Let Hope Rise

As mentioned before in Being Happy: Part 2, I do have my dark days, where sometimes the world just becomes too much. Thankfully, I believe in an awesome and almighty God and that gives me hope. Hope for a new day: Hope for a better tomorrow: Hope for goodness in all people.

My happiness and ‘smiling’ attitude make my life easier to wake up everyday and put one foot in front of the other. This way of living, however, if not easy for many people. I’m well aware of this fact, which is what motivates me to live stronger and louder. I believe in being that light, no matter how small, for someone else. I believe in being the hope that they search for.

Many people suffer from depression and anxiety. Many people focus on negativity in their lives, wishing they had better things or were able to do more. Many cultures and countries stigmatize mental illness and castrate those who are afflicted. It is so easy to just kneel down and give up, to cry for all those who are misunderstood, judged and ridiculed. I refuse to be one of those.

I will let hope rise, like a sunrise that makes you stop and ponder its significance and warmth. I don’t want to cry. I want to laugh and sing and dance in the light of the sun, letting it soak into my skin as a new day dawns. I want to revel in its majesty and feel the non-judging grace. I want to give this experience to everyone I meet. I want them to know love. Real love.

Hope can change people, can turn nations, can create miraculous moments. Hope can and it will. I can only meet so many people in the world, but everyone has the ability to be the hope for someone else. Are you the hope for someone or do you depend on someone else to see that hope?

We all live in this world together and together we must conquer the darkness that suffocates us. It takes everyone and that is the hope I hold onto: a changed life. I don’t need to be able to see a changed world in order to see a changed life, because that one life is the world.

Perhaps I am a dreamer and many realists may be filled with skepticism, but I do know what is going on around the world and I refuse to let it get me down. I am more than a news story. I am more than rejection. I am more than just 5’1″. I am more.

 

 

Running Around Christmas

I wasn’t going to update until after the holidays, but something happened that I needed to share. My husband and I were talking about how Christmas has changed for us since moving away from family. We shared what Christmas was like for each other as kids. (It was different, because we are from different countries.) This will be our third Christmas in the land Down Under and it never quite felt like Christmas to me. I thought about this and wondered why, or if I was just spoilt by my childhood and the ‘magic’ of Christmas. As an adult, studying and working, Christmas just passed by last year for me and it upset me deeply. I didn’t want that to happen this year, so I tried to get all my work done early and requested a few days off from work.

As Christmas started to settle in my heart and around me (even though I am use to white Christmases), I realized what was wrong with Christmas as an adult. It hit me when I went to a cafe today just to sit, have a coffee, and read a book. I sat at the cafe for about an hour and then got up to pay at the counter. The two girls working greeted me nicely (as always) and commented how refreshing it was to see me just sitting in there, reading, not rushing around and panicking about Christmas and gifts and food, etc. I may have given them a funny look and then I replied, “Christmas is about taking time.”

That’s when it hit me. The words just came out of my mouth. What my subconscious had known, the rest of me was just beginning to realize. That is what Christmas is about: taking time. Time for family, time for relaxing, time for you, time for others, time for singing, time for snowmen, time for elves on the shelves, time for decorating, time for lights, time for silliness, time to not be an adult and time to believe.

Christmas is believing. If we get caught up in the presents and shopping and cooking and running around, then we miss the whole point of Christmas. It becomes a chore, a stress, not a holiday. Most people I talk to tell me that this is their most stressful time of year. Their real ‘holiday’ is when they go on vacation for a week somewhere tropical. Why does it have to be that way? It doesn’t. Most people are just missing the point of Christmas. Christmas is a holiday, and you must be the one to make it that way. It is so easy to get caught up in everything around Christmas, but please try not to become stressed. Just don’t worry about it as much. Is Christmas going to be less special if your apple pie isn’t perfect? Will the kids remember what type of wrapping paper you put on their gifts? Will your mother-in-law criticize your souffle throughout the entire new year? No! (Well, maybe the last one.)

So enjoy the holiday. Enjoy taking time. Enjoy the belief that Christmas is more than what we get or what we eat. Believe.

Merry Christmas to all!

