Where do you find beauty?

I have a mark on my body, right under the left clavicle. It’s from a burn I had when I was 4 years old and very curious about the world and what was boiling inside that pot. I never considered my mark as ugly or beautiful; it is what it is: a part of me. One summer day an old friend, an artist, saw my mark and asked why I didn’t cover it. He found it particularly unsightly. Just a few hours later, another friend, also an artist, looked at it with admiration for its “sensual uniqueness”.

Years later, on a lovely spring day, I was walking in one of my favorite places – Sounion – taking photos of the stunning views and sights. Climbing some rocks to find the perfect spot for the next pic, I saw this persistent tiny flower growing among the rocks and the barren soil. Standing alone, standing strong, with its simplicity and resilience, it caught my eye and admiration, and became the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in this landscape.

“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder” Plato

Like my mark and the tiny flower, everything and everyone around us can be beautiful or not. We can find and appreciate beauty everywhere and it is rarely about the perfect shape and symmetry. Most of the times, it is about the eyes with which we are looking.

Just remember:

1. We cannot recognize something we do not already have or know its value.
2. All it takes to see the beauty is a loving heart and looking from the soul.

Time to Be Happy

The Paradoxical Commandments

by Dr. Kent M. Keith

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.

Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.

Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.

Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.

Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.

Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.

Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.

Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.

Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.

Give the world the best you have anyway.

© Copyright Kent M. Keith 1968, renewed 2001

Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments: Finding Personal Meaning in a Crazy World

Study. Understand. Never forget.

47 years ago today a military coup marked the beginning of a very dark period for my country. On this anniversary, my post is dedicated to an important reminder about history: it is important to not only study history but to profoundly understand it and never forget its lessons.

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.” (Edmund Burke)

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana) 

It all starts in our mind

          If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, 

          we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, 

          the same dysfunction.

          Eckhart Tolle

Glorious Tasks

"Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful." (Unknown) 

"I am not in the mood", "It's not a good time for me now", "It's not convenient", "I'm tired", etc. Replies we sometimes hear - or give - when faced with a situation where we can help. 
We do not help when it is convenient, when it is easier, when we are in the mood. We do not do good deeds because of rewards, for our image, or for any approval. Good deeds are done because they need to be done. 

"Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?" (Epictetus) 

Having done right meant that we might do things that are not "convenient" for us, or that we might get out of our way to do them, or step our of our comfort zone. But we all have the capacity to do something nice, kind, helpful. Something that can make even the slightest difference to someone else. 

"To be doing good deeds is man's most glorious task." (Sophocles) 

Photo credit: http://www.37days.com/2013/11/daily-rock-generous.html

On Perfection

Following a friend's comment on Perfection, I stumbled on this great post by Abhishek Parolkar, in which he shares the most beautiful perspective on Perfection and Flawlessness:

Flawlessness 

Whether its about business or personal life, We tend to define perfection as tool to succeed and it starts with the search for "The Perfect" : perfect idea, perfect business partner , perfect life partner, perfect job, perfect product, perfect boss, perfect employee, perfect marketing... list goes on. In this process of finding the perfect thing, we set our standards by looking at the world around us and not the world inside each one of us. Every time we evaluate something, we tend to magnify missing pieces & qualify it as incomplete or flawful because it does not fit into self imposed standards (which were set by looking at perfect things of the world but by underestimating the effort that made the perfection possible). We forget that flaws are reality

Defining something by the absence of something else is a mindset of incompletion, a hedonistic and fearful approach. It’s hedonistic because we try to isolate only the “good” things from the whole, and it’s fearful because we do that by fear of the other, “bad” side. Choosing only one side of the coin is useless and ineffective. You can’t have a full coin if you chose only one side of it. - Dragos

Hence for me, “flawlessness” is not about perfection, its about how complete can you become after accepting the reality. It might be little difficult to understand this until I ask you to watch a great ballet performance video below. This is what I call incomplete yet so flawless

Thanks to Pravin Talan for sharing this video

We always expect things to be perfect around us, a missing piece in our universe starts to cause discomfort. But we forget that we have started to take many things just for granted, even when we never owned it. Louis CK puts it in right perspective

Parolkar, Abhishek, "Flawlessness", 

Abhishek Parolkar's Technology Blog, February 21, 2010

http://abhishek.parolkar.com/2010/02/flawlessness.html

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License

Choose Your Battles Wisely

“You have to choose your battles”,  my wise friend reminded me today. “You have to choose which ones are worth to fight and do not fight alone”, he added.  

I follow his words of advice – this and many others – with the awareness that “what lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.” (Aristotle)