If you are like about 90% of mankind, about now is when your New Year resolutions start falling by the wayside. So here are some motivational quotes to bolster you up!
Monday Motivation: New Year Resolutions
Reply
Category Archives: Random
Spreading Some Positivity
It’s been six months now since we have been more or less confined at home and I was feeling a little down the past few weeks. So I decided to compile some quotes on positivity to cheer myself up and to tell myself that things will get better. Since it did lift my mood, I thought to share them with you too…
Would you like you?
I saw this one one of my various social media platforms. This is a question someone posed – would you like yourself if you met you for the first time? This got me thinking – what is the face we project to the world? Is it one which makes the other person want to continue to speak to you, to want to know more about you? Or is it one which makes the opposite person run far away from us?
If I met myself, I probably would not like me at first glance. I am an introvert and so do not mix well with people immediately. Add to the book, physical or digital, that’s always in my hands and my resting bitch face makes me look arrogant and proud at first glance. I know that its off putting to some people, and so this is something I need to work on in 2017.
What about you? What does your first impression tell other people? Would you like yourself if you met you? I’d love to hear in the comments section
Time Turners aka If you could turn time back….
Please do not read this post if you are a major Harry Potter fan and have not yet read the Cursed Child book. This post is heavily influenced by the book and contains spoilers in the book.
A couple of weeks back, I finished Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the major premise of the book is time travel and what happens when you try to change reality if you go back in time.
In the book, the protagonists of this story, Albus Servus Potter, and Scorpius Malfoy, who are best friends, try to turn time back from an important event in one of the books – the death of Cedric Diggory. They try to do this three times and each time when they turn time back, they arrive back in the present time in an alternative universe, one that has no bearing on their actual present.
So I started thinking ‘What if I managed to get hold of a Time Turner’, what would I do? Initially, I was very excited and started thinking of all the times in my life that, in retrospect, I wished I had done or acted differently. I also wondered how my life would turn out had I changed even one aspect of my life.
Then I read about the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly Effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
What it means is that small changes in one dimension (or a change in time) multiply and can have a dramatically different effect in the current state in time. This effect is part of the chaos theory.
When I read about this, I started thinking about this – if I did change any part of my life before today, then perhaps, today will not exist. I may be living a completely different world than what I am living today. I probably would not have S, GG or BB in my life!
At every point in our life, we make certain decisions based on our current knowledge. Our today is the sum total of all that knowledge and the cumulative effect of all those decisions. Who we are today, is, therefore the sum of all that we have done – right or wrong – till the now.
This is a similar lesson that Albus and Scorpius learnt. When they tried to stop Cedric from being killed, the reality they came to was completely different from the reality they left.
Let us embrace our current reality and learn to love life as it happens. Everything happens for a reason and this is so true here. When we try to change fate (or reality as it is), reality then throws a curve ball at us….
Random Thoughts – Gender Equality
This week, I’ve had many thoughts swirling in my head, which I thought needed a post all by itself, rather than put it down in my weekly update, where it may not be really relevant.
One of the big news in the papers last week was about the risqué and sometimes obscene games played at the freshmen orientation at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Apparently, this is common in other Singapore universities too – Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU). Reports said that the games were very sexualised in nature with some even invoking feelings of incest.
Orientation camps are a chance for the incoming freshmen to meet other new students and make friends. As parents of young teens who will soon get into one of these universities (hopefully), this is cause for concern to me. Since all Singaporean and Singapore Permanent Resident males have to complete their national service before they enter university, this means that there is a two-year gap in age between the men and women who enter the freshman year. This becomes as much as six years or more when you compare a female freshman versus a male final year student.
Some students (both male and female) who were at the orientation didn’t feel that the games were wrong, which lead me to think how they thought of female emancipation. Games like this, which are often under the leadership of the student council and perhaps the university management tacitly condone sexism and misogyny at a very impressionable age. It becomes worse because, in these games, it’s often the men who play the aggressor and the women, the victims. I am a feminist and I strongly believe that when young men look at women in such a sexual way, in what is essentially a very non-sexual environment, then it leads them to be conditioned to think of women in such ways in other such non-sexual environments such as at work. This leads to a life-long tendency to believe that women are very inferior to them and always act in ways which do not demonstrate true gender equality. I guess when men who do not want to take part in such games, protest, they are then ridiculed and called names for being wimps!
The university has stopped all these games for this year at least and hopefully this will lead to a serious review on what can and cannot be acceptable.
This actually leads to the other thing I have been thinking about for a week now. I usually steer clear of politics and since I am not a political commentator, I like to leave that to the experts. But I am sure everyone, including me, is watching the US Presidential elections run-up. I was very happy when the democrats finally (really finally!) elected a woman to become their nominee, in what was a historical moment in the history of the country. I along with millions of women worldwide cheered at this, but I was also a bit perturbed that it took them almost 240 years after independence to have a woman at spitting distance of the highest office in the country. For a country which calls itself the ‘greatest country in the world’, this is a bit disturbing as it does not really show that this greatness also lies in the equality of its daughters and sons.
However, the most disturbing part of the election campaign has been the republican nominee. I cringe each time I read about his comments on women, minorities, the disabled, (basically everyone except the traditional white male). At times I think nobody can be like this – misogynistic, rash and irresponsible, and wonder if this is the persona he has adopted to win the elections, then I read another article about him, going back to before he was the nominee and decide I was wrong, maybe he is like that in real life too. Then I really shudder and think of the country and its future.
As a woman, as someone who passionately believes in the equality of the sexes and as someone who believes in equal rights for everyone, I really hope this person does not win. If he does, women’s lib and emancipation will probably retrograde back to 1776 when America became free of the British and the words “Freedom”, “Liberty” and “Equality” are just words in the constitution
Memories and Such 