the most stable brain operates just a millimeter from madness." Time


I've recently found out about a program called Mind Manager. As you might have guessed by the name its purpose is helping you manage your thoughts. The software is quite easy to use as unlike other programs (with more mechanistic approach)  it represents the reality of our thinking more accurately. What you get when you open the software is an empty sheet with no lines, cells or margins, just empty space, exactly like our mind before having a great idea to fill up that space with. Ok, say we've got the idea. Then we have all the freedom of writing whenever on the sheet we feel like to. After writing down something we feel proud of we can put a delighted emotion next to it, like every piece of information in our memory is accompanied by a certain emotion. Probably the best thing about the software are those little cubicals with pluses and minuses, connecting the topics. Again it resembles a lot our very own mind with its hundreds of thousands internal 
connections. We keep track on most of them consciously, while many work on unconscious level and there are those that fade away with time. The program is less likely to forget or end up with schizophrenia and can prove better than our memory and thinking in some ways.
The logical question here is can we manage our mind? We, men, manage people, companies, projects, but how about our own mind and life respectfully? The problem with the carrier of our psyche is that there are still many uncertainties about it and how can you manage something you don't know well? Psychology, the science that is supposed to improve our understanding of ourselves is one of the most unclear sciences which doesn't even have a single definition of what mind is. Another constraint to maniging the self are our emotions. Every single еvent in our lives is
accompanied with certain emotional shades. We just cannot separate them from the rest of us. Neurolingustic programming claims emotions can be managed by learning how to call them out and how to surpress them whenever we want to. I've tried that and it does work. I am happy when I decide to be and I am never sad as I decide not to be. The problem with that is that others are not aware of the fact they can control their emotional flow and thus you cannot communicate with them very well.
Unlike things we typically manage, say projects, when it comes to our mind we don't have the habbit to write down what is going on in it. There is no such thing as Life Plan. Instead we are used to rely on our memory, some hardcopy materials (like pictures, letters etc.) and good old friends. As we don't have a clear plan how can we manage the process of our mind? How can we
measure the results? How can we lower the risks? There are two answers: society and common sense. The major framework of our lives is created by us, the society we live in: we go to 
school, some of us to univeristy, we work, make family and kids, we try to contribute with something to humankind and we die. During that period of time what navigates us is our common sense and intuition. Again, no
plan, nothing to manage. Then, why are we surprised that things didn't turn out the way we wanted them? Living
is like loving - everybody thinks they just know how to do it but a few are those who actually can, and it's usually because they had the time to think about it and learn how to do it. 
In a few words, mind cannot be fully managed as there are too many things that are not up to us. From the other hand there are quite a lot that ARE up to us and neglecting them just because it's easier is no use as we have just one life to live. So, you might never come accross Mind Manager, but it's probably a good idea to keep a natural copy of it in your head.

If - A Poetry Break

Here is one of my favourite poems - If. It was written by the English author and poet Rudyard Kipling, more famous for his Jungle Book. In 1995 If was voted Britain's favourite poem on the BBC opinion pool. The poem sounds like a fraction of value heritage passed on from a father to a sun and  conveys a philosophy of self control and search for harmony in life.  Every time I reread it, it reminds me how important  it is just to be a good person and how all other pety daily concerns lose their meaning if we lose the ground of who we are.
The posting is dedicated to a person who will never read it and who actually introduced me the poem. He himself incarnates its values and I am greatful to him for passing some of them onto me.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

Thinking through Pictograms

I dedicate this posting to two people who don't need to read it, as they have their own special way of seeing life.

Pictograms is an old method used by psychologists to understand peoples' thinking and intelligence. I find it very useful if you want to analyze the specifics of your thinking and especially clarify what the basic things in life mean to you. The techniques is simple. Take a white sheet of paper and a pen. Now I'll list a few conceptsand for each of them you should draw a picture that would remind you of the relevant concept. Your ability to draw doesn't matter. You can draw anything except for numbers and letters. Here is the list of words itself: 1. a joyful holiday; 2. a sad night; 3. happiness; 4. a brave deed; 5. ease; 6. support; 7. separation; 8. the last; 9. doubt; 10. past; 11. inspiration; 12. a sad autumn. After you've drawn a picture of all the 
concepts ask yourself the questions: What have I drawn? How would that help me remember the concept, what's the connection between the two? You'll be amazed by the results! Everybody has different connotations and no two people think the same. What I like most about this techniques is that it shows you in pictures your own opinion about the most important things in your life, in a way you might haven't even though of.

Jealousy

"Attack is the best defence."

Jealousy is one of the most powerful feelings in interpersonal relationships. It is defined as feeling angry or unhappy becuse somebody you like or love is showing interest in somebody else. Some people are more jealous than others. Why? 
We can trace back the reasons to early
childhood and a particular traumatic moment but any explanation of that type would be a kind of excuse to justify our present behaviour. We can easily relate jealousy to the sense of possessiveness as well, which you see is a trait that can not be easily changed. But let's see jealousy from a different perspective.
There is a defense mechanism in psychology called projection. Psychological projection is when one attributes (projects) to others, one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts and emotions. Say, we are extremely jealous of our partner. We live with the unpleasant thought that someone else can steal them from us. Are we not actually scare of the fact that we ourselves are the ones than can let be stolen? By manifesting a feeling of jealousy we are unconsciously showing our lack of 
willpower and confidence as partners. On the contrary, non-jealous people seem not to use the mechanism of projection resulting in a more stable and 
affectionate relationship.

Complicated Simplicity

I had a couple of friends visiting me in the afternoon. They wanted to see my digital piano as they are about to get one for themselves. We started talking about musical instruments it was not until then when I realized 
how complicated my own piano was. "Do you have an idea what is going on under any key when 
you press it?,  the guy asked, "You can't even imagine!"(btw, I'm sure he'll read all this so just to say Hello;)) I'm very 
bad at technical, and especially 
digital termonology but as far as I got it what actually happens is an unbelievably difficult and 
complicated danse between modern technology and brilliant engineering thought.  Likewise, have you thought of all the seemingly 
simple things around us? Say, a stone 
or a tree leaf, do yu know what they are made of? Do you know what you yourself are made of? Probably Bill Bryson was asking himself the same questions before writing "A Short History of Almost 
Everything". And as you can see from the title one can't ever know everything. Even worse, the more you know the more you don't know. For me personally all these questions and the frustration of realizing we can't possibly know everything are necessary, as this  is how we learn new things. Curiosity is one of the two major emotions that have always guided men through survival and progress. It's just that sometimes we forget to apply it to the simple things from our everyday life and thus make ourselves less sensible towards their colourful multiform nature.