Journey *and* the destination

I came across this great poem, Ithaka on an excellent blog by an academic heavyweight. This is from the blog post titled "Ithaka,AP from Prof. Ram Ramaswamy, Vice Chancellor UoH"

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is stepping down as Apple CEO, but more saddening are his health issues. A man who changed the world and whose impact will continue on for some amount of time.

Each of these quotes are a gem from him....
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/08/24/steve-jobss-best-quotes/

I just chose one very poignant one from them....

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

http://youtu.be/Q0VRj2uw9L0

Maybe thats why Indian philosophy invented the concept of rebirth.

The Good Life

From the description:

Watch New York Times bestselling author Mark Albion's 3-minute animated movie Based on Mark's book, More Than Money.

"The Good Life" takes you to a chance meeting between an MBA and a fisherman on a small island. As the MBA tries to teach the fisherman about business, the fisherman teaches him about life.

Life and work (in the right order)

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to
fake one of them, it had better be life

JOSEPH BRODSKY

*********************
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to
fake one of them, it had better be work

-Me, modifying on the above quote because what use is mastery in work if life has not been mastered.
*********************

Added: Paulo Coelho's Convention of those wounded in Love (modeled after the Geneva Convention, it seems)

Out to change the world!

Depressed or just Disappointed

Warning: Some of the things that I write are merely as a form of personal therapy. So I try to protect the privacy of the guilty or innocent.

This article in CNN from the O magazine caught my eyes as its title was exactly what I was thinking about. Am I going through a stage of mild depression or is it not as severe. The article helped me in finding out the difference between the two.
The article states

Depression is a withdrawal from life. There is a kind of hubris in this withdrawal, as though being depressed were a way of saying, "this imperfect, difficult world is not good enough for me. Give me paradise or give me death." The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out that depression is like a spell that a person casts over the world to make it utterly gray and uninteresting. Then you can tell yourself, "What's the use of trying? Why bother to get out of bed?"

The disappointed person lingers, however painfully, in the middle of the story, even though paradise has slipped through his or her fingers. Disappointment keeps you connected to life as it continues to unfold and places an important choice in front of you. It informs you that time has gone by and things have changed since you first risked investing in a cause or a career or an intimacy with another person. Neither a utopian outcome nor easy success nor bliss in love is just around the corner. Life is more difficult than you thought. The question is, what next? Are you going to take on the vital forces of life, despite limitations and imperfections, or pull the covers over your head as an exit strategy?

Well, I have had shares of both regarding work and perhaps that is promising because I might still be in the disappointed stage. So the article suggests....

Finding empathy
What's needed to transform disappointment in a relationship into something livable in the present and useful for the future is that kind of empathy in which two people's selves take a backseat to a shared sense of each other's suffering. It is impossible to be defensive and empathic at the same time.

Empathy helps turn anger into sorrow. When sorrow becomes mutual, it begins to erase the lines drawn in the sand. Only then does the possibility of apology and forgiveness become real.

Ofcourse, I am extrapolating from love relationship advice to work (that shows my lousy social life at the present moment :D).
But still, it resonated with me as I had talked in a previous post about losing empathy.

Finally, regarding the advice for love I think I have yet to reach a stage of disappointment though something is afoot!

The children instinct

From here: Orphaned hedgehogs adopt cleaning brush as their mother.

Losing Empathy

Empathy or the ability to put yourself in someone else' position is rare these days. Maybe because it is a dangerous thing, because if you empathize with the other, you will lose the will to fight against his position as ferociously so as to win. But it is also the quality that make us human.
I seem to be losing that quality these days. Filled with bitterness and frustration, I have come to view that a large part of my problems lie with someone else. The hatred against that person is overcoming my initial inclination to absorb the pains as part of the learning process. I am questioning wether what I am doing is worth it or am just wasting my time for a false ideal. Yes, I have the graduate student blues!
But that thought doesn't comfort me. I do not want to be comforted that everyone goes through these phases and I will come out better at the end. For I do not know about the future, but I know whats happening today. I have to take action and react to the way I feel right now. I have to understand what is going on and why I am feeling that way.
Its a mixed feeling and something I have rarely experienced ever. On the one hand it is frustratingly painful, but on the other hand it is mysterious. I cannot be sure if it is all bad or there is some good. Maybe it is both.
So finally a bit of rant out of my system and onto the blog.

Be More: Titan Ad

Philosophy

It happened in a jungle

The night the leopard laid down with the baboon!

Something more than empathy

Transformations or Detour

After not liking the brief stay in a city during my recent visit to Philly, I was puzzled since I always thought

I am someone more comfortable with big city life. I thought perhaps the recent years have changed me

and made me a village bum. But this video (via UltraBrown) made me realize why exactly, I liked cities

so much. In the words of one friend, "Cities give us stories". And I have been always in love with stories,

though I might not have exactly a very interesting story to tell in my life, atleast so far.

Cheating

Reading this post on the Overcoming Bias blog, I had the itch to comment the following joke that I had read just a little while ago. I managed to overcome my temptation to burst into a serious scientific discussion but I can atleast torture the few eyeballs this blog recieves :P

Friendship between women: A woman didn't come home one night. 
The next day she told her husband that she had slept over at a friends's house. 
The man called his wife's 10 best friends. None of them knew anything about it. 

Friendship between men: A man didn't come home one night. 
The next day he told his wife that he had slept over at a friend's house. 
The woman called her husband's 10 best friends. 
8 of them confirmed he had slept over and two claimed that he was still there.

A squirrel's fall

This post is not meant to make any sense

This morning as I was walking to work, I saw something which was new to me. I managed to see a squirrel fall from a tree! The bugger ofcourse was unhurt as he scampered away to his business. But the odds of a squirrel falling down and me being there to watch it is so low that I had to write about it.

I think the poor fellow must have been a tad embarrased!

"May he rule a 100 years"

"May he rule a 100 years" . This was what Paramjit Kaur is reported to said about Pervez Musharraf when she heard that her husband had been finally pardoned. Her husband Kashmir Singh was languishing in a Pakistani jail for over 35 years and Ms Kaur waited all those years waiting loyally.

While the love story is definitely admirable and requires all the attention it deserves. It also brought attention to the power to do good that people in power hold and also reminded me of the episode "Jiggly Balls" from Scrubs.

Dr. Kelso is normally portrayed as the evil, dogmatic and unreasonable boss but towards the end of the clip we get a glimpse of the kind of issues that he has to grapple with as a 'leader'.

Lying to teach

Overcoming Bias is a very interesting group blog, which tries to question the inherent biases which are present in our thoughts. This is a really great post about how even lies can really do you some good.

Related post : What does it mean to be good?

The obsolete letter writer

Sometimes journalists get to tell tales which are more beautiful than any literary author. Here is one such tale.

Randy Pausch

Love and Hope

No clues to what she thinks
High hopes on small gestures
Fear and joy mingle,
Heart ache paralyzes everything

But still a sincere charge
made with Love and Hope.