Dear Friend, Life Must Go On

It’s always good to hang out and get together with friends. As we’re getting along with our friends, we must still keep focusing on what we want to achieve in our life. While each of our friends has different goals in their life, we must also focus on ours, otherwise we will be left behind in our life.

Our friends one day may leave us to reach their dream, or it could be the other way around. It is such a common phenomenon in life. Have you ever thought about your old friends in elementary school, high school, or university? Where are they now? ... Yes, it is great if we still meet up or keep in touch with them. But some might have been disappeared from our radar. And again, that is just perfectly normal. They have to continue their life journey, and so do we.

Often I found very good friends in different places. But after some period of interaction, it is time to say good bye again. I’m not regretting that. To have such a high-quality friendship is a precious gift in this world. It’s a matter of whether we can deal with the sudden change of a situation where we have less and less time to interact with our friends. After all, true friends will always be close to our heart although they are separated thousand miles away from us.

The wise saying tells us that we should not have too much attachment to our friends in many respects. Indeed, experiences teach me that too much attachment to our close friends eventually causes more emotional pain when thing doesn’t work as what we expect. Unless, you are spiritually awakened enough to control your emotion, or in other words to say, you are free from attachment, that would be great! However, most people suffer “gloomy” period due to this emotional pain. It may take one week, a month, or even longer to dissolve such feeling.

“You may not know that you’re attached to something until you lose it or there is the threat of loss” (Tolle, 2005: A New Earth)

My colleague, Y. Apriliansyah, gave me a very good advice on how not to be overly attached to our fellow friends. Follows are the paraphrase on what he said: Attachment is caused by strong emotional bound, i.e. love, implicitly. Therefore, we must prioritize the distribution of our love. The first two highest priorities are to our Creator and to our parents (My comment: Most Indonesian believes that God is supposed to be the 1st priority to love then followed by our parents, but in India is the other way around. Despite different reasons in each country, both still agree that God and parents are the first two highest priorities to love. This is typical in most Eastern countries). Then we can dedicate our love to our spouse or sibling. Apparently, friends are relatively the last priority to love. The closest our bound with someone will be the more painful we suffer when we break up. In that case, only by shifting our love to the higher priorities we can dissolve such emotional pain.

My very personal suggestion is to be grateful always for those who still have good friends around. Be communicative and open to your good friends to avoid any misunderstanding. And ideally, we should not have overly attachment and too much dependency towards our friends, then we can enjoy our friendship without any prejudice, jealousy, and other kind of negative attitude.

So in this chance, I’d like to say to all my dearest friends: I’m sorry for my negative thoughts that have caused any problem and misunderstanding between you and I; Please forgive me; I love you; Thank you for being my friends and becoming part of my life (Ho'oponopono Teaching).

Many thanks to Mr. Thayalan and Yudi Apriliansyah

Earth Day'09

Love Our Planet Earth

Bali's Day of Silence

Mindset: How Can I Do More?

"Can I do that?" That sounds doubting our own capability; "How can I do better?" This is a more positive attitude.
I believe that in any life situation, we surely can do things to improve our lives. However, some people complain that most often they always run out of time to do their daily tasks, hence no more time to do other things that might enhance their life quality. In the end, they always say that their life situation is not as ideal as what they expect.

It’s very common to hear statement like “I wish I have more time to do that”, “I wish I could do more to get additional income”, “I wish I can cram that activity into my schedule”, etc. As a matter of fact, sure we can manage everything in a defined period. There is no time limitation as an excuse. Any life situation is certainly manageable. It’s all about whether or not a person knows how to manage it and really wants to do so.

The best way to manage our life is to get rid any inefficiency in our daily routine. Indeed, everyone has capability to live their life efficiently. Unfortunately, people tend to underestimate their own capacity to overcome such condition. I believe it is simply just a mindset problem. They accuse that their daily routine has killed most of their time.

