The Nurture of Perfection
In a perfect relationship, small impurities and annoyances always seem to creep in eventually.
The first instinct is to just push them away and forget about them.
The correct way to deal with them, however, is to deal with them. The reason for that is that they like to grow in the dark, acquire friends and stick together to make a huge problem that may become big enough to break the relationship.
The second one is that if you pretend that the problems don’t exist (or even if you fail to notice problems as they are arising), pretending that the other person is something he isn’t, you may as well draw a stick figure on paper and be in love with it. The partner, if you keep making him something he is not, is, after all a fabrication of your mind in that case.
Therefore, someone should try to find what annoys him about the other person as soon as possible, and resolve the painful part of it with the love and joy that a perfect relationship has plenty of. And really, almost all serious relationship are perfect when they are new.
Meditation
If a person does not have the freedom to do nothing, then he is enslaved.
If you feel the need to do things constantly, taking some time to do nothing will show you who the one you are serving is.
I Hate School
1. One reason why I hate the current education system is because it often punishes with no reason.
People without external support (or people whose supposed support – teachers, parents, classmates are even abusive) may get punished by bad grades or being expelled for something that they actually wanted and tried to do right with their whole heart.
I think teachers should be mindful that one instruction that may look to be the same for all pupils is actually perceived quite differently by each of them, and is of different difficulty for each of them depending on their capacity, background and interests and environment.
This is why it was deemed impolite to keep asking people around you for small favors that don’t mean much to you, from the beginning of time in our culture already. It is assumed that the school system is not subject to this, but i want to argue it is.
Something that seems small to one person may actually cause a big hassle to another. This is why many cultures evolve into praising behavior that is helping, and frowning upon behavior that is needy.
2. Let me close this by a story i heard recently, maybe some readers may link to the correct story; i will tell it as i remember it.
A monkey one day decides to organize a race. All animals are invited, and there is a big price to be gotten by the winner, for a small fee to enter the race. The rules will be known in time, and will be the same for everyone.
Animals from far and near gather for the race – hippos, horses, dogs, snakes..
Then the rules are announced: “The one who shall climb the tree the fastest will be the winner”.
Fake History
I think we people crave valuable physical artefacts, In the whole of human history, being in ownership meant better chances of survival. Now being in possession of many physical things has become more a liability then anything.
Then again, even in Buddha’s time (about 2500 years ago) he answered like this:
…
A person’s delight
comes from acquisitions,
since a person with no acquisitions
doesn’t delight.”The Buddha:
…
A person’s grief
comes from acquisitions,
since a person with no acquisitions
doesn’t grieve.”
I guess people in the past weren’t any less greedy about unnecessary acquisitions then we are today after all.
Consumption
We are a generation of men raised by women, I wonder if another woman is what we need.
by Fight Club
I have a comb yet my hair is tangled.
I have wall paint yet the walls are full of horrible graffiti.
I have a full fridge yet I’m hungry.
I have cleaning supplies yet my dishes lie dirty in the sink.
But all I’m thinking about is that i really need to buy a pencil sharpener. After all, my pencils are not sharpened.
We are a generation suffocating in stuff. I wonder if more stuff is what we need.
My Observations on Dogs
Most dog breeding is based on a misguided understanding of dogs.
Most dogs fit what most people expect of a dog.
Most first time dog owners do not know what kind of dog would fit their lifestyle.
Most people are really bad about estimating their own habits and the consequences of them.
Freedom
I believe that doing things badly but sincerely earns us a blessing from heaven.
War and Peace and Health and Disease
Us people, we like to have enemies. Don’t believe me? Check any news. Look at any movie. Play nearly any game. While many of them are not of the “slash around with a sword type”, surely you can find an enemy to your liking.
Well, it may be that you are at peace with the world – but still, shouldn’t we at least get rid of that corrupted politician? He is just destructive to society.
As society, we function way more cohesive when we have common enemies, and politicians love to offer people of other nations, colors, hairstyles, whatever, as enemies.
Enemies help define us, and make us stop flowing in that kind of uncertainty that we would find ourselves in in circumstances of perfect peace.
Most nations have a defense and a healthcare budget. They are usually paying for different things though.
A sensible defense minister would probably arrange the funds to target the enemy that is the biggest threat to the life of its citizens. For us living in developed world, this enemy has a name, and it is called vascular disease.
Wait, what?
War and disease are considered totally unrelated in our culture. Both take lives and in both we need to understand the enemy. We should take untreatable disease with the same serious consideration as a threat of a strong nation. We research and make weapons. Then charge and kill.
