11.1.11

Category: Beauty of Simplicity

"It is not enough to take steps which may some day lead to a goal;

each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Most people make New Year Resolutions a week before or after the New Year. I am not one of them; not because I’m not a fan of making New Year Resolutions, but because I am not persuaded that the year starts on January 1. I believe the year starts on the day I was born--November 1. But that’s just me, of course.

We are used to using the conventional calendar, and we probably won’t count the days and months any other way. Though we can’t deviate from traditions, we can always hold on to our convictions and crazy ideas. It’s OK to be different. It’s great to be a non-conformist! It’s cool to be a weirdo.

Last couple of years ago, I started creating a list of goals to accomplish within a year...sort of a credo. Before, the lists were extensive and covered lots of categories; but when I embraced minimalism, I made the list shorter. I called it a Minimalist Manifesto.

I was able to accomplish some but not most of the items on the list. It’s disappointing when almost all your plans did not come true. What I included in that simplified list may not be the ultimate goal of my life. Life is not a To-do check list. These are just Dares to challenge myself, and as the cliché goes: it’s just for fun. (What life is for but to experience leisure? We are here to be happy. We are here to play. The world is a big playground. They say that life is complicated. Not at all! We are created for recreation. And we don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. “All we really need to know, we learned in kindergarten”. How’s that for a dose of clichés!)

Robert James Waller immortalized “There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads”. In the same manner, there are lists that spring from nowhere, these are some of them:

1. Simplify! “Identify what is important and eliminate anything else”. Be a mnmlst. “The simplest things are often the truest", says Richard Bach.

2. Wander and Wonder! Because I don’t have a sense of direction, I don’t qualify as a traveller. I am a wanderer. A dreamer. Yes, sometimes I travel through dreams. I wonder when can we actually (in a sense of being actual) space-travel and time-travel the entire cosmos. When I say time-travel, I don’t mean going back to the past or moving forward to the future: that would be linear. The idea is to pass through time so that we can easily get from one space to another faster than the time it takes to draw a straight line between two points. But since travelling from Milky Way to Andromeda seems like distant echoes of ancient dreams, I’ll stick to wandering the earthly places in the meantime. (And, yes, some of the friends I met along the way are already exploring the heavenly places; and some are maybe scaling the depths of hell [heaven forbids]). 

I’d like to visit all the “magagandang tanawin sa Pilipinas”; those we’ve read in our Sibika At Kultura books when we were in the Grade 1. I’d like to see the wonders of the world. I’d like to walk the streets outside my country. I’d like to hear the songs the stars and the moon are singing, and kiss the lips of other languages. I’d like to savour the concoction of cultures of the strange foreign lands. I’d like to walk the places as far as eyes can see; because everything the eyes can see is just walking distance (according to one of my friends).

3. Eat, Pray, Love. Thanks to that famous book that was adapted to a movie, these three words now become inseparable.

Eat. I have to eat and eat until I gain 5 more kilos. Pray. Let’s let go of having the illusion that we are in control of our life. “Be water”, just flow. And let’s pray that we may flow fluidly. And when we pray, let’s “pray without ceasing”. Love. Well, as they say the greatest of all is love, so if you desire greatness, that’s self-explanatory.

4. Balance! We always fall. We fall in love. Falling in love with the person who doesn’t share the same feelings can be distressful. It disorients us from our proper equilibrium. We should find our balance. Let me tell you one of my biggest frustrations: I always wanted to learn to ride a bicycle. Every time I tried, I stumbled. I just couldn’t balance myself. A great scientist said that life is like bicycle, in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving forward. That’s the truth in Physics. But does the law of motion also transcend the non-physical aspects? On the other hand, the great ashram tells that you can find your balance through inner peace--meditate. Keep still. Freeze. Don’t move. Hands up. Drop your gun!

5. Think some. Learn some. Learn new skills every quarter. Among them are the following: learn to blog, to swim, to drive, and to dance!

6. Laugh out Loud! Yes, that’s one of my goals this year and in many more years to come. LOL! ROFL! Hahaha! You may be thinking about it as a cryptic for the pursuit of happiness—it is not. Happiness cannot be pursued. In a sense, it is not a destination, so you’ll never arrive at it. It is not an object of possession either. It’s a feeling. You cannot get it, you cannot find it, and you cannot possess it. It’s abstract and concrete at the same time. It’s something that you feel along the way. In a nutshell: we are not to pursue happiness, we should pursue awesomeness instead. Happiness is what you feel when you are awesome, when you are doing things that makes your soul smiles, when you are in circumstances that makes your heart jumps for joy. Happiness is what you feel when you laugh out loud, when you laugh so hard that it makes you cry. LOL.

7. Go forth and be awesome. Let’s be remarkable in everything we do, putting a heart in everything we make.

So those are the seven goals I have for this year. It is said that we are not to set boundaries but horizons. “Do not limit yourself”, a friend once said in a campsite in Mt Batulao. In Calculus, they talk about limits that approaches infinity. Yet we don’t have to have an infinite list, otherwise it will become too overwhelming. They say 7 is a good number so I simplify my list to only seven goals; and I wish to achieve them.

What’s your goal? Do you take time to write them, too? Share them in the comments below. Thanks for reading; I’d greatly appreciate it if you also share it to your friends in Facebook and followers in Twitter.  Please add me to your circle in G+