 

As a little girl, and one of the few girls within my large family, I was constantly pressured (indirectly most of the time) to be a ‘girl’. What did this mean? It meant playing with dolls, having tea parties, wearing dresses, and liking pink. Not only was I the exact opposite, but I felt, at times, that everyone expected girls to be ‘girly’. I never wore dresses; I wore jeans and t-shirts. I never played with dolls; I played with Jurassic Park action figures and army men. I never liked pink; I am passionate for blue. Did this make me a tomboy, then? Perhaps. I played sports and enjoyed getting dirty. I played games with the neighborhood boys, like tag and spies. I liked building things and being a ‘grease monkey’ with my brother and dad. I considered myself a tomboy, only because it was the only word I knew to describe a non-girly girl.

But now I want to change that word. I am a girl. Girls are not all the same and should not be classified as such. Just because a girl doesn’t like certain ‘girly’ things doesn’t mean she will be less successful in life. It doesn’t mean that she won’t get married and have children. It’s not the 1950’s. I am a scientist, a bassist, an engineer, a writer, a wife, a cook, a gamer… and I am most certainly a GIRL. Girls do not fit into one category, just like boys do not all play football.

So embrace the girl you are or the girl you have, because every girl is unique.

Girls Just Wanna Be Girls

 

Criticizing like a Married Couple

Early in a relationship we see only the good things. Months later we start to notice bad habits. Years go by and those habits begin to annoy us. Before we know it, we dislike everything that we use to love. What is the difference between this and a friendship that falls apart? Unconditional love.

If unconditional love is missing, in any kind of relationship, then forgiveness is absent as well. If forgiveness is absent, there is no way for it to survive, because all of the things that are hated, become the things to be focused on. This is why it is so difficult to have intimate relationships with people. There is no (true) love.

 

Indicators

Our world, our lives are filled with indicators. Look around you and see how many things you can point out that dictate your life. I often wish we lived in a place without things to tell us where to go or what to do or what time it is.

Would we know how fast we were going without a speedometer in our car? Would we be able to feel the temperature without a thermometer? Would we even know what day or month it is without a calendar? Would it matter?

What do all of these indicators do for us? Really. How relative is time? We think it is important based on getting to work on time or meeting up with people or catching the news, but is it really important to our existence?

If we had to use the sun as our only indicator, would it kill us to just be ‘approximate’? What is wrong with slowing life down a little? We could still meet people and get to places. It just wouldn’t be on that exact minute. Why does everything have to be on the minute? Why not within the hour? Or even sometime within a day?

Our lives have become dominated with indicators to the point that we wouldn’t know what to do without them. Forget technology (although they contain many indicators), and think of if you could go one day or even one week without a watch, a thermometer, a calendar, a phone, an oven temperature gauge, a gas meter in your car, a tv…

Why let things dominate our daily lives when we could be more at ease and free…

Could we ever adapt to such a life?

 

Free…

Most people are captive in their own lives: chained to their burdens like Marley was in A Christmas Carol. We often see animals in cages and think how terrible it would be to not move about freely, but we forget that freedom is not just about moving. Entrapment still occurs within the soul.

You are the only one carrying the burden that drags behind you, pulling you down. So many things, even small things, can cause us to feel trapped. Our cage may not be of bars and steel, but it still consumes our energy and happiness like a leech with blood.

Freedom or Captivity?

Freedom is different for every person. No one can tell you how to feel free. It should be natural, like an instinct. Something that you crave. We all crave to feel free.

So, are you free?

 

Slang, yo.

It is interesting how powerful slang can be. Just walking around, we hear slang words and phrases everywhere. It is quite common. However, we generally only hear it. When we read it in a newspaper or somewhere, it looks out-of-place.

When slang starts to appear in places and gets treated like a normal word, both written and spoken, then I may worry. Why is slang so powerful and influential to the spoken and written word?

But the more important question: Do we want to be known by our slang, by words that are only understood by other people within our country, or do we want to sound more professional and intelligent?

I do use slang, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of the slang I don’t use, because it just sounds… ugly. Why change something beautiful like language? Why butcher it to something that is unrecognizable? I have heard slang in my different countries and even in different languages. Here is an example:

When I first started learning Spanish, I wanted to learn because I thought it one of the most beautiful languages spoken. I still believe that. It has a magic about it that makes the tongue move like a dance. Exquisite. When I started meeting people from Spanish-speaking countries and travelling to those countries, I found that I got lost in a lot of the language. I was hearing a completely different language. That was because I had never learned the slang. But this Spanish was not beautiful to my ear. It was messy and rough, not the poetry that I dreamed of. It disappointed me greatly.

