Mind Platter Part 2

A Heart That Cannot Feel

It is easier to have eyes that cannot see those who deserve to be seen by you, hands that cannot reach out to those in need of your help, and ears that cannot hear those who deserve to be heard by you. It is easier to hold back from uttering words to those whose hearts can be comforted by your voice, or to deliberately deprive someone of a happiness you know you are capable of giving. It is all easier than having a heart that cannot feel. It is all easier than having a heart that cannot perceive the pain that you may be causing others. It is all easier than having a heart that cannot fear that it might be treated the same way someday by those whose care you think you might deserve but not receive.

Pamper Your Wishes

When you make a wish, believe that it is going to happen. Put it in your heart next to pa.s.sion. Next to honesty to yourself and others. Next to humility with yourself and others. Next to consideration for yourself and others. Next to believing in yourself and others. And so that the wish will be the perfect gift when it is granted to you, wrap it from the beginning with the bow of hard work and determination. Don't ever make a wish and leave it, because it will leave you too. If you can't do anything about it, then start with your heart. Believe that you are worth that wish coming true so that you can be worthy of it.

Take Responsibility

Just as you can't deny that you can feel love and hate, happiness and sadness, anger and ease of mind, or tiredness and relaxation, you can't deny that you have a fate that, sometimes, you can't control. That doesn't mean that it takes control over you. You can't deny that you have words that need to be spoken. You can't deny that you have a choice. You can't deny the ability that you can say no. You can't deny the ability that you have the freedom to make a decision and defend it. You can't deny injustice when you see it, unfairness when you feel it, oppression when you witness it. Stop blaming the world around you for wronging you. Take responsibility for the nos you could have said but chose not to, the words you could have said but didn't, instead wrapping your mouth with your own hands and remaining silent against what needed to be addressed. Take responsibility for the choices you could have made but restrained yourself from taking.

Dream Wisely

Imagine planting a little tree and antic.i.p.ating its fruits. Day by day, you give it everything it needs. Similar to what the tree needs to survive is what our dreams need to survive: hope, which spurs from a little event that we build a dream upon, day by day, second by second, waiting for that dream to become a reality. What happens if the tree of hope grows large, yet no fruits are made? What if the fruits are damaged? What if, after all of that hope that you invested, you discovered that there was no dream to begin with? Are you then left with a huge hope that you built on your own for nothing? Never be afraid to dream. But be careful not to let the roots of your dream dig too deeply into the ground of hope, unless you have left enough hope to dream again in case the first dream disappoints you. If you allow all of your available hope to go towards one dream, you will have to wait for that dream to wilt, day by day, second by second, just as it grew, and die on its own before you can make another one.

A Dialogue with Myself

So you go on with your daily life, interacting with people for the most part. Once the night settles its darkness upon you with that imaginary breeze tickling your eyelids softly, causing them to helplessly close, all you have is a confrontation with yourself. Are you who you want to be? Are you really who you seem to be? There's no pretending here. It is you having a heart to heart with yourself. One thing that we often miss is that, when fooling others, we are only fooling ourselves. We have habits that we would rather live with than get rid of. We have unspoken words that we would rather keep hidden and rest than speak loudly and show a different side of ourselves. If we don't work on changing that hidden side of ourselves, it will surface one day, regardless of how hard we try to hide it. All I'm saying is, before trying to be honest with others, be honest with yourself. Don't be afraid to take risks and say what's in your heart. Don't risk losing what matters because of the fear of disappointment in yourself or in others.

Happiness Is in Your Hands

When people's definitions of happiness differ, the level of difficulty to reach that happiness also differs. If happiness means money or status to you, then wait to pursue it, but if it means seeing and appreciating what you have, caring for your family, seeing beauty in the simplest things, then start now. While you are doing that, others will need something to keep them motivated to achieve their shallow goals of money or power. They will envy you for being so happy with so little. People may befriend you for an ulterior purpose, smiling back at you when you smile, not out of happiness for your happiness, but out of questioning. How can you be so happy? How can they reach that happiness? How can they take that happiness away? That is what greed can do to people. Greed doesn't always have to do with money, and it is even worse when it has to do with happiness because people start building their happiness on the misery of others, and oh, how hurtful and deceitful that can be. At the end of the day, be thankful for your health and family. Don't let any insignificant things or people get in the way of this aura of happiness that you choose to surround yourself with.

