Khayelitsha,
Kibera, Orangi Town
Wakeful the night, robbed of its sleep
hunger and fear and pointless the tear
a man and a cat prowling the street
paw-print in mud, squealing and blood
hiding away under a sheet
gunshot and scream, then comes a thud
violence by dark the truth is so stark
Dharavi, Neza-Chalco-Itza, Rocinha,
Manshiet
A day has died.
(nothing changes)
When I wake up my day is born
For sixteen hours then I blow the horn
I want to plug my mind into another source
and believe I have access to a hidden force
(a voice calls “change it”)
To leave the mundane behind
Stop leading a life so blind
in what has become the perpetual grind
and a dis-ease infecting my mind
(on the cusp of change)
Jump onto dreams, not one but three
Climb ever higher up my flame tree
To be free and unobstructed see
Touching the blue reality
Unlocking life with my unique key
(embracing change)
Now, never more and with pressing resolve,
before my wings retract with fear
I am heading for another hemisphere
upon a tune only I can hear,
clearly ready to evolve
(change)
The sacrilege of losing another day
A blasphemy if I would stay
There is no other way
I am flying without delay
Now I can play
I love my day
Let's play and play my beautiful day
your weight, so light
my body against yours so tight
an urgency in parting
once more you pull me close
then I will leave
you whisper please don’t go
innocent and curious this night
we have till dawn
only the candle knows
and when the cuckoo calls
again I shall run on
to shine this fairy tale
across another page
and when my glow becomes a burn
open the book and I’ll return
What is (longterm) happiness reliant on?
On me being happy of course.
However, basing happiness on something/someone has a catch. When that something disappears, happiness goes with it.
Soever a bad idea.
Definitely, happiness is amped when I have what I want, and I wouldn’t want to live without what I wanted because that makes me happy.
Want – have – happiness, not-happiness, want – have – happiness, not-happiness, want …
The frequency of life. Roll-er-coast-er.
I pursue happiness. I run after it. Sometimes I catch it. I find that ‘…happiness…’ and I am ecstatically happy. Forever. Yeah really! — ?
I’ve got health, job, girl, cabriolet, aircraft, house, money galore, — G-d am I happy, over the moon. I float in transcendence.
Alas, that is a fleeting ecstasy. It’s a pill. Pills’ effect is not lasting.
Health gone, happiness gone.
Job gone, happiness gone. Girl gone, happiness gone. Cabriolet stolen, happiness gone. Aircraft crashed, happiness gone. House repossessed, happiness gone.
Everything gone, happiness gone with it.
Not being happy doesn’t necessarily infer that I am deadly, depressingly unhappy, but to me, not-happiness would be somewhat vegetating along. What’s the point? To get through a crisis and then find happiness?
Isn’t it that the accomplishment after the successful pursuit of pleasure makes us feel happy? Ahh, satisfaction. The consequence of taking a ‘pleasure pill’ is, well, pleasure, and that’s when I’m truly happy.
Uh, that word truly. Rampantly, crazy happy. Really? Or just overboard, cloud-nine walking till the novelty wears off?
Real, lasting, unblemished happiness is the product of the deliberate thought, “I am happy,” without a condition.
There is no “I am happy if… or when…” there just is “I am happy.”
You gotta beeee happy, you can’t find it. You create it by saying that you are. You instantiate, actualize, effect and realize it.
Wait a sec. How can that be? I need my sailboat to be happy. I need my Yorky to be happy. I need, I need…to be happy. You gotta be kidding me with this “I am happy,” unfinished sentence.
Maybe the great sages can be happy without any condition, but I, hmm?
And yet, whenever I think about it, and lately more often, I think being happy is a disposition, like a pizza base. I need to create the base. Tomato, cheese, olives, and artichokes without a base to put on are like pills, but, when you provide the base you have a real meal in your hands.
A base of happiness garnished with the ingredients of my liking. Now my mouth is watering and life is dancing. Scrumptious stuff.
