A New Year

It’s really awesome how all of us look upon each new year: as if it were something completely new, a diary full of empty pages waiting to get filled up with new events. Is this the case, however ? Unfortunately, not. To tell the truth, each new year is not a tabula rasa, a letter-less blackboard anxious for what we are going to write on it. And this is because we always full upon entering a new year. Full of events and memories, full of opinions, likes, dislikes, wishes and curses… We understand that this is so in due course, when we take a pencil and try to write something on the pages that we believed were empty and realize that they are already written. They have been written with our fears and hopes that come out of our past and determine our present.

We visit, for example, a place. Even if we have never before been to this place, it is possible that it will remind us of something. But even if it doesn’t, we will soon grow anxious to capture it somehow and in this way document our presence there. Thus, between our eyes and the place a lens soon intervenes: the lens of our mobile phone or of our camera. Soon afterwards we fall into indecision about which is the best angle to take the photo. We are already lost into senseless anxieties and thoughts that are connected with memories and form threads of thought which make the feeling that this place ought to leave us with, fleeting, even indifferent.

And if this place reminds us of something, then it should come as no surprise if it triggers memories from parts of ourselves that we thought we had left behind but now come back uninvited, making us realize that the onion we were fiercely peeling off has still got too many peels and that the more we move towards its heart the more these peels are soaked with what we used to be, what we still are.

Can one escape himself? No, not as long as he is himself, as long as he identifies himself with his ego, as long as there is no room inside him for some tranquility and silence. Not really.

A better person

Spirituality is wonderful, as long as it has an impact on this world here. I mean, spirituality should help the individual become a better person and incorporate in his life the spiritual values he aspires in, rather than, say,   let him just enjoy a successful and blissful meditation sitting per se. Spirituality isn't about successful sittings at all, it is about how you can make yourself a better person, useful to those around you, inspiring, truthful and so on and so on.

Magic

In order to perform magic, you need to be enchanted yourself first.

Understanding

What I really want is to understand. To understand what pain means, what death means, why I have the license to hurt someone and, what's more, why do I do it.

I can't give answers to these questions. No one can. This is why we live our lives "as if" we knew what we're doing and we give any answers that we can - and best serve us. "As if" I knew what I was doing, I started a family. I did so because I've never stopped believing in man; it's my faith in God that it's not as solid, because I needed him to be a good old guy who takes care of his children no matter what and has built a world of justice.

Well, this is not a world of justice. And not a single day goes by that I'm not afraid something unexpected might happen and my family will suffer because of it: call it crisis, war, kidnapping, theft, drugs, car accident, unemployment, anything you want.

There are a million things that happen to people unexpectedly and it's really not that they have caused them, in much the same fashion as the sun shines every day for all, irrespective of whether they have earned it or not. These are two seemingly opposite things that I just can't understand. But it's OK if I don't. The moon will still go round the Earth and the leaves will still fall in the autumn, irrespective of whether I have earned it or not.

Deception

"And yet, with this deception,
true happiness occurred.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly."

Luise Glueck

Dancing your way through life

Sometimes we perceive life as a set of backsteps, for which we feel really sorry. Here's an alternative view: you can see it as dancing your way through life, instead of treading it. One step forward, two steps back at times or perhaps three steps forward, one step back; this is life and flow. Every human being dances through and with them; we don't just walk them.

Happiness

Happiness is about you being part of the vast space. It is about being joyful and at peace with this fact. It is about not wanting to be anything else than this simple, humble, yet glorious, part of life in the making.