Trust?

How many times have you told yourself, That's it. I'm never trusting anyone anymore? Then you go on, you meet new people, and you trust them. Sure enough, eventually you go back to your initial realization that no one is trustworthy. What is the true meaning of trust? We need to evaluate our beliefs and re-define what we consider trust to be. I am sure that, for most people, it means being able to tell someone your secrets, whether they are about you or not, and expecting that they won't reveal them to others. That is called being able to listen and not repeat what you just heard. If that is your definition of trust, then the solution is simple. You need to aim to a.s.sess your purpose in speaking about yourself or others to anyone but yourself. If someone is not trustworthy because you found out that they repeated something you said, then how many people's words have you repeated without them knowing? Ask yourself, What is my purpose? before you say anything that you consider confidential. That really is not the definition of trust. Think about it. Define it in your head. Take time to reflect.

Where Am I?

Sometimes we think that we know what's going inside of people's hearts and minds and that we are certain of our thoughts. And it makes sense because, based on our experience with them, we think that we know exactly the way they think. As hard as we try to give others the benefit of the doubt, we feel that we need to protect ourselves from their harm by expecting them to be the same as they've been before. That just makes it easier for us to perceive and understand their new actions. It's a safe feeling. The slightest inflection in their voice can have so much meaning behind it. The look they have on their faces as they are saying or asking for something can tell us whether to read into their words or whether to take them just as they are. The truth is that most of us are constantly challenged to be better than we are, and we do try to fix our image to be the way that we want it to be seen by those around us. Somewhere along the way of trying different things that we think will help change us, we may be misunderstood to be trying too hard, to be fake, and to be different than what we really are. Compare this to the metamorphosis of a b.u.t.terfly. Halfway through, it looks nothing like what it ends up being. It is your choice to either stay halfway through or to continue your journey once you start it, to reach that destination of the person you know you can be.

A New Language

If my heart could speak, it would need a whole new language to express the way I feel. If my heart could create a piece of art, artists could not handle the power of its feelings. If my heart could sing, composers would not be able to put together its symphony, the softest ever made. If my heart could smile, it would flutter out of my chest and into my eyes to see the world with a touch of beauty and a hint of joy.

Baby Steps

Today, promise yourself to be the best that you know you can be at whatever you do. Celebrate the little steps and little successes that you have, no matter how small you think they are. No step towards your dreams is too small. Those little steps are like the beginning of the storm of good things that will hit you; starting with the little steps, the raindrops fall slowly and softly. Don't expect to be an expert at whatever you do from day one. Be realistic. Be up for the journey. Prepare yourself for the victory by staying humble about your achievements.

Delusion

I wonder what's worse, disappointment in reality or feeling indifferent about whether reality changes or stays the same. Life never turns its back on you. You turn your back on yourself when you allow every closed door to stop you from moving on to the next one. Sometimes we choose to stand at a closed door and hope that it will somehow open, although that may defy logic and although we may know deep down that no goodness will come from it. We wait. We choose to wait. We choose to have hope, and we're always scared that the door will open the second we walk away. We claim owners.h.i.+p over what we do not have and fear losing it, although it really never was ours. We read too much between the lines of hope that we weave in our own mind's imagination, only to figure out at the end that we have woven a web of fragile hopes upon fragile hopes. And just as with a spider's web, once one thread is broken, the whole web falls apart.