Unattached and still happy, yeah, and then heap on the blessings.
Don’t just think it, say it out loud,
“I am happy, I am happy, I am happy.”
Now I’ve just created the base.
Words are expressively powerful.
Saying “I am happy” eliminates the desperation to find happiness by pursuing evermore garnishings.
Having an unconditionally happy base, being unarguably happy, un-joggle-able, allows me to gather my focus onto that which is important to me. The amusing thing is that suddenly I don’t want a thousand things anymore but literally just a few, — to make a really delicious pizza of my life.
Happiness is such a solidly good base that any decision reached in that state of happiness can only lead to more of the same.
Happiness from outside is makeup. Admittedly beautifying life immensely, but it washes off. Happiness from within is an unshakeable foundation.
Let’s all set our human cruise control to “I am happy.”
Imagine the impact of all us happy people in the world?
Staggering.
Magnified sand grains
A bit, or a memory cell, in computing terms, is the smallest addressable entity of information conceived by man, — not a byte, a byte is made up of eight bits, also called a word but not in the literary sense.
Science, by way of nature, knows about some really small stuff too:
Atoms, Protons, Neutrons, Electrons and Quarks, Quanta, Plancks, Leptons, Higgs bosons, and Strings…
It gets so small it becomes enormously large again.
Flipping bits was the exclusive terrain of Assembler programmers in the early years of programming.
They’d switch them on or off, — a dichotomous choice, — for various programming logic reasons. Often bits were simply used as status indicators. An ‘on’ bit is also said to reflect a status value of ‘true, and an ‘off’ bit a status value of ‘false.’
Imagine you are running an App.
For simplicity let’s say on some processor a bit is designated as a day/night status indicator. ‘on’ means it’s night-time. When the App tests the status of that bit a value of true is returned and it will say ‘Good Night Earthling,’ otherwise if the bit is ‘off,’ false is returned and the App will say ‘Good Day Earthling.’
Because bits can only have one of two values at a time, either on or off, these values are also referred to as being ‘one’ and ‘zero.’ A zero is sometimes also referred to as meaning ‘initial.’
Strung together bits and bytes make sense (instructions, data) and have been the foundation of our computing prowess for the last, oh, seventy-five years.
Bits, as tiny as they are, have allowed humans to progress on all fronts at mindboggling speed, — human-lightspeed when compared to a hundred years ago.
We rule and succeed by ones and zeros, or more accurately by on and off. Hard to believe, — when we play with an App or use a social network, — that it ends up in ones and zeros.
Computers and most significantly the internal process that uses bits and bytes are an ingenious, brilliant invention.
Shades in between ‘on’ and ‘off’ don’t exist. A distinct yes or no, or a clear ‘on’ or ‘off’ has been our modus operandi since the start.
If we can get this far using this principle how much further could we get expanding on it?
Nature works on an inclusive approach. It doesn’t just switch on or off, it has every nuance in between too.
Nature’s bits are called cells. A single cell has all the information necessary to make the whole, whatever that is: a tree, a human, an orange…
“Lead the way Nature and we shall observe and copy.”
Arrive the Quantum bit or Qbit. It can exist in the superposition of two states at once. That is a quantum jump from the established, entrenched, practiced thought process of seven decades where a bit could only have one of two states.
Why this (Super)Quantum bit?
Because we want to achieve more. In the process, we always come up against limits that make us re-think our approach and then better it.
“We are masters at transforming reality to rise above the wishlist anchored in imagination.”
Human lightspeed was achieved with one bit representing one value. Dare imagine the possibilities if a bit can represent more than one value?
The potential incremental effect to everything conceivable to us would leave factorials in the dust. We would have to strap our mind to our brain else we would lose it.
Now then, let’s look at our greatest desire:
Human interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic travel.
We have come a long way with travel. Walking, riding, driving, flying. At its extremes, we are now at the international/interplanetary stage. Let the ISS* and the moon be planets for this example.
