The Teaser behind the Luster
It’s been a while I have met my friends. It’s been a while I have chosen to take a drive for myself. It’s been a while I have gone on a vacation. It’s been a while I have witnessed, recognized and admired the people I love, the people who are always there for me and the people I somehow started to take for granted and
it’s been a while I have met myself.
If I had read the above words somewhere, I would have told myself that yeah sure, I know the gesture these words are trying to make and that I certainly do not do that. But it’s been a while that I have told myself the truth.
We all very often come across a legacy someone genius minded graphic designer left us over the internet. It’s a picture comparing a straight line and a curvy line stating the difference between the ideal and actual road to success. Viewing that picture some, including me, remark that oh yeah we already do that. It’s been a while I have caught me lying to myself like that.
Our primitive evolution probably had a lot to do with the physique for the purpose of their mere existence. When apes and Homo-Sapiens would have lived together, body language, expressions, acts of kindness and aggressions might have been the key parameters of survival. They must have left us the heritage as well. When I see the luster of success on a face, I tend to tell myself the sweet lie that people achieve success, fame, power, calm and satisfaction with just a pinch of luck.
When a person aims higher, a spell gets enacted out of nowhere, takes his hand and guides him through the journey of success, fame and glory. And the luster of the appearance, acting, makeup and appearance of the being makes me completely forget about the legacy an anonymous legend has left us. We have buried the philosophy under the mountain of Scientology but the rules are absolute, nature doesn’t change, light doesn’t vary its speed and principles do not bend themselves.
Key to the Time Management
The idea of time management has been around since the dawn of industrial age globally. When people started to learn to adopt the life to live in someone else’s vision. What are the pros and cons of living in someone else’s dream, concept of freedom and slavery, comfort zones, confronting the world and safety, each of these points needs to be debated in real depth. Each needs to be redefined and reviewed into much more depth than we usually care to dive into. It often is very amusing seeing that the world is changing by the mere ticking of clock and yet the phenomena in its true essence is the same as it was hundreds of years ago.
Whether or not should we have adopted this evolutionary route to the state we are currently into is, once again I would say, a very delicate yet necessary debate. But for the time being, here we all are standing side by side to each other and confronting each other as well in this battle to survival. The mechanic lifestyle is now nothing new to us, in fact we assume it to be an essential part of our ‘success’. I wouldn’t be wrong in saying that almost every person around us is familiar with the very important concept of time management and how everyone is complaining about how he doesn’t have time to do anything.
I have a privilege of being an engineer and hence being familiar with the sour taste of the curry we call industrialization, hardships of going to a technical job, pressures of conducting projects in time and try to live a life as well. The whole concept of managing things, keeping a balance between professional and personal life, differentiating between being a puppet or a man has been very difficult to understand. I wouldn’t be wrong if I say that I spent literally years to find these things out very sorry to tell that I could not understand the essence of concept.
The truth of the matter is that it itches me when I cannot understand a philosophical concept, although we already said a goodbye to philosophy long ago but all these concepts would pride themselves for being under its shade, I assume. I couldn’t understand the idea until one day the phenomena told disclosed itself to me automatically. The secret to time management lies in the shift of our routine practices, the essence lies in doing things not for a lot in little time but doing a little for a lot of time daily. I started to gather pictorial data of daily safety talks, fun activities, ongoing and finished projects and at the end of everyday it seemed like nothing had been accomplished but after a few months when I viewed those pictures and reports, they started making sense.
Even though it felt like we didn’t do anything by the end of every work day, we didn’t stop doing it and after some months, those tiny bits joined themselves to construct a larger picture of accomplished tasks. Same proved to be true for my personal life, my commitments to take care of my health, taking daily runs, finishing the books I started to read and the list goes on. It’s like trying to at a very tall building or a mountain standing beneath it, you cannot take an adequate look. But when you get to some distance, you can truly can see the beauty of its features. That mountain is your life, you cannot have a look at it when you’re very close into it, when you’re living the moment but when you get past that point and have a look, you can truly analyze what happened and what should have happened.
This is why they say that key to living a life is to live each moment and the key to live each moment is to make peace with what you’re doing and to get all the distractions out of your mind otherwise you’re not living the life made of tiny moments, you’re living a life of distractions. How can you expect that to be peaceful, less stressful, happy and satisfied? We bust our peace and health to earn some money and then spend that money to get back the peace and health we already consumed.