A typical common example of a life situation is when your boss assigns you for a new task. The first reaction could be excited, nervous, doubtful, not confident, or mix between them. That’s still normal response. Yet, some people might feel stress or under pressure as they take it as more burdens to bear.

But lets we take a look at it through rose-tinted glasses. Would that be a big chance to get more precious experience? The boss might have considered several candidates, but then you’re the one who has been chosen and entrusted to perform the task.

In some case people are urged by their life situation to do more additional works to support their life. They still can manage it eventually. The key to success in managing more works is simply doing better time management, thus allocating time more efficiently within our daily routine.

Another point to bear in mind is to keep positive mindset: We can do anything as long as we put extra effort physically and mentally. Never ever give up! That is the moral value.

“How much we can do depends on how much we think we can do” (Schwartz, 1979: The Magic of Thinking Big)

Aris, our friend, can’t move his left hand after having an accident. Yet, he does not give up doing his normal activity even with one hand paralyzed. Playing pool is one of his hobby. He develops a technique to strike the ball with one hand. Now, he plays as great as other two-handed pro pool players. He enjoys his hobby till now. I really admire his inspiring spirit!!!

Ost: The Matrix

Clubbed To Death
by Rob Dougan

...is dance music that you could never dance to. (Wikipedia)

Just a little part I tried to play on my piano

I love this composition very much, so COOL!!!
Take a look at my other essay related to The Matrix here.

Happy Chinese New Year 2009

Gong Xi Fa Cai 2560

May We Always be Fulfilled with Positive Energy

May All Sentient Beings be Well and Happy

Xin Nian Kuaile, Wanshi Ruyi

The Greatest Blessing

It was typical for me not to tell my family, close friends, or anyone about my big project before I reach my final goal. Good though, to some extent! Despite the high pressure I had when dealing with the task, I learn to be strong to stand up on my own feet, and not to depend on other people, an absolute single fighter very often!

The moment I announce that I have achieved my ultimate goal, that would the most euphoric climax for me. I love to surprise my family and my close friends. I really enjoy that moment with all joy and excitement!

However, it's not easy to accomplish every single task. It requires big effort and wouldn’t be as easy as snapping finger. Perhaps I just realized that every task I do will run more smoothly when I ask my mum for her blessing. I believe that mother’s blessing to her children is absolutely powerful in any situation. So every time I have chance to tell my mum about my tasks, I’ll ask for her special blessing.

Dare to Dream

Edensor, a popular Indonesian novel by Andrea Hirata, tells about the author’s life reflection in attaining his dream. The story begins in a little village in Belitung, Indonesia. There lived a boy who had strong will in which his life journey led him to end up in France to study his master higher degree. France was the place of his dream, inspired by the old picture of Eiffel Tower hung in the almost-broken class room wall during his early school days.

Through his effort, he got a scholarship for his post graduate program. This was his starting point of his life adventure. A boy who previously lived in a low-level-society district, who thought that going overseas is only for someone economically capable, eventually just started to experience the world thousand miles away from his village. He learnt lots of things from his journey. There he realized that whatever he dreamed about during his early days, it would come true. Even by chance he found the most beautiful scenery of Edensor, a place that he could only see and imagine from a book given by someone important in his life when he was just a kid.

***
This novel of Edensor inspires me to write this essay, an essay about having dreams in our life. Many people don’t want to realize their dreams. They think that the world is such a threatening place. That's why it’s better to be secure by not taking possible risks to chase what they really want to do, what they really dream about. Once you have a thought like this, then that is your world going to be. (Coelho, from the Alchemist)

It is very true that in realizing our dream, there will be lots of obstacle blocking up our way. But the essence behind that is how we learn to overcome such blockage by applying patience, hard work, effort, and persistence, so that we become a better individual. Unfortunately, most people give up in that situation. They don’t want to live their “personal legend” in making their dreams come true.

“Personal legend” is a term mentioned by the alchemist to refer to several processes that must be accomplished by someone to achieve the goal of their life. (Gee...I really like to refer to Coelho’s work. Coelho is such a genius!)

