Inhale your portion of wellness

It’s a lush green forest around you. Birds are chirping. It’s early morning and a cool breeze is blowing. Nearby, gurgling waters of a brook add music to the stillness around. You feel better. It feels good. The external orderliness, peace and calm raise the bar of your better feeling. With the same set of your own individual, internal, self-specific problems, worries and concerns you feel better if the surrounds are better.

The desert sand is burning. It’s noon and forget about trees you cannot see even a blade of grass for miles. You feel horrible. You feel bad. Worse than your self-specific set of worries make you feel normally. You feel bad if the surroundings are not convenient.

We cannot inhale in isolation. If there is misery in air, it will enter your lungs. Use air-masks and air filters, do whatever. Life still will be stifling and genuine efforts just a struggle because we cannot help inhaling our share of the miseries. The solution lies in cutting down on pollutants. Not in wearing masks. But when it comes to our struggle to increase our happiness, the efforts are almost as useless as wearing masks when the air is polluted.  

Our own set of factors that make life either good or bad are not the sole deciding elements in making us happy or unhappy. If we are happy, then we are just sharing a fraction of the overall happiness surrounding us. Our lungs are safe just in proportion to the purity of air around. If the quality of air is good, only then the individual battles like quitting smoking, eating healthy and doing yoga to keep lungs safe will be meaningful.

If we are unhappy, that also is a fraction of the overall misery spread around. Individual is just a constituent of the whole. Happiness is drawn from the overall pool. How long the frogs will sing songs of self gratification in a vanishing pond? Its waters vaporizing. Its shoreline decreasing. Stanching green mossy puddle. What can be drawn out of it? Only death and misery, not life and happiness.   

A talented software engineer, with his tools of prosperity and happiness, is of no use at a place like Somalia. There is no surrounding prosperity to help him nurture his talent. There is no supportive economy and companies to help him contribute to the overall wellness and get a fraction of the happiness and feel good. A software engineer prospers in America because using his skills he can contribute to and earn back a fraction of the happiness spread around.         

The surroundings set the stage for either make or break.

“Love thy neighbor!” By loving others you are loving yourself. By caring for others, you are caring for yourself. By contributing to happiness, you are adding to your own happiness because your share of happiness and prosperity will be just a fraction of the overall happiness around. With your effort and skills, you draw a big portion if the social forest around you is healthy like the natural forest where each breath installs new vitality in you.

Long before you really start doing something to add to the overall wellness around you, start with a simple practice. You might be busy with scores of neck-breaking responsibilities, leaving you with very little time for real action on the goodness front. Start thinking good of others. Think good for your surroundings. Be happy over others’ victories. Smile over somebody’s stroke of luck. Feel bad for somebody’s loss. Say some sympathetic words as well. Over years, the goodness in womb will get healthy. It will deliver a healthy baby. And sooner or later you will definitely ‘do’ something to add to the overall goodness around you before you finish your journey.

You will then have a larger share from the pool of wellness. When the sun will be setting and you preparing to enter the night for rest, you will walk into the forest with well-meaning steps. It will be a far happier retirement than it would have been otherwise.

The hedge that is forever trimmed to maintain the power center

Political extremists (both left and right) and religious fundamentalists try to change the masses for the worse. Cut down the people to a fraction of their potential and you have nice governable puny-heads. They serve meow meow. For instant gratification. Hate, phobias, pseudo-greatness, anger and jealousy are very convenient tools to rob someone of sanity and get cast as a hallucinated pawn in the power game. Those who are power hungry—individuals, groups and institutions—try to disempower those to be under the influence of their power. It cannot be otherwise. The power pyramid has few strong at the apex and weak masses at the base. It can never be a square, having people of same realized potential from top to the bottom. Those ambitious for power can never think of empowering the masses. In that case the pyramid loses its standing. With pseudoism and populist rhetoric they rob the masses of the balance of their judgment. Hate does it. It tilts you off the balance. You fall prey to weakness. You become lesser of a human being. The power monger’s ambition draws on the peoples’ weakness of judgment. They try their best to keep the people to be nearsighted. To tame them in a sphere, with unrealized potential, from where the launch-pad of wisdom is too far. It draws votes for the power hungry, in a day to day life but it is paid in terms of racial attacks in America, brutal killings by Islamic extremists, attacks on Africans in India, and scores of incidences when people pick up hate and run after each other.

Flip the coin and be the best from the worst

Be the seat of my strength, not weakness.

Be the seat of kindness, not cruelty.