Whether it be the life of modern slavery, live it efficiently.
The Digital Spirituality
When talking about spirituality, the word spirit pops up. Used very often for versatile tasks, having different meanings for different media but nevertheless we all use that. Sometimes some of us don’t even know what it actually means and at others, all of us don’t know what it means. Other than just being a linguistic term, the spirit has a spirit of its own. We borrow the spirit from the word and put it into whatsoever we are dealing with. Without having being proven scientifically, it’s always there in shining in its eternal glory.
Times are changing. With every second passing by, we hear that time is changing. Nothing in this universe is the same as the older second that just left the platform. It’s always a brand new second, a brand day, a brand new month, a brand new year and a brand new start. But in some of the newer days, everything around us is getting digitalized. Everything is connected to the other creating this codec massive chaos, where one thing is manipulating the other. Somewhere in the ancient tales, there used to be a species having those interlinked interrelations and we hear that the species was the homo-sapiens.
In some of the ancient tales that I happen to remember, people used to come up with masterpieces, claiming to have injected their spirits into those masterpieces, whether that be Mona Lisa, Taj Mahal, The Great Wall of China, Pyramids of Egypt, Religions like Islam and Christianity and the list goes on. Spirituality is always exhibited by the monument that stands beside you, claiming its eternal glory. And now, well, the times are changing. The monuments today are these digital codes, interconnected devices, 3-D visions and virtual realities.
It’s very difficult for me to digest that an electronically written program can exhibit a spirit being put into it. For me the idea of something spiritual is somewhere you can walk into, a magnificent height and a nirvana exhibiting monument. Somehow I never got the idea of a mechanical spirit, of a digital spirit, a spirit exhibited into a code, a spirit exhibited by a giant compressor, a rocket or even a sky scraper for that matter. A spirit needs to be simple, elegant and soothing. Through an era, I have been thinking that its all about money, but it simply is not.
It is about passion, about dignity, about recognition and to some extent about offering services to the mankind. Money, multinationals and billionaire personalities and glories are just the side benefits that come along. There must be some people who can make a difference with their bare hands and a vision. Those are the new spiritual people we are going to find abundantly and I guess with everything revolutionized, the franchise of spirituality has launched another brand entitled Digital Spirituality because after all the following is very much true:
People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road, doesn’t mean that they are lost.
Things that Matter
In search of an answer
I roamed here and there
Jut to find out
It’s where the heart lies that matter
The key to all the riddles lies inside
Have to make oneself uncover, unhide
You always know what you’re looking for
Call by the obstacles and take a ride
Sit back, relax, it’s you, you should flatter
Heads up, hopes high, don’t let the courage scatter
Success is not a destination but a mere attitude
In the end, these are the things that truly matter
In Search of an Identity
Identity is the trait of how the brain thinks and how the soul acts. We all have been awarded with similar hardware and yet we all are as different from each other as day and night. Even the person who are alike, share common interests, get excited about same things, tend to dress same are very much different from each other.
We fall for different persons, we like different foods, we have this unique lens, we have tremendously different chemical reactions going on inside our heads and yet we all have the same dummy structure. Since the advent of science, the vastly scattered alike objects are being categorized into groups so to trap the study of trillions of objects to a few groups that behave in a similar manner. But humans couldn’t get categorize the Homo-sapiens.
It all goes on a micro scale when ideas develop and ideologies grow. At one instant, I get proud of being a part of a distinct body and on the other, I start searching myself for the unique traits that I possess and other don’t. I want to believe that I’m special, I’m better, I have a greater cause and I lack the meaning I was meant to have found out by now.
This idea is what drives people to do scary things, to do brutal things. This idea is about the struggle of getting a ticket.. a ticket to heavens. This idea is about discovering those missing parts inside the soul. This idea is about being a part of something much bigger than a single human being. This idea is about being a part of a daring community. This idea is about having an approved identity which one has been searching all through his life. This idea is about finding divine meaning and eternal happiness.
When injected into the minds of weakly wicked souls, this idea propagates like a virus, attacking the immune system, destroying the happy cells and compelling one to do things that he wont even be able to see. This is about taking a revenge, a revenge from the people who are in peace with the fact that you cannot know everything in this short life. A revenge from the people who don’t know what they are going to face next.
