I Love the dream, I Live the dream, I Leave the dream

I can see so many characters around. They all are so happy to see me.Looks like I am the reason for them to smile. They all are loving me.They all are pampering me. Oh! I am so happy. I just LOVE my dream. It is so beautiful. I am enjoying almost every moment of my dream. The wind blowing, the birds chirping and the water flowing; everything makes me happy. The toys around, the soothing peace or the entertaining sound; everything makes me feel great. My mother’s love, my father’s care or my brother's/sister's affection; there is so much to LOVE. There is so much to LIVE.

With the time passing by, I see newer characters entering my dream. I still LOVE all the characters except the ones who are trying to alter the way I am LIVING my dream. But I am LIVING my dream. They say I need to learn the ways to LIVE, so what if I was LIVING happily even without learning anything; so what if my dream was more beautiful when I knew nothing.  But I succumb and I do learn. I am learning to LIVE.

I am growing. I am not a kid anymore. I am learning and I am learning to LIVE. I am looking out for bigger things to please me. The birds are born to chirp and the water is bound to flow. Even the people who used to be my life are no more the reason for me to be happy. Parents love me but that’s their duty. Nothing of these pleases me anymore.

I want success. I want growth. I want to defeat everybody. I want to move ahead of everybody. Even if I can’t win, I would make sure their defeat. I want money. Even if I can’t earn much, I would make sure they don’t too. Now I have money. I have name and fame. I feel so happy.

Actually I still don’t. They are much richer. They are bigger. I will still yearn to get bigger name, more fame and more money. That will definitely make me happy.

I have so many people loving me. But how can they do that? I don’t really love them. I hate them.  I am so angry with them. The characters in my dream are so sick. They are just destroying my dream. No body seems to love me. I want the “real” love. He/She loves me very much. I am so happy now.

Actually I am still not. I am so lovable. I am so likable. I am so much ‘I’.  He/She doesn’t seem to love me. He/she doesn’t understand me. Had he/she understood me,  I would definitely have been happy. Actually it’s not about him or her. Nobody seems to understand me. I just have so many unlovable characters in my dream.

How can I be happy?

They say I will have to LEAVE my dream. They must be joking. How can I LEAVE my dream. I don’t want to LEAVE my beautiful dream. I don’t want to LEAVE him/her. I don’t want to LEAVE them. They care so much about me. He/She always worries about me. I have enough money to enrich my dream. I have won the race.I enjoy every morning with sun rising. I enjoy every evening with sun setting. I enjoy every walk outside and every talk inside. I enjoy every moment. I thank GOD to make me LIVE that moment. I LOVE my dream. I LOVE to LIVE my dream. I don’t want to LEAVE my dream.

My dream has ended. I needed a LEAVE to LIVE and LOVE my dream.

Do you really LISTEN?

It is so surprising that sometimes we don’t really listen to what people say to us. It is surprising because we hear them but we don’t listen to them. Thinking over this distinction, I really got anxious to know how hearing is different from listening. Till I could really understand the difference, both of these words were synonyms for me.

Hearing is just a physical phenomenon. Whenever somebody spoke something to you and the sound waves generated reached you, you definitely heard whatever was said to you. However, you heard something, never means that you actually understood whatever was said. Paying attention to whatever you hear results into listening. Essentially, consciously using your mind to understand whatever is said is listening. After finding out the difference, I was quite happy to realize that what most of the times I do is listening. If I ask you how many times you listen instead of hearing, what would be you answer? I am sure most of you would also say listening.

Going deeper, I found that listening is not only hearing with attention. It is much more than that. Listening is hearing with full attention, without applying our mind. Most of the times, we listen to somebody, but we don’t listen with an empty mind with enough space to accommodate what all is spoken. We come with a lot of prejudices or pre conceived notions about the speaker or the subject on which he or she is talking. We pretend listening to the speaker, but deeper inside we keep a judge sitting, who is really dying to give judgement of right or wrong, truth or false or yes or no. That judge is always ready to give advices. Sometimes we even come prepared with a negative mind-set of proving the speaker wrong. Even if the speaker has done nothing wrong, the judge is ready to literally punish him or her.

