A Rainbow Dream

A Rainbow Dream

Yesterday even i was very blessed to have been able to behold the most perfect rainbow I have ever seen in my life. It was the largest, most defined and colourful I have ever seen with my own two eyes. The rainbow lasted only 5 minutes, and I stood there the whole time. The sheer beauty nature was able to command filled my heart and my mind. How can something so perfect be so brief? How can something so complex seem so simple? How can something seem so real to the sight be so fleeting to the touch?

In those five minutes, my mind was charged by the sight of the rainbow. Its arc left an indelible mark on all my thoughts. My thoughts started to speak to me about Plato and his Perfect Forms. Plato believes that everything in this world is a fallen form of something perfect. This perfected form exists outside of the human experience. To be human, is to be unable to experience this perfection. A world existing beyond ours, a world, where all that we can and ever would experience come from. A tinge of sadness started to creep out of a corner of my heart. Wastage always invoked strong feelings in me. To know that something that could have been, did not be but became something less than what it should be… constricted my heart constantly. Thoughts’ regarding the Limits of Reason saddens me, that we humans should be so blessed by reason and so cursed by emotions. This eternal conflict saw great waste in the lives of many of us.

If an orgasm were to be the most intense physical experience, then the most intense emotion would have to be love. Love, or madness depending on the context have been the cause of many great acts as well as many great failures. Love in its perfect form cannot be captured by language. Language in its lacking dissects the perfect form into smaller categories. Since I also use language, I must also yield to this flaw. I could discuss equally regarding anger, sadness or worry, but I rather discuss the most extreme emotion.

Infatuation is a splinter off the tree of love. Infatuation is not even a branch of love, a mere splinter. Once this splinter takes hold on one’s mind, once it has embedded itself into one’s thoughts. It will drive one mad without question. Hopefully because the madness consumed one-self, realty would have pulled it out and return oneself to sanity. Love is undistinguishable from madness. The chariot of passion is pulled by the twin steeds of insanity. It is this madness that gives passion its fire, its intensity.

What lies at the end of the rainbow? What lies at the ends of our actions and our thoughts? Will we follow the rainbow only to have it fade away just as we are approaching the end? Our emotions are very much like the rainbow, fleeting, inconsistent and ephemeral. We should navigate the seas of our lives with the help of the timeless stars, the rising and setting sun. Our hopes should be built upon the bedrock of reason and not the shifting sands of stray thoughts.

Steady your hands, grip tightly on your rudder and stay true to yourself, least you find yourself pursuing a Rainbow Dream.

Girl Guide 3: Why you should not play hard to get.

An Inch away

Self-worth can be a contentious subject to discuss. We all pitch ourselves at different levels, depending on factors like age, gender, appearance, etc.

Before we get any further let us list our some premises and assumptions. In the current order of things, the onus is on the guy to take the initiative to bridge the gap and break the ice. Some might find this idea reasonable, some might find this old fashioned, but this will be the point of departure were I will balance this entry. People develop differently and at different speeds depending on their environment and peers. Passivity does not mean inaction, passivity is not a lack of action, it is a state of mind, and one can hold your hand passively.

Girls rarely would want to seem too eager or overly interested in a guy. There can be a myriad of reasons behind this, and sometimes we ourselves are not aware of the reasons or are unable to articulate them. But I will not be so bold as to try and guess the reasons girls might have for playing hard to get, I am not trying to give an answer, I am trying to ask a question. Actions or inactions such as, not replying a sms immediately, giving a maybe answer when she already wanted to say yes, etc. Sometimes, girls brand themselves as passive, hence they rationalize their behaviour to be acceptable. This mode of thinking will lead to a crime of wastage. The world has developed in such a way that we have come to be responsible for many things in our lives. We don’t get assigned our dream jobs, we don’t randomly answer our exams questions. We send out countless resumes, psych ourselves up for interviews, studying voraciously for exams. But why would you sit behind him in class and stare at his back, walk pass his cubical at work and say nothing? To leave things up to luck and chance is not just an act of passivity, its downright irresponsible. We are not responsible for the circumstances deal to us, but we are responsible for the play of our own happiness.