Regarding achieving our dream, here are best notes that I quote from another Coelho’s work “By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept”, part of the wisdom saying from the padre to Pilar:

“Follow your dreams, transform your life, take the path that leads to God. Perform you miracles. Cure. Make Prophecies. Listen to your guardian angel. Transform yourself. Be a warrior, and be happy as you wage the good fight. Take risks” (River Piedra, pg 132)
I would add a bit of my own interpretation and note.
Listen to your heart to chase your dream. There will be so many miracles for you to experience on the way to reach your dream and be grateful for every single miracle you receive. Be brave and take risks in moving forward to make the dream comes true. How soon your dream can come true depends on whether or not you move your step toward the realization of your dream.

So have your big dreams. Enjoy the journeys in achieving your dreams. Finally celebrate the moment when your dreams come true!

Season's Greetings

The picture of Snowflake here is published with permission from Nancy Hamlin-Vogler of Eastern Sun Printworks. Thanks a lot Nancy for sharing your beautiful master piece to me :-)

Mood Booster

We’ll never know what will come to us in the next couple second: news, occurrence, etc. It could be something good or bad. Those things can influence our mood significantly. Good thing is good for us. But bad things can affect us worse and worse. Bad things in the beginning of the day can really spoil the whole day. Bad mood EMITS negative vibration. Be aware of it!

That’s why it is important to identify something that can turn our mood better. People call it as mood booster. Mood booster has a significant role in controlling our energy. Mood booster could be things that make you relaxed, happy, warm-hearted, smile, laugh, peaceful, and other kind of good feeling. It could be memories, music, sport, hobby, pets, foods, nature, and many more. Different individuals have different choice of mood boosters. Environment is also a very influential factor in applying which mood booster is the most effective to use in a particular situation.

For me, I notice several mood boosters in different stages of my life:

Kindergarten: going to the beach swimming with my family, walking to explore the block around my house
Elementary school: get together with my musician friends
High school: sitting on a quiet beach enjoying my self alone looking at the horizon
University in Indonesia: going to China town for shopping and eating, praying in the old temple
University in Australia: going to the Strand and Sunday market, cooking, salsa night, going for trips
Working in Tuban: talking for hours on the phone to my close friends, reading self-management books accompanied with relaxing music, and for sure, playing tennis!

Doing some exercise might also release mental pressure, uneasy feeling due to stress, and all sort of negative energy, hence improving our mood. When I wake up in the morning, if my mind is drawn into too much worry, then I just push my self to jog, get sweat, and release all tension. After that, I feel much fresher and stop thinking such unnecessary worry. To relieve stress from work, I play ping pong, tennis, or practice taichi. It does help me to get out from such depressing situation.

However, like I said before, we’ll never know what will come to us in the next second. When something suddenly comes and makes us feel bad, then we need an instant mood booster. What I normally do when I face such situation is talk to my best friend. A suggestion from them on how to overcome the problem would be very helpful and such a precious gift. Nevertheless, that they are being available to listen to me is already an enormous blessing.

Another instant mood booster of mine is listening to music. I have prepared a bunch of good music in my mp3 player. They’re all the cheerful, funny, soft, relaxing ones. No hurt feeling, disappointment, nor broken heart kind of song; It’s all with positive lyrics. I just set my mp3 player on and simply enjoy it. It makes my mood better at anytime. So, find out what will your mood booster be :-)

Recently I read a book called "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. He proposes that only with the Power of Now we can gain our liberation from any unconscious thought that causes our negative feeling. To access the Power of now is basically to be fully aware on the present moment by observing our breathing or emotion. Simply just observe, be a silent observer.

I have been practicing the Power of Now and I’m in progress to get more familiar about it. Like the author said, keep practice until it is rooted into your habit then you can start to experience the joy of this power. Hmmm, I am inspired to write another essay regarding this technique.