It’s when incidents like the California’s Human Hunting happen, when the Paris Attacks are witnessed, when the Syrians get bombarded, when the Palestinians construct pools of blood supplied by innocent children. Geographies are different but the incidents taking place are alike in nature, different ideas from different ideologies trying to conquer each other. They don’t know one mere simple fact that they should just agree to disagree. Live and let the other live.
Let’s Start New
Walked toward an end- dead
Laid down, rested his head
Told not to get up
Neither for water, nor for bread
Without the spice, goes that taste
Ran to manage that hasty haste
When bliss is a ‘satisfaction’ from ‘now’
Its ‘now’, he shouldn’t waste
It’s when the hunger of life grew
When he stopped his soul to chew
When he said, “It’s for him this time”
It was then he decided to start anew
SUMII-Some Untold Manifestations of Insights and Ideologies
I remember myself asking a question from my high school science teacher. The question was that if we kept on absorbing the knowledge for a huge part of our lives, when we were eventually going to utilize everything we learned and absorbed all through our lives. I was probably looking for the sentence that we need to utilize the knowledge we absorbed previously to absorb the newly discovered knowledge.
The age was anxious, the question was simple enough but was insightful. I don’t remember the answer he gave but I do remember that since then, I’ve been trying to figure out a lot of questions. It’s simply curious that how curious a man can get in satisfying his curiosity for answers. It’s simply curious how this piece of meat has spiritual needs which demand something other than the need of another mere piece of meat. I have found out a lot of answers since then. And unfortunately while finding these answers, I have stepped across a lot of doors that are now locked and have shut themselves down upon me when I want to go back. Now I want to unlock and go past the barrier of time but I cannot do so. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get the door unlocked to provide me a safe passage back to that beautiful zone of my comfort.
In discovering the answers, in letting go of dear ones, in forgetting the amount of care needed to take the decisions to come across a door that cannot be unlocked once you get on the other side, I have gathered an understanding of what happened and a wisdom of what should have happened. The understandings I gathered, I now call them as Some Untold Manifestations of Insights and Ideologies-Ubiquitously Manifested and Understood as my beliefs, admirations and affirmations.
I believe that there are no backups. There are no backups for your actions, for your plans, for the ones you love and for the ones who love you. There are no backups for the time you spend. There are no backups for the loss you suffer when you go around with the attitude,” What do I have to lose?” Well the answer is that it is you that you are going to lose. You’re going to lose it whether that be your time, health, youth, career or the shape of your image in someone’s eyes. Whether that be love and the person you love. Whether that be you and your life. You and everything you own is at stake every moment the clock ticks away from your life.
I believe in love but I also now believe that the other person is a mortal human being. I believe that in essence every human being is to think for himself or herself. Every human has the right to secure himself or herself. Every human should be taken literally and not for granted. No matter who the other person is. No matter whether that person is the person you thought was destined to be bound to you for the rest of the life and for the life afterwards. It doesn’t matter at all. The other person is just a mortal human being. The other person needs an investment from you, needs to be appreciated by you, needs to be taken care of, and needs to be given respect in return to the love devoted for you.
I believe nothing exists like unconditional love. I believe that mortals don’t fall for mortals by the mere bonding of unconditional love. It’s true that there is such a thing as love but it’s also true that there is no such thing as unconditional love. I now believe that love is a mirror. It’s only conditioned to show you back what you show it in the very first place. It’s only conditioned to give back to you what you give in initially. It’s only conditioned to get unconditional if at first you are unconditionally involved with it. I believe that unconditional love needs a condition of being unconditional with it.
I believe in not letting go. Whether that be your interests, your career, your hopes, the image of yourself in your own sight, the one you love or the person you want to be. Whether the other person is not giving you what you think you deserve, whether he’s not giving you that unconditional love you’ve devoted, whether he’s being uncomforting in your life, I believe in not letting go as far as you know that you are the one he’s with. I once read a story about a gold miner who kept on digging for a long time without any luck and gave up eventually only to discover at a later stage in his life that he was just a couple of feet away from all the gold he had been looking for. That man regretted his entire life the moment he let go of the digging.
