Category: Blog

1. Program it (each week? Month? day?)
2. Have rules and obligations (I must do a minimum of X, optimal of Y)
3. Be carefree, skip from time to time.

What if you lost your parents at a young age? Would you be different?

What would change if you discovered you have a non curable cancer? Would you be different?

These are a couple of examples I got in mind while discussing the same argument today.
The question was along the line of the “Is he because of the sad things in life he got, or he’d like this in any case?”

We can change, and this is key to me.
The way we change, though, may vary a lot from person to person, depending on the context too.
Losing parents at a young age is something you can’t quite foresee which implications has.

But for one thing I’m sure: whatever happens to us, it’s not the event itself that makes us change.
It’s how we react to it.

See the event as a ignition, something that starts a fire.
The event can or cannot be the source of a bad change, something like “turning into a shitty person” and it’s how we react to it that makes the difference.

Each event, if you take it outside of the context, doesn’t have emotional value. It’s an event.
You can detach easily if you see it this way, but once the event has a context in your life everything changes.
An event can change your mood to the worse, and yet, it’s not the event that did it, but it’s you.
You did allow the event to take a major place in your life.

You could’ve left it there, but you didn’t.

I started watching Thirteen (Reason why), on Netflix, I’m still on the first half of the show, but what made me think was the scene where the main character drinks a liter of beer because “Of the group”.

We’ve all been there, all our friends tells us “Come on, be like us, enjoy life like us, be happy like us”, and you follow that lead. You follow them because you trust them, you follow them because you don’t want to let them down.
You follow them, even though sometimes it’s not the best choice and deep inside you even know this.

You have that gut feeling at least once in your life, right?
Or maybe you didn’t and that’d be fine too.

But we all fell for this trick. It’s not their fault.
If they’re good friends, they are asking for your sake, because they sincerely think you’ll be happier, that you’ll have fun.

But what is courage?
A person I know once asked a dear friend of mine to do something crazy.
This friend is a person that doesn’t do crazy things anymore.

So, what’s courage for him?
I’d say that he would have courage if he did something crazy, but by himself.
If we are following a lead, we are not showing courage, but weaknesses to other opinions. We are following the lead.

Courage means doing something outside of your comfort zone by yourself, no help or pressure from the outside.
If it’s the outside that guides you, that forces you into a way, that is not courage, at least for me.

It’s a form of passively accepting, of submission, of depression.
The greatest courage is the one you don’t need to show, tell, or even repeat.
The greatest courage is hidden to the eyes.

I was at the supermarket and in front of me, quite far away, there was this nice young couple.
She tries to reach his head, to kiss him.

They end up kissing, but they continue to walk. They exchange a few short kisses and this causes them to almost fall down.

Here it lies the beauty of love. The ugliness of two people incapable of walking straight, the beauty of them loving each other.
It’s as if, for a split second, they didn’t care, and that second lasted the whole walk.

I went in japan 2 times, and in both travels I visited the Koya-San, a mountain with a cemetery in the forest, a very calm and spiritual place.

Last time I was there with my GF and weather was cloudy with a chance of rain.
We were sleeping in a temple, so after an early dinner (it was winter, so the sun was already out by 5PM) and a onsen we decided to dress up again and walk through the cemetery by night.

There was this “thin” rain, drizzling on us, and we were walking with 1 umbrella.
In front of us there was only a lone man, no other seemed to be interested in that place at night.

Since we felt like stalkers we choose a different path than the man ahead so we could both enjoy the silence of the graveyard at night.

At the end of both paths (they riunited) there was this big temple, full of lighted lanterns.
We walk up to the stairs together with the man.
He goes left, we go right to walk around the temple under the light of the lanterns.

And there it was the thing that made this the most memorable night.

There was this absolute silence that broke with a girl singing inside the temple.
Her voice resonated all around us, it was something magical and everything was amplified by the atmosphere, the lanterns, the light rain.

We get to the back of the temple, right there they stand a man and a woman.
The man is praying with a loud tone, and the woman sat behind him in silence.
He was sad.
We cross again with the other man, and we leave the couple behind, then we get back.
The voice of the girl stopped, and yet stayed with us for all the rest of our trip.

PS: I always advise everyone to take a trip to Koya san 🙂 it’s a wonderful place.