I asked the same question again to myself, if I listen most of the times. This time the answer was NO. I listen but I don’t LISTEN. I am sure now most of you would also agree that you don’t LISTEN. Please notice that LISTENING is not listening without making any judgement. Whether we should make any judgement or not, is a different question. But, at the moment, what I am saying is judgements can be made later, when the conversation is over. LISTENING is listening without making any judgements at the time when conversation is taking places.

Fair enough, the main question is why should we really care and bother about LISTENING. So often we think that, for a relation to flourish, we need to say the right thing at the right time. Infect, at times unspoken words become so critical that they change the future. Often we regret that if we had said those words, our lives would have taken a different path. Sometimes, we just remain silent and silent, and it becomes too late. Sometimes it’s late to the point that listener leaves us emotionally, and sometimes it’s too late to the point that the listener leaves us physically too, infect leaving the life. Surly, it’s really important to speak the right thing at the right time. But we often forget the significance of listening.

Let’s look it the other way. Had you really listened, err.LISTENED what somebody wanted to say, your life would have been different too. When you listen, you listen to only what is spoken or not even that. But when you LISTEN, you LISTEN to not only what is spoken, but what is not spoken as well. Most of the times, we don’t really LISTEN to even the people who are dearest and closest to us. Had we really LISTENED to them, our relation with them would have flourished as well. Sometimes we get too late and do not LISTEN to them till the point comes when they really leave us and then we think that they never said to us anything. More are the chances that they did, but we never LISTENED to them.

So are you ready to LISTEN?

Alter your Nature, not Behaviour !!

Let’s begin with a question. How often do you like a learning, you accept it, you decide to follow it and yet you fail to do so? Let us put this in other words. How often do you decide to or you are suggested to alter your behaviour and you agree to do so, but still you find it hard to continue the alteration. I am sure you would say many times. Have you ever wondered that the learning that you gather from your experiences remains forever while the learning that you get from listening to somebody or reading somewhere remains temporary!! You listen or read, you accept, you follow, you ignore and then you forget.

There are innumerous examples of such a behavioural pattern. You come to know it is good to do exercise everyday yet you don’t do it. Although when you get into really bad shape or health, you start paying attention to it. You know you bother too much about what others say and that makes you feel bad most of the times. One fine day you read a self-help book and come to realize that it is not what you should do. You bring in the alteration in your behaviour and continue with the alteration for some time, but then you come back to the original way of being after some time. Although one sudden day something drastic happens in your life and you decide that now onwards you won’t really care about what others say and you continue with it as well.

Have you ever wondered what causes the permanent change or what really brings the persistent transformation within you? I tried to think over this. After thinking a little I realized that whenever we get to know something and we try to alter our behaviour accordingly we often fail to retain the alteration. The alteration remains permanent only when we actually, truly, really realize what we have come to know and alter our nature accordingly. Experiences in our lives always give us great learning and alter our nature. That’s why we are able to retain our learning that we get out of our experiences. This would make you think how nature is different than behaviour as it did to me as well. I went on to identify the difference. Further I share what I realized.

Everyone has a nature that is formed by the observations or experiences that he or she gets in his or her life. It is the basic way of thinking or being. Behaviour is a little different. It’s the way you act. Nature is internal or inherent, while behaviour is external and is derived from nature. So your nature decides the way you think and act in various situations. The way you act defines your behaviour. This means your nature decides your behaviour and when you alter you nature, your behaviour alters automatically.

You might wonder if this is the case then how come it is possible that sometimes we alter our behaviour only without altering our nature. I would say this is possible and this is the fault we make. Many times our behaviour is not aligned with our nature. We don’t behave in synchronization with our nature and that’s when we fail to bring in the persistent transformations. Behaving opposite to your nature never leads you to success. You can do so only for a small period. You cannot continue it for long. So if you want to bring in a permanent transformation within yourself for whatever expected goods then you really need to alter you nature instead of behaviour.