May be the mirror in front of the other person is getting all blurred up and not showing him the unconditional love he’s getting. May be the situation needs some time in getting fixed, what if the last step you refused to take was the final step towards what you always dreamt about? What if I would have been awarded, had I been patient till taking this last step? And it happens more often than we realize that the thing we wanted was ready to welcome us just a step ahead. I believe in taking that last step ahead no matter how difficult the times are.
I believe that a belief is the most powerful gift from God to men on earth. It’s a belief that unites you with you creator. It’s a just a belief that there is a creator who so perfectly created everything that since the dawn of this universe, we are still trying to discover the amazing miracles He performed and yet we are here with just a fractional understanding. A mere belief equips you with a God, with a Creator, with a purpose, with a reason worth living for and with a purpose worth dying for. I didn’t believe in fairy tales or mere chances of luck. I never believed that ‘not letting go’ could be this much important. But as a matter of fact it is more important than I think it is. Belief in something is more important that I realized.
I have always been hiding and running from SUMII. But now it’s time to confess that the essence of my life is SUMII. If I gained anything in my life, it’s SUMII. If there’s an insight and an upside for me, if I earned anything in my life and if anything is important than all of the rest, it’s SUMII.
That Awkward Confession
I realized it only when the truth got me
That I should forget you when you already forgot me
That you was there with me for sure
And you’re not alongside anymore
You was my charm, my sunshine
I had you once, you was all mine
Your love was the total assets I had
You always was my perfect valentine
Tonight’s the night to break the rules
Get myself separated from the herd of fools
With a glimpse at past, I now end this session
For tonight, this is my awkward confession
What Would You Do?
All through our lives, we come across many incidences. Some of those are minor while other are major, some make us happy while others leave unwanted traces behind them, some make a drastically fantastic difference while others just don’t kill us and spare us to live while bearing the aftershocks. We happen to live the fancy ones and when it comes to the other side of the picture, we happen to act or witness a mixed of different reactions.
A couple of days ago, I witnessed an accident. A cart loaded with iron bars hit a vehicle from the driver’s side. Though it wasn’t as major an accident as it could have been but the phenomena can be linked to what we’re trying to discuss here. The driver got out, stood beside his vehicle, was going to bump the guy on the cart and then stopped. Sat in and went on his way. What was to happen, had happened. Hitting the guy, calling the police, filing an application, whatever he had done, wouldn’t have reversed what just happened.
A couple of years ago, a friend had to suffer a major break up. Probably one of the most unfortunate and sad incidences he has had in his entire life. It was like losing someone close to you to death. With as major incidences as that, there come consolations, explanations, advices, ambitions, tips of self-recognition and that very old and strong argument that it was meant to happen and whatever happened, happened for the good of you.
He was broke, he wasn’t ready for any of that, was still in the state of denial and to that argument, he’d often say that if it happened in the best of his interests, why does he feel that gap inside his chest? He used to tell everybody that whatever you say, your words are not going to bring her back. Yes, that’s life, nothing ever gets back. All you are left with is the burden of what just happened and all you can do is to play with your understanding of the situation and come up with a theory that justifies what happened but theories like thus don’t reverse what just happened, nothing ever does.
What are you possibly supposed to do in the end if something unfortunate happens? Hollywood often presents heroes who set out to take revenge but taking a revenge doesn’t get those back who are gone, does it? Unfortunately when it comes to this question, I stand empty minded, wondering what am I supposed to do and how am I supposed to react? Irrespective of the situation around me, irrespective of whether the revenge has been taken or not, I lost something dear to me and I don’t really care about any of the rest. There has to be an answer or a standard operating procedure like you perform when you get to know of being affected by some disease, you take your medicines and get cured from that. There must be some remedies that cures the gaps in your chests, that return the happiness of your heart, that brings back the charm of your soul and that get your life as decorated as before and that clears the blurriness of the series of even we call life and bring back those who are dear to us more than anything.
But what would you do when you find out there are no such magical remedies and that you have to live with the gaps?
We All Say That ..
We all say that we have moved
Memories of those special ones have been removed
But in a corner of the heart, somewhere deep inside
There’s that bitter truth that we all hide
That’s what, to ourselves, we refuse to tell
For that very same person, once again, we fell
We can’t explain the gap when we see that face
Something takes us to her, which we can’t even trace
I admit today, once again
Since the moment she left, I never could get rid of the pain
The pain that itches the heart and makes me lame
When I lose to the fact that without her life will never be the same
Umair Rehman 