martes, 1 de enero de 2013

The Dangers Of Conformity

Conformity: The difficulty to mantain your own beliefs amongst others.


“Humanity’s most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

How many times a day before doing something or taking a decision, you take the time to think about it. And when I say "think about it" I really mean it. I mean thinking about yourself, what you believe is right and wrong. Now, how many times do you skip that step because everybody else is doing the same, so you decide to avoid the "thinking" part and follow the crowd just like sheep.
I once read: "Do not follow the crowd. You might get lost in it"
What is the point of taking that road if you aren´t confortable in it? The number of people that do something does certainly not contribute to making their decision right. When C. Colombus believed that the world was round everybody acused him as wrong. Everybody believed he was wrong, and who turned out to be right? The individual who went against the stream.

We are not sheep. We were given minds to differenciate what is right from what is wrong. We were given vocal chords, a mouth, and the power to speak so as to use it, not repeating what others said, but what you want to say. Make those parts of our body worth it and use them as you are supposed to.
Frost once said " Two roads diverged in a wood and I took the less traveled by, and it has made all the difference."

I am not asking you to kill somebody, that is a good type of conformity. I am encouraging you to think for yourselves, you are not just an individual in the world. Make yourself remembered. Lets not live in a world where we claim not being equal, when all of us follow the same shepherd. Lets be our own shepherds, but whilst teaching others what thinking for yourself really is.

“As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing it, So, students, should you accept my words – after testing them, and not merely out of respect.” – the Buddha


By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

Carpe Diem


Note:
I love reading with music. If I get inspired with a movie, (in this case the dead poets society) I enjoy using it when writing, and I find it quite intresting while reading as well, so here is the Youtube link to the audio I used in case you want to use it as well.
Soundtrack of the Dead Poets Society:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYvffYsiRh8&list=PLC3BD70249F8A1AF1
Having said that, let us begin.


Along with a new year comes a new way of living, or at least to me. A change has to be made in order for me to continue.
GATHER ye rose-buds while ye may,
  Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
  To-morrow will be dying.


This fragment from Robert´s Herrich "To the Virgins" can also be summarized into 2 words. Carpe diem. These two words are the Latin for "seize the day". Curiously, these words have been used in English since the early 1800s, but not most of us have really experienced what it really means.
Carpe diem is about taking chances, it is about believing that your own ideas can contribute to the world, and that every single day must be lived to its fullest. This powerful meaning is sometimes underestimated by us, I must painfully admit. We don´t understand life´s importance until we are about to lose it. We take for granted that we have a certain capability and that we will reach as high as our capability determines us to, but  what happens the most is that we tend not to know what our capability is. We all are destined to succeed, as long as we really want to and try to achieve it.
"You must strive to find your own voice. For the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it all."
We all are important parts of our world. We aren´t equal, that´s for sure, but we all have something that should tie us together with a bow, and that should be the desire to swim against the stream, going against all odds and our "capacities" as well.
Limitations might appear, but nobody has to ever stop you from doing what you really want to do and achieve in life.
“But only in their dreams can men truly be free. It was always thus and always thus will be.”
We are all free, but we appear to think that we live trapped. Those iron bars we see in front of us are nothing else than fear. Don´t stay there still, staring at them, they don´t bite. Touch them and feel how transpasable they are. I wrote this poem some days ago.

Carpe Diem

There is nothing more conquerable than life itself,
just wish for it and seize the day,
you will in fact find your way,
to that endless journey you have always strived to make.  
Do never stop and bear in mind,
life´s roads will diverge once and again get intertwined,
with your soul and your with heart.
Thus fly away and depart
to what destiny has for you set apart
Hence do not be late
for the break of day.

- Lucia Miri Echavarria

Here I have attached a fragment of a poem which is about life.  Life has its ups and downs, but we must go through them to succeed in it.

Walt Whitman´s O Me! O Life!?

"O me, O life?Answer.That you are here--that life exists and identity,That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."

