Intention

I'm still marinating on this one, and I think there are fallacies to this but living a life with intention (I think the other word I heard tossed around was mindfulness) makes a difference.

This applies to relationships, careers, and lifestyle in general. All those stupid stories about how people turned their lives around has a lot to do with perspective. They started paying more attention to what they ate or lived or whatever. They made intentional changes that (usually) worked out in their favor.

Everything we do takes us somewhere, whether we mean to or not. The actions we take have repercussions and it's taking into account the fact that what we do is a reflection of who we are and what we'll become that gives weight to this little thing called intention.

I mean I think that placing too much stress on it is probably problematic because people stress and then are paralyzed into not doing anything at all, but I think in realizing that things are always moving in a direction, if one chooses to allow oneself to absorb experiences or learn new things, one becomes a better person or at least a wiser one for what one has gained.

When I went to Korea, I had no intention of getting better at reading and writing Korean. However, when I worked for a company where email communications were in Korean, I had to get better and because I made the intentional effort to get better, I did. I could've just written terrible emails the whole time I was there if I didn't care but that intention to made me improve that much faster.

I think that what I'm getting at is that it's the minor changes and the small things we do that add up. I suppose in some ways, it becomes about one's frame of mind too. Can you turn a situation into one where you are thankful for what you have, rather than getting annoyed about what you missed? Instead of playing one more game for the One Piece app, I could be sleeping just that much earlier.

In some ways, it is perhaps the small things that end up defining who we are, rather than the big.

Perhaps this is going back to the importance of time.

Living a life of thankfulness

Thankful for what I have.

Thankful for what I don't have.

It's oddly at times like this that I feel the most thankful for everything that exists in my life. I'm oppressed by thoughts in my head and crushed by a sense of defeat, and yet there's always that ray of hope.

There's plenty of bad to dwell on, but there's more good that is often forgotten or overlooked. It's taken for granted because we get used to the good. We get complacent. We get used to avoiding things that cause suffering.

The creative process is never easy. What I mean by creative is not in the sense of "thinking outside the box" as many think of creativity, but what I mean to get to is the root of what creative and creativity means, which has the idea of creating or making something (the implication is that creativity comes from either nothing or things that are seemingly unconnected/unrelated things).

So when talking about creativity, it is this idea of forging paths that didn't exist before, connecting ideas that often are overlooked - like a shortcut path that is overgrown with weeds (or creating a new path to a destination). If that is the case, clearing the path and making the connection known and its function understood will take time and it won't always be easy.

When I think of life sometimes, I find it oppressive. What's the point of the things we do? Why is it important? Does it need to be important or have significance? Why does anything matter?

And yet we live on. Perhaps I can ponder such things because I don't have basic worries - everything I need, I have.

The point is, despite the thoughts in my head, there is always something to be thankful for. It perhaps is in these moments, that one truly lives (though the question then becomes "what is living?").

Bah. Things aren't connecting.

I like marinating

Though ironically, not in cooking (it takes too much planning ahead).

Ideas sit around in my head just stewing and morphing into what becomes something coherent and then *poof!*

A paper
Blog post
Story
Realization about life

And so on.

Or something simple, like what to make for dinner.

I suppose what I've been marinating on lately is the idea of synthesis.

There is so much information out there and it's not about knowing, it's about using what is known.

Even if the information on how to make a car is all out there, with all the YouTube videos and what not, it is still up to the user/viewer/browser (or whatever you want to call the person sitting on this end of the computer) to take the information and make something of it.

I can watch 100 videos on how to make a car but I have to take that information and actually do something with it - synthesize the information into meaning.

I suppose the car example isn't the best one, but if one is looking for something on the Internet, one must sift through all the irrelevant information, find the relevant information, and then examine it to see how it fits into what one is looking for. Once all the pertinent information is found, one must synthesize the meaning of all that information into an answer.

It's very much like graduate school research, which is why I was thinking of the idea of synthesis to begin with.

I think that the humanities and its relevance is going to be making a comeback because with all the information out there, the people with the critical thinking skills will be needed to synthesize meaning out of all the information.

Just sayin'.

"Bliss of solitude"

It's part of a line from William Wordsworth's poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."

I think I've forgotten what that was.

I'm relearning how to be alone, working, researching, and reveling in that which is grad school life.

But sometimes, I just want to hide away. Disappear from the world, not in death but in solitude or isolation.

And yet, I spent a wonderful weekend with family, surrounded by those I love.

Let us come back to the bliss that is solitude and be imbued with words, word play, and knowledge.