Changing gears, I will put forth the perspective of the guy. Simply put, playing hard to get creates an impression of not only of what the girl thinks of herself, but also her perspective on the relationship she as with the guy, how much she values his time, how much she take him for granted, how serious she feels about herself and other guys.

Depending on what phase of life you are in, you will meet different grades of guys. We have the childish, insecure teenager, the dreamer early 20s, the grounded late 20s, the conscious 30 year old, etc. I am generalizing of course, but the fact that guys are men and men are guys at different stages of their lives. This phase construction is based on age, but not determined by it, the circumstances are the determining factors of growth in my opinion.

By the time boys become men, and take on any worthwhile form, they would have already laid the foundations of their personalities. They would and should have grounded their thoughts, calibrated the loci of their self-worth, and learned how to channel their resources. In short, they would be busy. Of course not all men fall into this category, most are still growing into this mould even into their 30s.

By the time a guy becomes worthwhile in anyway. He would have captured the attention of more than just you. You might know him or of both of you might be strangers, it does not matter. What matters is that he has come within reach. It takes less effort to reply a sms than to turn a door knob. Will you turn it or turn away?

The Measure of a Man

A man is as great as the dreams he dreams,
as great as the love he bears;

As great as the values he redeems,
and the happiness he shares.

A man is as great as the thoughts he thinks,
as the worth he has attained;

As the fountains at which his spirit drinks,
and the insight he has gained.

A man is as great as the truth he speaks,
as great as the help he gives,

As great as the destiny he seeks,
as great as the life he lives.

Bicycle

Love is like a bicycle,
if you are willing to go through learning how to ride it
then you could ever go by yourself

if not,
then you are better off dumping it
and walking alone

Art in real life

What we experience is but

a shadow of the Forms,

always lacking, always inferior

I felt privileged to have been able to attend a rather intellectually simulating seminar on Nude Art. Spearheading the seminar professor Eli Barta, PHD in Philosophy and a pair of collective art practitioners. Interestingly, my main personal takeaway from this seminar had nothing to do with nudes or with sex. It had got to do with universal values.

The professor radically disagreed with Vertical Submarine (the pair of artists) regarding their stance in doing art collectively. Vertical Submarine argues that by doing art collectively, anonymously, they can transcend concepts like gender, class, sexuality, etc,etc, to focus on higher, universal qualities like equality, truth, freedom, love (in all its forms). But Barta challenged them arguing that they are not transcending but hiding or sweeping under these categories. She argued beautifully saying that there are no “human beings” walking the streets, there are men, women, students, workers, but no human beings. The idea of human being is rather useless to us due to an absence of other intelligent life. We merely adopt an identity out of our repertoire according to our social setting; only one identity is germane at any one time. If you are single on Valentine’s Day, that’s your identity for that day. Universal ideas per se are also not useful as they are by and large out of reach of mankind. An ideal to strive for, but essentially does not exist on earth.

I am not so naïve as to believe that we can sustain perfect ideals on earth. But, does it mean that we should all give up and lie, cheat and steal? Is altruism madness? Is compassion for non-kin silly? I disagree.

We can never attain and sustain the perfect form as Plato puts it, we live in a world that it merely a reflection of the Forms. But when we try and strive towards it, we sometimes catch a glimpse of it. I argue that when it comes to “universal qualities”, the focus or the loci should be on the process, the experience and triumphs. Be reminded that the ideal, the concept per se is but an ideological construct, its one thing to be called generous but another thing to skip a meal and donate that amount to charity.

Courage is a good example. Courage is born of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. The absence of fear is fearlessness, or stupidity, depending on the outcome of the conflict. You are courageous only if you find the strength within to overcome some fear, the process of overcoming. The same can be said for love, hope, compassion, etc. These higher ideas in my opinion are what make us human. As physical beings we are tabula rasa, blank slates, blank canvas. These proximate ideas are the paint, the moments are the brush strokes, the wider the spectrum of colors, the greater number of brush strokes makes for a deeper and richer painting, a closer to perfect person. It is true that there are no perfect people, just like there are no perfect paintings, but we can improve and how we improve is by striving towards these impossible ideals. Do we want to die a blank canvas?

Every time I am lucky enough to catch a passing shadow of some higher quality, it excites and encourages me. Reminds me that there are things worth fighting for, and sometimes worth dying for.