Elon Musk wants to get to Mars. Extended interplanetary travel. Presently this journey critically highlights the limitation of conventional space travel: to transport matter (human, spaceship) through space (distance) to an extraterrestrial destination in a time frame that does not adversely affect our life or compromise our lifespan on earth.
A prerequisite seems to remain: we still want to climb into a vehicle, race into the distance, get out on the other side and do something and return again.
We are at odds with the time required and the physical and potential psychological extremes and limitations involved.
We got this far by flipping bits and we have once again approached a limit.
The time has arrived to use Quantum bits and develop that even further to the capacity and ability of a cell and then, — then capture the essence of individual beingness and project that.
Nature, the Universe, seems to have no limit to anything.
Humans suffer limits but somehow always manage to come up with something to jump over those boundaries.
Limits occur because, well, we have reached the end of a path and are being ‘told’ to think beyond the state we are in, i.e. not just ‘on’ or ‘off,’ but out of the quanta called a box.
“Let irrational, perceptive thought govern our thinking and rational actions our collective fellowship.”
Physically we are Earthlings, accurately definable entities governed by the natural laws and behavioral laws on earth. If we want to venture beyond our horizon, and by the way Mars is still within our horizon albeit barely visible, then a quantum leap is necessary that supersedes the rational, temporal, telluric based thought process.
Materialistic propulsion has limits.
Certainly, a self-contained, Enterprise-like spaceship traveling at warp speed through space is a wonderful picture and incentive to dream.
However, imagine transportation evolving into a completely new reality through a concept born of irrational thought conceived in a vacuum of presupposition.
The future of transportantion lies in:
Essence gathering and projection
and not physical transportation at all.
Picture credit: These sand grains took 14th place in the 2011 Nikon Small World contest. https://www.livescience.com/16369-nikon-small-world-photos-2011.html
ISS – International Space Station
Rising as a reaction to ruling indifference and indoctrinated acceptance, the question is like a bubble of methane gas released in a swamp. The question comes into existence. The question has a life of its own and a reason to be there.
You’d be moseying along minding some business, probably in semi-automatic mode, and pop, here comes the question:
“Is this the best way I can live my life?”
The question serves to remind us to revisit what we want, — and then compare it with what we have. The wider the discrepancy the more persistent the nagging, to the point where we often become impatient and ignore the question, falling back into inherited mediocrity.
“What am I supposed to do now that I am so deep in it?” you might say.
“I need answers where none are forthcoming and not questions to upset my life even more.”
The question is actually an observation of my own life telling me that the path I am on is not in agreement with what I want. It becomes a billboard above my eyes. Softly interrupting at first, patiently persistent, and eventually pounding me with all the force of pain and frustration when it continues to be ignored. Ultimately, however, even the energy of life will succumb to the anguish of being disregarded and overruled by the mind and retreat into depression and disease.
Why let it get to such a state of stuck desperation?
The moment we acknowledge the message (the billboard) that Life* has, no matter how hopeless we think our situation is, we become our own ENABLER.
When I thus ENABLE, I BELIEVE in Life. My Life.
The only honest, concerned and able guide I have is my Life. Suddenly, as if by some mystical arrangement I will be doing it the way of my Life.
During the times that I follow the way of my Life I am given a limitless view and a feeling of perfect alignment. Nothing is missing. It’s the way. The only way for me, — exclusively only for me. Why? Because I am like none other.
Now the magic happens: I forgive; I am free; I let go; I understand; I help; I decide; I act; I love; I achieve and progress; I create; I win; I am kind; I am complete.
The way of my Life is harmonious and flowing existence. That is happiness. Everything comes together.
In turn, you might have a pertinent question too that you want to ask your Life at the present moment.
Ask: “Life what do you suggest right now?”
Behind the ego and emotion, Life’s answer will be loud and clear.
*Life (with capital ‘L’) an intelligent existence within us with an unbiased concept of our being; an entity or a part of us who guides us to the utmost benefit in the context of our individual super-reality.
~Nothing, clueless & lost~ 