My point is this: Why do we let slang rule our language? Why does it make us so comfortable? Since when does using beautiful words together in a sentence make you sound “old-fashioned” or a “know-it-al”? Since when did we compromise our knowledge?

 

Wear Love

I hope this doesn’t come off ‘hippie-like’. Nor do I wish to sound like those Miss Universe contestants wanting world peace, because that is logically impossible as long as there is diversity and misunderstanding in the world.

I do believe, however, that love can solve anything, but in saying that, it may be one of the most difficult things to do. Why is love so powerful? Perhaps because it is so gentle.

Loving without opinion, without prejudice, is much more challenging, because humans are prone to judging. It is natural, but that does not mean it is right.

 

Dance in Color

Beauty comes from the soul of a person, not the skin. If it came from the skin, then people would be divided into two races: glowing, flawless skin and boils pussing from each pore.

The world is a beautiful painting filled with colors of the rainbow and light of the prism, both seen and unseen. Cultures make this rich blend like coffee beans of many countries, combined to create a sweet aroma of the people of the world. Celebrate each difference together and rejoice with the purest joy and then the true spirit of the world will reveal herself to you. She will embrace you like the prodigal son and never let you forget the feeling of bliss: a world with no skin color, no language, no money, no status… open your eyes and see the true beauty of our Mother, the only Mother, we all share together on this one planet. Dance in the colors of life, falling from the sky like rain in the spring, and together we will dance as She comforts us under her blankets of clouds. Brown, peach, yellow, hazel, sand, white… one song, the song of the earth, joins us hand in hand in a dance for no one and everyone, for the named and the nameless, for the forgotten and the fame, for the lucky and the struggling… Do not simply look at the painting of beauty, jump into it, dive into it, drown in it. Swim amongst its pages of calligraphy and cleanse yourself with the joy of knowledge and freedom.

Is there hope for humanity? I see hope in every child’s innocent smile, in every arm raised together in love, in every embrace of acceptance… there is hope as long as there is laughter and love.

If every continent were connected by underwater passageways, would the blend of cultures and peoples create a unity of love for each other as fellow man and woman?

Can someone be proud of their country and culture, and still accept everyone else in the world or will jealousy and rivalry interject into every conversation?

 

Wisdom will Die with You

For the past week I have been pondering the very existence of man. I do not doubt that we exist, but I have been asking myself, ‘why?’. What is the purpose of mankind? I would like to think of myself as making a difference in the world, but am I? What have I got to offer to the world that the world needs, that it doesn’t already have?

My whole life I have been driven to be better. Every time I accomplish one thing, I move on, without so much as a blink of the eye, and work on the next project, that will be bigger and better than the last. I have been doing this for over twenty years now and have never stopped to think what exactly I am accomplishing… until this week.

I was doing my research for my degree, when all of a sudden I wondered why I was doing it. Would it contribute in some way to help mankind or is it just an illusion of knowledge? What could I do that would last centuries? I realized that this research would only last as long as the next person comes along and takes it one step further. Sure, I could do this research and make it better each time, but one day I will die, and what then? What was the point? What are we are striving for that will last past our days of living?

Some people call it their legacy. Some even call their children their legacy, but what of the people without kids? What if we look beyond our own kind, beyond human beings… what will be remembered then?

I have always wanted to gain more and more knowledge. I read everything from newspapers to novels. I talk to people from different careers, cultures, and countries. I even strive to learn three languages. My life is consumed by the desire to know more. But what does this knowledge do for me? Where does it get me?

I heard today someone say this, “You can have all of the knowledge, but if you don’t know how to use it, you have no wisdom. Without wisdom, you are useless.” Are you useless? Am I? I ask again, where does this knowledge get me? What do I want to leave behind in this world that will be remembered by people generations from now? What do I want to leave behind…

I can honestly say that I don’t know, but that I hope to know one day, perhaps when I am ready to take on that challenge. So many things on this planet do not need the knowledge that we crave. The trees, the animals, the water, the very air. It is all so magnificent and it is exactly as it should be. Where will our thumbprint be after we die? Who will remember?

Maybe it’s not even about people. Do we need to be remembered to feel important? Maybe adopting a little puppy will remember your cuddles. Maybe the waves will remember you enjoying the surf. Maybe a higher power will smile down at you and embrace you upon your death.

So, what is worth doing in this lifetime? We only get one. We cannot rewind or pause. What really matters?

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you.” Job 12:7-8