Wholeheartedness

A risk that you take is only genuinely yours when you put your whole heart into it and go for it with your own convictions, not because of pressures from others. A true risk is one that you choose to take with hope that it will be a milestone for the fulfillment of your vision in life. If a risk ends positively, then you've made the right choice, and if it does not end as you hoped it would, that calls for a reflection on your part and an evaluation of the implications for new risks that you take. Either way, you learn a lesson only if you keep in mind that everything you do is a learning experience and never a waste of time. Time is only wasted when it is used for efforts that prove to be disappointing and we only regard that time as a waste. If we change the way we look at the disappointment, and consider it an experience that we can learn from, we add one new thing into the shape of our personalities. Sometimes that is just enough to make us realize the importance of spending time on what we neglected while we took that risk. When you focus on forgetting negative experiences instead of taking time to reflect on them and learn from them, you put yourself at the risk of inviting more negativity into your life, because negative thoughts will pile up, and every time you have a negative experience, you will recall all of the other times and rea.s.sure yourself that you have a bad life or bad luck. But when you learn to twist each negative event into a positive lesson and apply that lesson into your new experiences, you become more skillful at seeing the positives in life rather than the negatives. Instead of falling back on all of the bad things that have happened to you, you are building a good, positive bank of experiences that has, at its base, the understanding that mistake is too big and too negative of a word, while experience is bigger and more constructive to your life.

Free

The stars may be too far for my reach, but I am just as far from them as they are from me. It amazes me how the world seems to move in one direction sometimes. There always has to be a start and an end. You always have to be moving somewhere because, if you're not, you might lose the race. The one with the most power wins. The one in the right position wins. The one who is better at playing the game wins. It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, or if you're trying or not. If you're not good at playing the game, you lose. Before you believe that, ask yourself if the games that you are playing are worth playing and if the races that you are running are worth running.

We Are in This Together

When you're going through a rough time, keep this in mind: every person on earth has problems of his or her own, young or old, wealthy or poor, healthy or sick. You may look around and see happy faces. You may look around and see that everyone else's life is perfect because they have what they want or what you wish you had. Do you realize that that's how people look at you, too? Do you realize that, to some people, you may seem like the happiest person on earth, with the most perfect life? You may be feeling like you're living in a blur. You may not care about how you interact with those around you because you're so engulfed in your own troubles. You may think that they don't even care about how you treat them because they're already happy. What difference is your smile or nice gesture going to make, right? Wrong. You may not be strong enough to draw a smile on your face when you're troubled, but others are. Their troubles may be bigger than yours, worse than yours, and more hurtful than yours. Just because they don't talk about them doesn't mean they don't exist. So, before you look at others and a.s.sume things about their lives, or judge them for doing the things that they do, think of how they could be looking at your life and thinking the same. Once you accept this fact, life becomes on your side. Happiness will seep through the broken pieces of your soul, and contentment will sew the pieces back together.

Through Their Eyes

See yourself through the eyes of those who love you. They see all of the goodness in you when you fail to see it. They see the best in you when you see the worst. They are always ready to lift you up even before you fall down. They see every reason why you deserve happiness, love, and joy when you may feel that you're the furthest from deserving all of that goodness. Learn to care about those who care about you before you try to make those who don't even notice you turn your way.

The Journey

Sometimes it's more important to figure out where you are than to decide where you're going. If you don't know where you are, how do you expect to know your destination? We often rush to our next goal, forgetting what we are leaving behind, forgetting those we are leaving behind. We forget that happiness is a journey, not a destination. We forget that tomorrow would not exist without today, and that today would not be what it is without who we are and what we have.

The Heart's Aches

Could it be that you have fallen in love with the unknown? Ask me, as I have fallen way too deep. Could it be that you miss a place you've never been? Or that your fate sends a calming feeling to your heart telling it that happiness is coming its way? Could it be that your heart smiles before your eyes do? Or that you s.h.i.+ne just like a star in someone's sky? In a different world, in a different place, oceans away yet skies too close, a heart of gold may be waiting for the perfect moment to flutter your heart with the happiness of your dreams. One day, you will understand what you haven't heard yet and hear what hasn't been said yet. One day, you will hear silence and read what hasn't been written yet.