I won’t end before pointing on how you change your nature and not behaviour when you want to bring in permanent transformations. It is very simple. You need to really get into what you have come to know. You need to realize instead of just agreeing or accepting it. What this means is you really accept the learning as a reality in your life and writes it deep down within your mind and heart. No matter what comes your way, you always have that learning with you. In other words you really get committed to what you learned. This cause the change in your nature. And as I said, change in nature changes the behaviour automatically.

Do you have Facebook Relations?

Today, I was just going through my Facebook Profile and saw a share.  The share was very funny. It compared a boy’s and a girl’s Facebook Profile. The message conveyed was a boy, whose status update says he has won a Nobel Prize, hardly gets a couple of comments and likes. On the other hand, a girl ,whose status update says she has bought a lovely pet, gets hundreds of comments and likes. Along with enjoying the share I also realized that, though it was an exaggeration, it was not completely incorrect. Most of the boys, though don’t get much attention, feel much proud in commenting on a girl’s profile. I am sure girls enjoy that too.

Going by my habit, I started thinking what makes boys going and commenting on girls’ profiles and what stops girls doing the same on boys’ profiles (going largely by the Indian Society and Social Networking).  It’s not only about commenting. Most of the boys thoroughly enjoy adding girls in their friends list while girls seem to be avoiding that (intentionally or unintentionally). Had this been related to the information that opposite genders attract each other, both the sides should have been doing the same.  But this is not what is actually happening.  

Going by the history of what I have written till now, you can be certain that this is not what I am going to talk about in my today’s blog. My intent is not to appeal to girls to accept boys’ friends request or to make them giving more comments and liking more of the boys’ status updates. We will again go one step deeper to make out something new out of this observation that I had and most of you would have had too.  

OK, so let me come directly to the question, what’s wrong here? Is it that girls are introvert and boys are extrovert? Is it that girls are afraid of strangers? Is it that only boys are interested in having more relations or it is that girls are still living in a society which is not open enough to give them a chance to have stronger relations with boys?  We live in a society and each one of us looks for new relations. Being social animals we do enjoy new relations, new friends, and new people in our life and their companies too. This is not new too, as this has been happening for many centuries. Then what has changed?

Thinking a little, this is what I could get as an answer. We still love making relations but what has changed is the definition of a relation. Now we don’t like to have relations which are Relations, rather we prefer something called as Facebook Relation. A relation in true sense (any relation, friendship or parents-children relation or husband-wife relation) for me is the one in which both the sides related are fully committed to each other’s happiness though they don’t expect such commitment from the other side.  So as long as you are committed to a relation fully, you have a true relation or you share a true relation from your side. You never bother if the relative is fully committed too. As far as our Faceboook case is concerned, either the boys are not really looking for such a relation or even if they are, the girls don’t think they are. Since the girls don’t think that Facebook could be a mean to get a true relation, be it friendship or love, they don’t really bother to do something like this. Some of you might differ here but I would just repeat that I am picking the case of Indian Social Networking on Facebook and there can be a big lot of exceptions also.

Something to note here; is it that only boys look for so called Facebook Relations and girls look for the true relations. Let’s try to find the answer to this question. Over the past decade there has been a big change in our outlook about relations. We have started hatting something which is the root of every relation. We hate commitments and being committed. Instead of looking for a true relation, we look for a relation that could satisfy our ego and make us bigger in the eyes of the beholders. Boys do feel proud of having a Facebook Friend of opposite gender, which might not be the case with girls. In fact in today’s world we are always looking for relations which can give us a sense of pride. We don’t like friends who stop us going the wrong way. We don’t like parents who always scold us for adopting the bad habits. We want our spouses to be good looking. We want our spouses to be rich.

I am not saying that this is the case with all of us and there is something very wrong going on. My intent is rather to differentiate the most desired attribute of a relation which is commitment. There is nothing wrong in making a relation that suits your choice, however with a lack of commitment in the relation it would always remain a Facebook Relation and nothing more than that.

We Love Impressions!!!