Before I conclude I will add one of my favorite poet´s quote:
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and comen merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages." - William Shakespeare

I will summarize this last bit (going back to the fragment of the poem) by quoting the famous movie " The Dead Poets Society"
"what will your verse be?"

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria





Alone with myself


I’ve always looked, but never said a Word. I’ve been always listening, but my mind spoke in a language that nobody would understand. This was the first time.
I used to be a very silent kid, usually everybody pointed out how shy I was. I used to isolate myself, not because I liked having no friends, but because nobody would ever understand me better than myself. Maybe it was the fear of what others would say, or of being wrong. It might have possibly been as well the fear of the “why” that comes after telling someone your reasons for something. I am afraid of questions and not being able to answer them, so I’ve been always better on my own. Of course this was all before “the big day”. The day in which I chose to do something I thought of without last minute regrets. It was that day which marked the rest of them and until now I don’t regret it at all.

I love watching people everywhere, I get sometimes very distracted and my teachers get mad at me. The point is that I see problems everywhere, they overwhelm me, but confidence never sees me. I have never had that little part of me; deep inside to tell me, “go for it” or “what if?” There are more than a hundred things that annoyed me and couldn’t stop. At least I write them all down in a notebook I always carry with me.
It was in that moment, when my pen stopped working. There was no more ink left since I wrote tons of things per day which scared me to react to. I had to be quick and silent so that nobody could hear my footsteps and realize I was there. Mum and dad were still fighting, they hadn’t gotten a clue I was there, but if it weren’t for those marvels on the floor, those tiny balls of glass. I fell. As my body hit the floor and grandma´s photograph fell from the night table beside me, all sound stopped. There was no more shouting, nothing but the noise of my breath. I closed my eyes and stood up. I walked to the door that separated my parents from me and took a deep breath. My hand, placed in the cold metal that would help me open the door. I felt as if I was frozen, my whole body immobilized

Somehow the door opened and mum peeped out to see if it was clear. A tension like a charge of electricity filled the room. I stuttered for a while, until I saw mum full of bruises. It hadn’t been the first time, but it made me lose my fear.
“What is wrong with you? What is it now? Is it that you forgot your reports from work today and you were told off and had a bad day and that’s why you go around blaming everybody except from you? Oh right! That was last week. Tell me dad, what is it today? Is it that you blame mum for getting pregnant again? I may look like a shy fourteen year old who doesn’t think too much, but believe me, I do. I am tired of noticing everybody´s problems and not being able to do anything, but after all though I know they should figure solutions out for themselves, I can´t keep their problems out of my mind! It isn’t my fault that because of my birth you broke economically! It wasn’t my fault that because our dog looks scary it scared Mrs. Honeymoon´s cat and that he escaped a week ago and doesn’t give a sign of coming back!  It isn’t my fault that because I think too much I cant sleep at nights, or that because whenever I see a problem I have to write it down ! or how the kitchen sink is broken and the sound of the drops falling makes me nervous so I cant be there!  And the worst thing of all is that I cannot even say a word about it because nobody would ever understand! What if I kill myself so that you debts aren’t that bad? Of course not, you would have to pay a funeral!  What if I tell Mrs. Honeymoon that our dog was the one who scared her cat, Mr. Pickles, who she´s been crying and worrying for, and that I do know that he´s not that far away from her place, he´s just scared to go down the tree he jumped on, which I can see right through my bedroom´s window, because of the water everywhere from the storm! She would hate me for knowing and not telling her! What about my teacher? If I told her that I can’t sleep well because I think too much at nights and that the only thing that keeps me awake is everything that surrounds me except for her class, would cause me to get a visit to the principal´s office! Or how can I explain you that the only reason of why I am here is that my pen´s ink, the one I use to write the problems I am afraid of confronting, run out and that my intention wasn´t to tell you all this but to get a new pen?” I said with my cheeks covered in fear. I took a deep breath. My parents were as pale as snow as if they had seen a ghost, so I continued.
“Nobody would understand me, right?” I said hoping for an answer. “Nobody would ever understand neither of my thoughts nor feelings, because nobody is aware of my existence” I left the room with a slam on the door and went to bed. That night I couldn´t sleep either. Thoughts conquered my mind. Words didn’t seem enough to explain what I felt, but what I didn´t know was that they did understand me, I wasn´t alone.