Be the source of light, not darkness.

Be the source of energy, not idleness.

Be the source of creativity, not limited vision.

Be the source of love, not hate.

Be the source of smiles, not tears.

Be the source of happiness, not suffering.

Be the seat of optimism, not pessimism.

Be the seat of gain, not loss.

Be the source of help, not obstruction.

Be the seat of leadership, not just sheepwalk.

Be the seat of a better human being.

Be the source of a more loving person.

O my mind, my seat of potential, take my journey further.

Please choose the better half of all the dualities for me.

Keep reminding your mind. Repeatedly. Daily. With eyes closed and fervent request. It’s a very nice, nutritious pre-breakfast food.

Choosing the better side of the pair of our actions and feelings is as easy as flipping a coin in our fingers from head to tail. It's a very short journey from the worst to the best. As short as the flip of a coin. A mere realization. Acceptance. And a pledge to remember. We are pre-conditioned for the negative end of dualities. The instinct can be broken. Just early morning practice is sufficient. It’s needs much as reminding the self. Repeatedly.

The folly of treating title more important than the story

There is a house well plastered, tiled and painted on the outside walls. Its well designed and vibrant exterior catches attention. Drawn by the catchy exterior you step inside. You expect an equal attraction inside. But a surprise awaits you. You come across soot, grime, dust, unplastered walls, cobwebs, cement and stonecrush staring at you. It’s a house that has been left unattended inside. Incomplete. You will feel running out. It’s a house that needs the workers rather more than the visitors. That’s how most of us die: just houses under construction. Throughout our lives we keep on painting the outer walls to satisfy our ego through expanding our visibility, hoping attention will give happiness and peace. Little do we realize that real comfort lies in the house completed from inside. So the interior remains incomplete, disordered. Can such a house give permanent peace? No. Outer walls are important. But only to the extent of defining our world, a psychological boundary to stamp our ownership of our chunk in this world. Only this much. And the importance of the outer walls is meaningless if the interior is unfinished. Outer paint is just the title of the orderliness inside. A summary of all the cozy arrangement inside. We, but, commit the folly of treating the title as the main story. Can a title replace the main text of the story? No. The title ought to be catchy. But the story is all that matters. 

Put down your dagger and pick up a stick

The ancient days of real bloody hand-to-hand battle are over. Then daggers were more suitable than sticks. They drew more blood. And made you more threatening. These are but more of social battle times. Instead of drawing the blood, it’s about catapulting ego, anger, jealousy and complexes. It’s no longer about bloody injuries which might land one on the wrong side of the law. It’s about law-abiding invisible whiplashing. 
An advice here. As we set out to tame and slay the real and perceived enemies in the social battle, we can very well afford to carry a stick instead of a dagger. The dagger will go too deep into somebody’s ego to inflict a permanent wound. Staying there as a painful milestone to instigate the carrier to work and connive against us in future. If it is not possible to drop the weapons altogether, at the most carry a stick only. 
Instead of calling somebody bastard, thus inflicting a dagger wound, we can say your father must have been away when you were conceived. Hope it again doesn’t sound like a dagger wound. Well, I mean to say we can try to bruise the skin only, to pacify our ego, with the stick of our words, instead of stabbing the heart with a dagger. A mark on the skin is less painful. It will not leave a permanent scar. Time heals everything. But it takes some more time, and sometimes it lasts more than the lifetime, to reach the extent of the dagger’s farthest point. 
Social battles are very funny ones. Almost flimsy. So why carry lethal weapons. There are hardly any permanent enemies. Scenes and stages are shifting. These are basically funny little stage shows. People hardly care about who the last paper enemy was. So carry a namesake stick. We need not even hold it in our hands most of the time. Just keep it in reserve tied to our belt. We will feel like a well-equipped soldier ready to tackle the enemies in the social battle.
Dagger is suitable for hate. And for plain anger. Or for the unholy, dark duty to kill like in war. But how long can one can keep the fire of hate going? Long before the fire consumes our last enemy, it burns the carrier only. So it's better to be irritated only instead of going full throttle with anger and hate. And a stick is a suitable weapon for irritation. It's a lesser weapon. Irritation also is a smaller fire. It is as much of less harmful to other as it is for the carrier. 
The ultimate goal of course is to go without any weapon at all. And dropping irritation to still less harmful and gentler reactions is the goal. All that goes in parallel with the degree of control we have over our mind. Again it boils down to training the mind. And sitting in silence and looking at the real self daily is the first step in that direction.