OK, for a change, this time I will begin with a straight question, how often you don’t like a person who is loved by many others? I am sure you would say quite many times. Even this is not rarity that we find it too irritating to see somebody, whom we used to like a lot sometime in the past. We often see, the same children who love their parents when they are kids, stop loving them when they grow up. A boy or girl, who is ready to die for his or her beloved, stops even taking to the other at some point of time. Why do we have totally opposite emotions for the same person at different point of times? Above that, what makes us love or hate somebody?

Thinking over this, I realized that our emotions for somebody are based on our judgements. We as humans are always trying to judge others. Infect, we are born judges. We love judging people. Forget about people, we don’t even leave objects and the nature around us. We judge people, make an impression about them in our minds and behave accordingly. The behaviour and emotions that we associate with an impression in our mind remains the same throughout our lives. We just keep changing the impressions of the people surrounding us.

Interestingly the impression exhibited by a person varies drastically with time. We are never absolute and possibly we can’t be. We are made to change the impressions with time and situations. Right from the moment we are born we keep changing the impressions. Somebody who can come up with the right impression at the right time is loved by everybody.

Most of us always wonder what we do to be liked by somebody. The answer is simple. Just try to see which impressions are liked by that somebody. You just need to fit yourself into the lovable impression of that somebody. If your friend likes people who speak less, you speak less and surly you would be loved by your friend. If your girlfriend likes her boyfriend to spend time with her, you spend time with her and surly you would be liked by your girlfriend.

On the other side, if you want to love somebody just change the definition of the lovable impression that you have in your mind. So if your friend speaks more than your liking, start loving people who speak more. If your boyfriend doesn’t give you time, start loving people who give you less time and enjoy the privacy that you get.

Is it all that simple? Had this been simple, everybody would have loved everybody else. The complex thing is to change the impressions. We can’t change impressions so frequently. Infect to put more correctly, we find it hard to go against the impressions which we find lovable. The moment we are born, we are zero. We don’t have lovable impressions and we can love almost everybody. You see, the kids love almost anybody. Kids love humans and not impressions. But as we grow up, we get surrounded by the impressions, one over another. Imagine how the life would be when we start loving humans and not impressions. On a very remote note, imagine how the life would be when we the humans would be humans and not impressions.

What do you do!!

I have been writing on many topics for quite some time. Probably the better way to say would be, I have been literally doing the “operation” of the human psychology and emotions. So this time I thought of trying something new. I thought of writing a fictional love story. Getting inspired by some authors writing love stories and seeing how those writings appeal to youth, I thought of trying the same. I started writing about two characters Maanav and Devi who had to fall in love at some point of time in my story. Forget about falling in love, Maanav and Devi were not even introduced to each other, before I realized that it’s not what I love writing on. I was hardly getting any interest while writing on such stories. And finally I decided to get back to my area of interest and do what I love.

The simple idea of getting back to doing what I love suddenly filled me with a sense of pride that I do only what I love. But soon I felt, no I don’t always do what I love, rather I love what I do and sometimes or most of the times I don’t even love what I do. I do just for the sake of doing. On analysing how doing and loving are related I found while doing anything you might:

Be doing what you love

When you get to do what you love, you feel great. You would feel very satisfied and contented while doing the work you love. If you are doing what you love then surly the results would be good. There will be no procrastination. And finally at the end you would get a sense of achievement. You would feel proud that you did it.

Be doing what you don’t love

When you do something which you don’t like, the outcome is generally not fruitful. You might do it for various reasons. Either you are forced to do it by people or society or you do it for money or recognition. Anyhow, more are the chances that, at the end of the story you are not going to feel really contented. You would feel a little or more than a little dejected while doing the work and after doing it as well.

Be loving what you do

This situation mixes with “doing what you love” up to certain extent. There are two possibilities here. First, you start loving the work you are doing and the next time you would do that work as you have started loving it. Second, you have to do that work and you have started enjoying it as there is no sense crying over it and getting frustrated. However if you had an option of leaving it, you might have left it. Actually there is a high degree of possibility that you never loved that work.

Anyhow most of you have figured out that we should either do what we love; otherwise we should start loving what we are doing.