If the rationale that enemies that require applications of guns require their own budget, we could as well have huge, separate budgets for enemies requiring statins, the enemy requiring chemotherapy etc.
For the one who kills the most – disease, not war, we need to step together, not just leave it to the individual. If another nations army killed your neighbor but not you, wouldn’t you still be outraged? When disease kills someone, why do we prefer so much to ignore it?
It would be outrageous to just let someone kill another person. Whole communities have risen up through history for such unfair cases. In the case of a rare disease, the world is silent. The people and their families silently weep, while nothing some rare random people are making slow strides to some resolution.
The gap between science and medicine; the other persons responsibility
Medicine is presumably based on science. When you go to a doctor, you expect to get the best care possible. In the process there are factors that may add into the process a kind of error that is mostly ignored, or sometimes mentioned as medical mistakes, where the speaker and the audience don’t really want to hear about it – or for that matter, think about it. Why does it happen and what does it do? This article will be my thoughts on this, some arguments on some things; i am not offering an answer here, but rather a question. I think people need to be involved in the process of caring for their own health, not because doctors or medicine are inherently bad, but because i think there are some assumptions that are made in treatment without the patients consent. So let me present some of them.
1. “The doctor knows what is best for me.”
Science today is presented (we could also say, marketed) in the way of scientific articles. From articles on basic science (chemistry, physics etc) medical researchers design treatments (most often in the form of drugs). The treatment is evaluated in a trial (which is strictly regulated by a designated agency from the government). Based on this, the treatment is then marketed (presented) to doctors and patients.
Some considerations on which treatment a doctor will offer to their patients are:
a) cost
b) efficacy
c) safety
When was the last time you spoke with your doctor and compared treatments on all the factors? I believe, most people havent. When a treatment is slightly more efficient, but way more expensive – especially if various forms of insurance are involved – you will be prescribed the treatment that costs less, often, without even being informed of the other treatments existence – unless the cheap treatment fails! It is not that the doctor will tell you there is a expensive treatment (and let you decide or work for it), but you will be prescribed the cheaper version automatically. This is not only relevant to generics vs brand-names, but may be about whole different treatments. Since this is not a medical mistake as agencies will allow the doctor to choose between treatments, you may not even sue the doctor if you suffer side effects from it. In the same way, conflicts in other factors may arise – you may be prescribed a drug that is more effective, but less safe (safety is not a yes-no question, but rather a spectrum), or vice-versa. But if only you know how important it is to you to get cured of a particular ailment, how can this be left to the doctor to decide?
Another point is, is this doesn’t apply only to treatment, but works on diagnostic tools as well. In some places sending people to cheap inaccurate tests many times is very popular. After all, who cares if you have your non-fast-progressing skin disease for a couple more years before getting diagnosed, if it makes the insurance guys less naggy?
So let me recap this point: doctors don’t know what is best for you, as they don’t know what the disease means to you.
2. The doctor’s decision making process is not reviewed
If we had a program that would make a diagnosis based on the imput of symptoms, we could review the structure why a disease has been attributed to the certain symptoms. The weight of a certain symptom would also be known. The structure would be open to improvement. The doctor on the other hand? Well, he kinda remembers it might be this or that – sometimes forgets something completely and gets sued; or mostly just wastes the patients time in the progression in the disease – while getting his hefty paycheck. If you die because you were added to a treatment waiting line to late – well, tough luck. This is not even a medical error.
This is allowed because people (often without being mindful of it) believe that doctors base their work on some kind of magic and intuition, since doctors are actively trained to look caring and knowledgeble (if they don’t, they increase their chance of getting sued after all). Science is not based on intuition. Therefore, since medicine is scientific, it is based on rational thought.
Now, i shall let you in on a secret – if it is based on rationality, it is programmable. Yeah, so what about it you say? If it is programmable, the process can be repeated for trivial cost. And nowadays, people are paying with their lives for a late diagnosis and inferior treatment, of which the first could be obtained for a trivial cost, and the second applied by themselves (so only the cost of making a drug would be there for example).
Teams
I was with a bunch of idiots again, or so it seemed. The project we were about to do would again be a contest about whether our mind’s will get numbed more then the ones of our audience, out of sheer, thick, suffocating, boredom. We heard it before, we were going to tell it again, and they are going to hear it again. None of us even wanted to be there. It was as fun as death.
Then i threw my ideas in. I was stunned. Not about what i said (it was just a hair-width away in terms of boredom, still a bit better, as i thought at the time), but what people started coming up with in reply. The whole thing started to become interesting and engaging.
All of a sudden, there was a flood of ideas that i found not boring, but just amazing.
What did just happen? Was it me that did something?
zacione 