Knowing others is wisdom.
Knowing yourself is enlightenment.
- Lao Tzu

It’s funny how much time changes things.
When we are born we are perfect, beautiful, unblemished; created this way by nature and our parents. Little by little that perfection is chipped at, eroded away. Scars, tattoos, piercings, drugs, alcohol…little by little they all take their toll on our bodies till we our sagged and puffy flesh barely resembles the child that once was. A vibrant new blossom is so colorful and beautiful when first clipped from it’s stem but quickly it withers, fades, then shrivels into nothingness.
Should I be saddened by this fragility that is our shared predicament, that eventually all that is beautiful must fade?
Certainly there is some appreciation to be found in the complexity of scar. Each little scar here and there is a record of a moment in time. Skinning the knee while you dad teaches you to ride a bike. Cutting your lip on your braces that you so abhorred. Bumping your head on that date where you met your true love. Yes, these scars have their own beauty. Perhaps it’s all just a little bit of payment here and there for the wisdom you eventually accumulate.

This soft flesh, it’s here today but like all things it will eventually wither and decay. Even the most radiant flower, once it blooms it will never be as pretty again as it was then.
So many little things preoccupy our daily lives…how will the bills get paid…will I get a terrible illness…will my true love ever come along. What will these things mean 100 years from now? Nothing.
Many people do not take the time to realize that they create their own misery, your life is controlled by your actions. You can choose to let shitty situations interfere in your happiness or you can choose to face it, to deal with it, and move on. Stop making excuses, stop letting stress control you.
Only when we have lost everything can we truly be free.

Am I more awake when I am asleep than during my waking hours?
The days and weeks gather speed and fly by faster than ever.
Am I breathing? Am I living?
It seems like the harder I try to grasp this semblance of my life, the faster it squirms out of my fingers.
My mind has been wrapped in cellophane. Some days the malaise begs me to fall back to dreams.
Dreams of my life, bright thoughts sprinkled with trepidation.
But these are all veiled from me, for now.
Am I awake?

We live in very interesting times.
More and more, people are becoming interconnected. Through media, technology..we are all connected more than ever before.
Have we lost primal nature of humanity? I submit that eventually we will have a total loss of identity..slowly technology is contaminating all of us with each other’s thoughts, opinions and personalities until individualism will no longer exist. Think about how we have become technological beings…we communicate incessantly via telephones, cellphones, the internet. We stare for hours at images generated on a computer screen or a television, sitting in our little houses transfixed by these images, spending more and more of our time viewing a two-dimensional reality. Think about how easily the population’s way of thinking and understanding of right and wrong can be manipulated by consistant exposure to subtle messages in media. People will simply do things because that is what the television insists we do. Buy this product. Hate this enemy. Elect this leader. Control of the media ensures control of the population. The mind is egregiously reshaped by these images it views over and over.
Our sensitivities have been numbed.