Wisdom of Ages

I suppose the best story of all is the story of life. As it is to those of us who know enough to see the end and still be able enough to can't wait, to those of us who love to look back and front with a smile, to those of us it is the very best of all stories to tell. Who want's to hear more? Say yes!

They say happiness is such a fickle thing and then, of all the choices that we have, we end up choosing everything else. We choose all the things that other people say will bring us pleasure or standing, both of which can only be yours by choice. And in the end we end up with all the things that money can buy without feeling any good. It begs the question when will enough ever be enough? Everybody should know the myth of Midas and his touch of gold, but you can take your pick of almost any fairytale and find a golden thread of yearning desire, wanton need, happiness and choice. The problem is not to question when, but what it is you want.

I suppose it  makes sense that a lack of oxygen would dull your senses, but as a child with asthma, the only thing that I knew was droll. Never much to play, never much to perform, never much to notice at all, but when you wanted me I was always there, smiling in my oxygen deprived reality. I used to sit in trees a lot. My mother tells the story how I hid away in the branches of our backyard tree, but in my mind I was sitting there, grateful for the chance to climb above the struggle of moving over ground. Happy to sit there in my happiness to breathe. I'm still somebody that finds happiness in small things. I get captivated by beauty, and I'm easily enthralled. I have a deep appreciation of the growth and development that is possible if you can get over the struggle to take a deep breath and just do it, and I still to this day hate people that don't. Though hate is an emotion I only had to confront much later in my life... To me, making the most of it is not only a way t...

To this day I still cannot remember much from my childhood. Memory being what it is, that could either mean that it was uneventful boring, uneventful horrific, or uneventful happy. Uneventful boring would either have meant that I had some kind of childhood malaise that prevented me from exploring the world like my body was designed, or my environment gave me so little to explore that my mind found muchness in things that amuse it, because that is the way it was designed to do. Our environment abound to fascinate and enthrall, to captivate in natures radiant beauty and blind us in awe of existence. I can understand that in some children the beauty in nature can be the allure to lead them wandering off into the sunset, following the promise of a dream that's better than the one we left behind. According to the elder in my care I was a dreamer, staring off to space and making never-ever journeys to never-never land, and though it sounds like kinda fun to leave it just like that,...

A recent article by Deepak Chopra, Crossing a spiritual divide , mentions that Americans are experiencing a spiritual awakening. For the first time in 47 years, more than 50% of respondents to a pole admit to a "moment of sudden religious insight or awakening". What I'm thinking is when is the wave going to hit us in South Africa, or has it just begun to do so? Ever heard of Mighty Men? (No, not the cartoon superhero, or you and your dad.) Mighty Men is the most recent South African flavor of religious fervor, and the man with the cross is Angus Buchan , who professes nothing but a simple message of love and prayer and good Christian values, and he does so to men. Mighty Men is only one of a whole range of flow experiences that are currently being triggered all over the world. Another excellent example can be found in the "gift" that the Black Eyed Peas gave to Oprah on her birthday. Not only does it perfectly illustrate the nature and occurrence of spiri...

Many of us may remember some experience where we were engaged in an activity, and in the blink of an eye it seemed as if hours had elapsed. This experience is referred to as flow, and a few years ago it was the subject of a lot of research that resulted in another, more descriptive term called 'optimal experience'. The reason why such a relatively strange human quality attracted enough attention to become the subject of research, is that such experiences are frequently remembered as “the best time of our life”. One of these experiments aimed to examine the different user experiences that facilitate the occurrence of flow, simply by asking research subjects to describe their flow experience. By analyzing the feedback they formulated the following qualities that are common to the flow experience. Challenge – The activity must be challenging, but not so much that it discourages people from participating. Skill – To complete the activity, a participant must use some kind o...

When Hugh became Heff, just after his first betrayal in love, that was probably where our path’s split. Even then, with him fearlessly choosing the traditional role of faithful husband, and later of wealthy Casanova, our journeys maintained the course that started off in early childhood. In many ways I feel that we are twins, separated in time by the betrayal of love as we understood it then, and it broke our hearts. I decided that I would uphold societies wish and play it straight, and since I was definitely not straight, my life became a search for answers. I immersed myself in the study of science, and through it I came face to face with God. But just like my first experience with love, my meeting with God through the lens of an electro-microscope didn’t look like it was ‘meant’ to be at all, and baffled by the evidence I had found it slowly dawned on me that maybe society was wrong, that some of the things that were told to me was flawed. It was during this time that I broke m...