Let us move one step deeper into “do what you love”. Let us try to understand how do we find what do we love doing? We did not have any liking when we were born. Since the time we were born we were made to love doing different things. In fact whatever we loved doing, we first did that to love it. This means we do something first which can or cannot be liked by us. To love some work first you have to give it a try. So the more important thing in life is to DO. If you love it, do it, else leave it.

Well, does that mean you can do anything that you love? The answer is NO. Even finding out that whether you actually love doing something is also not that simple. Sometimes we get a feeling that we will love doing something or we love doing something while in reality we won’t or we don’t. After thinking a lot finally I decided I cannot say I love doing something if it gives me or it will give me temporary happiness. If I have an opportunity to do something that can give me persistent happiness that stays throughout my life then I should definitely try it. There can be many tasks or activities doing which give you temporary happiness, but the happiness won’t last long. The real task or activity is the one doing which you feel yes, you are doing it and at the end you say yes, you did it. For example you cannot create your palace by breaking others’ houses. This means you cannot be happy in a long term by harming/hurting others. At some point of time you are going to regret which would mean loss of happiness. So it will be better to avoid getting involved into any such activities. Essentially watch for the tasks that can give you permanent happiness, do them, love them and at the end say you did them.

What is Love?

We all want to love and be loved. Thinking about love today, I suddenly realized how quickly we start loving each other. Love can be between any two living entities (to be specific, between a living and a non-living entity as well). The most obvious love is the love existing in a relationship in existence. Love between parents and children or husband and wife are the examples. Sometimes love starts creeping in even without an existing relation. We often see a boy or a girl falling in love at first sight (is it love? debatable point). We as humans also start loving animals, objects, places and what not. We are in fact born to love.Then I asked myself what is love. Suddenly many thoughts started prevailing in my mind and soon after, I thought of translating my thoughts into words.

Allow me to share please, the first thing that struck my mind while thinking of what love is, was compatibility and mutual understanding. But immediately I rejected this idea as love can exist even without any of these phenomena. Kids grow up and sometimes the understanding starts disappearing between them still the love prevails. Then I thought love is care and concern. Since even in the absence of mutual understanding they care about each other so they love each other. But still this could not pacify the anxious mind I had at that moment. Care is the outcome of love. If I love something or somebody I care about him/her or it. No love no care. Isn’t it? No.

If you care about something or somebody then it doesn’t really mean you are in love. You might want to care because caring is into your nature or you love somebody else related to the person or thing you are caring about. It is like a girl getting married to a boy immediately starts caring about his parents, whether or not the love is present. Love might occur later also. In fact liking and loving are also different. You like somebody doesn’t mean you are in love. Love is more intense and deeper feeling than simply liking.

The question still remains. What is love?

Then I went over some other aspects surrounding love. Is love attraction or enjoyment? When we enjoy somebody’s company or we get attracted towards him/her , should we assume ourselves to be in love. Quickly I derived the response as no as this is indeed attraction. Then I thought it is actually the sensitivity towards fulfilling somebody’s wishes or desires. Guess what; quickly I thought that might be responsibility as well.

Uff. Finally I went through some articles and writings on love. I could not figure out the real definition of love. Then I thought let’s try to form a definition and that’s what I did. Here is the definition:
Love for an entity is an intense and deep emotion resulting due to its goodness. Love can cause you to care about, get attracted to or be responsible towards somebody or something.

By goodness I meant anything good existing in the entity, good looks or good behaviour or even good singing or good dancing as well. I might love a tree if it gives me shelter as I consider its sheltering as its good quality. I might love a river if its serene water really calms my mind.

Moving a step ahead, sometimes you try to see goodness in some entity even when you haven’t really known that entity. You love your kid even before he or she is born. Forget goodness, you know nothing about your kid who has to put his or her first foot on the earth still you love that kid. I figure out that you love in anticipation of the goodness. This makes me think even the anticipated goodness can result into love.

Wow! Something really surprising resulted while searching for the definition of love. Love can indeed be caused by the anticipated goodness. This means we don’t really need to know some body and his or her good qualities to love him or her. Every person has something good in him or her which might or might not be known to us. Why can’t we accept this fact and anticipate the definitely existing goodness. Just imagine how much love would start prevailing in this world of growing hatredness.