Everything Changes

Life is fickle. In a split second, everything can change, in the first cry of a baby, in a last breath. I’d like to think there’s a reason. A method to the madness. That every winding path is meant for a destination. But I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I guess that’s why they call it hope. And not truth.   In life, there is intense happiness, intense warmth, intense love. There is also intense sadness, intense anger, intense pain. It makes up the balance of the universe. We cannot have one without the other. Sometimes, I think I’d rather not have either side. That I’d rather live in the middle. But now, I know that that is not living. Because in every intense moment of pain, there is a newfound appreciation of every intense moment of love. In every intense moment of fear, there is a new reason for hope. So yes, I do believe there’s a reason. No matter how small or how large. There is a method to the madness.

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Clarity in the Clutter: Mindfulness

I think I can speak for most of my generation when I say that we are extremely stressed all the time, torn between school, homework, social lives, extracurriculars, peer pressures, exams, and family responsibilities and within all of that, somehow we have to find the time to take care of ourselves. In order to cope, we have found a way to convince ourselves that this level of stress is normal and necessary in order to be efficient. We’ve learned over time to just accept it as a part of life that we can’t change. This is exactly what I believed before I started practicing mindfulness. But this could not be farther from the truth. True, we cannot eliminate the responsibilities that cause stress in our lives, but we can control our reaction to these stressors. Often, all these responsibilities pile up upon each other and cause clutter in your mind which then causes you to become stressed and overwhelmed so by clearing the clutter, you are then able to eliminate the stress. This is where mindfulness comes into play. Mindfulness is being in the present. By practicing mindfulness, we are unknowingly eliminating 90% of the clutter in our minds. We...

Little Joys; Big Happiness

We must not overlook the small chances we have to smile. How many of us watch in awe the sight of a rainbow? I would say most of us wouldn’t even notice one in a clear sky, including me until very recently. I have a 10 year old brother that never fails to point out the little miracles of life. The little moments I wouldn’t have taken the time to appreciate otherwise. Some days he’d point out something as simple as a bird’s nest or a butterfly and we would sit there, observing, talking, laughing; and bonding over something that we could easily overlook while engrossed in our own busy lives. And very rarely, we would be blessed to be able to see an egg hatch or a mother feed her baby and we would just watch it awe at a demonstration of life’s little miracles. These are the moments that give depth and meaning in life; the moments that could easily slip right by if you weren’t aware of them. In the grand scheme of things, you don’t need to do something big to be happy… going to an exotic vacation or an amazing water park does not define...

December 2024
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