Mum and dad tried to give me more attention, only by asking me about my day, sending me to a psychologist, surrounding me by people who would only mumble words that made no sense to me or that didn’t seem relevant at all.
I was surrounded by tons of school partners as soon as my parents talked to the school about “my problem”. Anyway, nobody could understand me the way I did, and even though they were there I felt as if I was on my own.

Maybe someday someone will understand me, or I might end alone for my questions about everything, but I’d rather be alone with myself.

Lucia Miri Echavarria

Stability


I read in my chemistry book that an atom with either negative or positive charge isn`t stable, the ideal is to be like noble gases, which have full outer shells.

Stability.

Recalculating…

Unknown ERROR

That´s what my brain says every time I think about being emotionally stable. I get mocked even by my thoughts now…incredible.
I am used to having those days when I feel in the mood for having tons of positive charge…which means basically that everything is hit by rays of sun, rain eventually stops, you are what you want to be, and all of those quotes you share on Facebook and everybody likes them thinking, I will be more positive! 
Life is amazing! Until they realize, life is hard, and it is definitely not summarized by a Facebook picture. There are obviously days in which I am charged with negatively..This goes on like this: who cares, I am just one in 8 billion people, or maybe I will never succeed at all, I will live under a constant rainy day, my head is London – like.

Now the question is…do we need stability? When I think of this term I connect it with two words: Boring and structured. I did try to be stable, balance my emotions, not getting my hopes too high, that sorts of things boring people who don’t believe in themselves or live inside of a box do. Definitely I am not one of them, but still I don’t do too well with my emotions…so it is confusing. I live inside a bubble. When I have different attitudes my bubble changes shape. It isn’t solid, as any bubble, so in conclusion, thoughts and opinions can penetrate through and get my bubble can either get bigger, smaller or eventually explode because I can’t do anything from inside since it is very fragile and can easily explode, so in general terms if I collapse of opinions I explode. Metaphoric, right? My mind and my bubble are sometimes too complicated; maybe the chemistry introduction helps if you are more of a logic or rational person. I am like an abstract painting…you will never understand me; you can take guesses but you´ll never know certainly what sort of person I am. I don’t even understand myself, so I find no point in others trying to understand me.

Whatever, the point is that I have to study chemistry but I am too depressed to do so.

I WANT TO BE A NOBLE GAS.

PLEASE!

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

How everything became nothing


We`ve all got those moments. Those moments that will be with you forever in your mind and that if you want to you can play them over and over again as if they were in a dvd and your mind projected them just as if you were actually living them all over again.

Memories can be either positive or negative. Positive memories are those that make you smile at the ceiling stupidly, the ones you daydream of or sometimes even dream of. Negative memories are the ones that give us nightmares or bully us from the inside of our heads, tormenting our mind and messing with our thoughts.

Sometimes I think about something so much that I start forgetting the actual thing, just like when I try to remember my dreams... Ironic,  right?. How is it possible that over thinking about an event makes us forget parts of it? What meant everything to you at that time, the only thing you were thinking about starts becoming nothing… Our mind is an entire unknown world that doesn’t have a map, it is unpredictable.

When I was younger I used to complain very much because to me “I didn’t dream”.  We were once at a friend`s house for a sleepover and when we woke up everybody would tell what they had dreamt about, but I simply couldn’t recall anything of it. I would, maybe, get flashbacks of it…but they were too blurry for me to get a clear picture of it. Now I complain about forgetting what happens…

Everything can become nothing. In fact, it is an interesting paradox.  What means everything to you can vanish in days, hours, minutes, seconds…and we can keep on counting. Your job, a very important person who might be a relative or a friend, freedom, choice, power of will, and again…we can keep on counting.

