I Live Today

Maybe I wonder if sunlight will continue to shine with all unending problems surrounding this self with everything else. By night I may wonder where all these things would go and where it take things. There are times I feel like doing pantomime in a hollow situation, thinking about it as uselessness.

However, there are simple things make me aware. I can’t deny the presence of myself in this life. Among my relations to the world and others and struggles and money and success, I can find one realtiy, that I am an existent living being. And it is so clear that I am living not in the past or future all the time. I am just here and now. I am just inhaling and exhaling my breath. It is a reality I can’t deny. I don’t live in tomorrows and don’t live in yesterdays. I don’t compare yesterdays and tomorrows, I don’t compare myself with others, because I am living now, I am, I am myself, is growing here and now.

So why bother myself to be immersed in yesterdays. I can’t touch my yesterday self, I am a reality as far I only exist today. And I don’t need to wait for tomorrow, for tomorrow is still potentiality the upcoming next time, while I live as a reality just now. So I live my today life in my best ways, living and growing at my best.

Smile to Stranger

We often advised not to talk to stranger on the street. However, sometimes we can try to just smile to one of them once. We can give away your smile (or even say hi) to anyone we pass on the sidewalk to your workplace, or in campus, or in your neighborhood. However, everything must go in natural and sincere way. We have to be in the right mood, too.

For the first time, actually it took some experimentation to do this well. We may need a few steps on what to do and what not to do. Or, if we been doing it well for years where we've lived, we may think how else will I get to greet and say hi to people? We can make new friends this way, sure. It's a nice gesture to smile at a stranger, isn’t it? A smile is nice to give and nice to receive too. We never got a negative reply, the worst risk is we got no reaction at all. Its quite interesting experimentation we can try.

Khayyam and Life

I read about famous Omar Khayyam. Khayyam means ‘the tentmaker’. However, he was known foremost as a great Persian man at his golden age. Born on May 18, 1048 in Nishapur, Persia (Iran), live as a well known poet, mathematician and philosopher, and died December 4, 1131.

One thing I read is that Khayyam was quoted in Martin Luther King Jr’s speech:

Why I oppose the war in Vietnam. "It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home America. Omar Khayyám is right 'The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on.'" Yeah life must go on and on.

Khayyam always talked about life with a beautiful style. Below is pieces from his Rubaiyyat (quatrains), talking about Life itself.

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted - "Open then the Door!

You know how little time we have to stay,

And once departed, may return no more."

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise

To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;

One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;

The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument

About it and about: but evermore

Came out of the same Door as I went.

With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,

And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:

And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd -

"I came like Water, and like Wind I go."

I confess, his words above are moving and make me impressed. Iran has really its jewel.

Foucault’s Way

Thinking about Foucault’s concept of panopticism (madness as a social construct), I am reminded of how he wrote his book. Foucault’s book, Madness and Civilization is rather difficult to follow. Anyhow, Foucault wasn't a historian or even a philosopher in the conventional sense.

His book rested on constricted historical documentation, yet this have vibrated good idea because he explained what’s going on in his cultural analysis. Many of us who have learned from Foucault read him because of the way he looks at his sources. He invites us to reverse some of the historical causality more than did by other historians. He was concerning with "becoming what one was," and folie et déraison was his first attempt to become himself.

Rising above the Cartesian Weltanschauung, he show us what lies beyond its arbitrary structures, he reverses the paradigm, making a mockery of asylum in that Madness book. He discards the arbitrary constraints of reason, reexamines and reconnects aspects of language said to have been irreconcilable. He also attempts to reveal the ultimate philosophical irony: truth often lies not so much in scientific method, with its birth perhaps in the Socratic method, but in discourse, in an analysis of established categories of language, thought, and history.

However hard his book is in my own capacity, however unconventional his way of life, he evidently helps readers understand how they live now and here. It’s good thing, I think.