What if I told you that nothing can become everything? Can it work that way too? When my mind is blank, out of memories to recall either negative or positive, I have my mind and me. There is nobody else than us and a blank page. Big things can turn into little things, but the minutest thing can end up being the biggest.

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

domingo, 30 de diciembre de 2012

New Year

With one last day left of 2012 ahead tomorrow, all I can think of is what has past and what is left to live next year. This year has been full of struggles as every one, but struggles get bigger each year, but that is what comes with growing up.
I tried to label this year but I found it to be a quite difficult task. I´ve learnt, I loved, I made mistakes and I regreted. Just like every year this was full of unexpected events, ideas left to put into practice and a big moral. For me, this year, there are two morals. The first moral was "Do whatever pleases and makes YOU happy, in the end it is YOUR life you are living, not anybody elses´. The second one is "Take chances. Life doesn´t have rules, and you ARE expected to fail so as to succed."
I spent too much time thinking about what others might think abut anything that I did or thought. I´ve spent this whole year on it and I dont wish my 2013 to be anything like it. Taking chances is the second step, life is full of parts which aren´t known, left to discover and explore, and if we never try, we will never know.
I take with me what I learnt and all my mazing experiences from this year. All the negative is left behind.

Mottos for this year: 
"Be yourslef, everybody else is taken."
"Stop being afraid of what could go wrong and focus on what could go right."
"The happiest people don´t have everything. they make the best of everything they have."
"Do more of what makes you happy"

I wonder what the world has for me this 2013.
At least I know that I have 365 opportunities,  previous years of experiences of all kinds and a blank slate with a big label that says "2013" on it.
Best wishes for this New Year,
 Luli Miri





You need two to tango


They stand face to face. Walk towards each other .When their eyes meet they know they are ready and the music starts to play. The audience is amazed by how synchronized they look. The man leads, but it would be graceless without her hooks and eights. All of this, blend together in the typical argentinian TANGO music.
Thoughts and feelings dance together, but you couldn’t do without them both taking turns to lead. What do I mean by this?  Thoughts and feelings complement each other, when you think too much, there’s no room for emotions to flow. Imagine you are walking on your own on a dark alley at night. You hear footsteps behind you. Your heart starts beating faster, your hands are shaking and covered in sweat. You are afraid and run all the way to the next block where you see light. At that moment, out of danger, you realize you were afraid that someone would hurt you and decided to run. Two minutes before, you couldn’t have put your feelings into words because your emotions overwhelmed you and that was the way it could have been. If you were to start thinking instead of running I wonder what would have happened to you. Maybe you could have turned around and you would have realized the “supposed footsteps” were some shutters banging with the wind….However you could have also turned around to face a dangerous murderer pointing at you with a gun and in that case it would be too late!
There’s a link between emotion action and thought. Every event that defines an action either follows or will be followed by both an emotional response and a thought.
You are sad or angry and accidentally you shout to your mother; then you start thinking about it and how wrong you were. Here we have a FEELING, ACTION, THOUGHT link. Otherwise this “chain: could start with the action; so, you shout to your mother, you think about it and then you feel sorry afterwards. Finally everything can start with a thought, for example thinking your mum might be upset because of how you treated her; then it it followed by an action as you go and talk to her and finally you feel better after exchanging a few words with her and saying sorry.
Sometimes it’s the emotion who’s leading the way, and this is more evident when we let go of all rational thought and act impulsively. The best example that comes to mind would be that 5 cm above the floor feeling you get when you are in love.
Of course, then comes the fall. And no matter how many times we hit the ground, there we go again!
I refuse to think that we are irrational beings, but then again, why do we behave as if logic didn’t matter when we should be the most careful? We know that falling in love actually includes Falling, and we keep on falling in love!
Yet, the only thing that really differentiates us from other species is the fact that we have the chance to choose and not to act upon mere instinct, so I must conclude that the whole process of balancing our thinking and rational self with our emotional being is not without purpose.
After all, we do need two for tango