Schindlersword

Simple Alphabet

Feel

Wordless

In the wordless world, feel doesn’t exist for self-evident reason.

Wordy

In the wordy world, it is all about stimulus-response and, in that, your feelings play a starring role.

Many word-users believe what we go after and what we avoid is determined by what is going on within us and without us. If that were true, we’d be little more than elevators with buttons to push.

In the beginning

Well, in the beginning of the game of pursuit and avoidance is the pursuit of something or other and, therefore, with the avoidance of everything else. That explains why FOMO (the Fear Of Missing Out) is among the popular on the fears buffet.

Next, you will get results no matter what, is usually how it works. However, we don’t value results. The reason is as simple. We don’t value things, we value their meaning. Hence step number 3, you attach meaning. Others can help, but nobody else can do it for you.

What you feel is about the feeling itself. How you feel is about the intensity.

Once you decided the meaning, it is how it makes you feel that determines your decision of what to pursue and what to avoid next.

It is a circle game.

  • Feelings are to be felt.
  • Understanding feelings is a poor substitute for feeling.
  • Thinking about how it will feel if all goes well cannot compete with feeling it now.
  • Ignoring feelings is ignoring feelings are a gift you’re meant to keep.
  • Drowning feelings? Amplifying feelings? Good luck with that.

I’m not suggesting feelings should be the purpose of life. All I’m saying is give feelings a chance.

“Sometimes I feel very, very confident and I lose in straight sets.” – Roger Federer

Never a question of choice

You can feel good or bad anytime.

People do it every day.

Because we don’t make choices. We make decisions.

“The warrior’s approach is to say yes to life. Say yea to it all. Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.” – Joseph Campbell

“Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere. And you will find joy in overcoming obstacles.” – Helen Keller

Marketing isn’t as bad

MARKETING ISN’T AS BAD AS IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE.
”Words are not only in open books, they are an open book themselves.” – Spinosa

Marketing is no exception. Although it first appeared (in writing) only some 400 years ago, that doesn’t mean marketing is a recent invention and interest in it even more recent than that. On the contrary, the origins of marketing, and interest in it, date all the way back to when words were fresh on Earth.

In those early days, anybody could dream up a new word, every child could do it, and truth was no exception. But getting people to believe truth not only exists, but in a book you have a copy of, then as now, poses a different challenge entirely. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, all it takes is give it a try.

I’m not saying that’s how marketing began, all I’m saying is that’s when the original word-masters realized…

– “Most people will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.” – Thucydides
– “The one who dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool.” – Plato
– “A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood 

…long before Thucydides, Plato, and Margaret Atwood put these observations into words. Either way, the race was on for the first story the children — the younger, the better — should hear at school.

Thus began the golden age of storytelling. And with it — “Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the fairest story of them all?” — the planet’s longest-lasting beauty contest ever. As well as the most divisive and deadliest.  

“In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.” – Gaius Plinius the Elder

Guilty as charged. This explains why many believe marketing is a bunch of liars the world would be better without. However, that would be forgetting that lying doesn’t describe marketing.

Lying describes people regardless of what they’re doing with their lives. Religionist, scientist, cook, farmer, shoemaker, or singer, everybody knows from personal experience that when you tell a lie, you are the first to find out.

To exploit, or to help, that is the question, and the answer will not come from marketing. 

It is all up to you.
#marketing#storytelling#beginnings#words

Life

LIFE DOESN’T MAKE SENSE

Life doesn’t make sense” said the writing on a wall at the bus stop where I had been waiting for my transport yesterday.

I thought of the poor soul behind the writing on the wall briefly only because in situations like these, I prefer to listen to the wind blow or watch the river flow. After all, I’m full of air and 70% water myself, or maybe for other reasons as well. Be it as it may, this bus stop was ideal for the purpose, for it was a quiet place, one bus every hour, 3 people a-waiting, on my way to meet my friend at Ménétru-le-vignoble, France, population 152 — we’re talking rural countryside.

IN THE WORDLESS WORLD

In the wordless world, life doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.

IN THE WORDY WORLD

Expecting them to make sense is a common mistake people make with words. Life is simply no exception. Expecting words to make sense is a mistake for two reasons.

  • As Bruce Lee — among others — has observed, “If words control you means everyone else can control you.” 
  • Words lack the sensory organs required. The one with the senses, the sensational one, is you.

Accepting words as is, as opposed to wishing they were different, can lead to road signs that may have been invisible in the past.

One points in the direction of “MAKE SENSE: TAKES WORK!”

The other signals “HAVE OTHERS DO THE WORK FOR YOU, FOR FREE.”

Why would anyone do the work for you, for free? Let alone for millions of words? Who are those people? 

The difference isn’t in the road signs. the difference between the attractive sign and the unattractive sign is in our response, each their own.

“Once we have surrendered our senses to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”
– Marshall McLuhan

Meditation: A common mistake

MEDITATION: A COMMON MISTAKE
It feels good to meditate.

Meditation stops the noise, stress, worry, and anxiety before any of them get in, frees up space for peace, clarity, energy, recreation, and health, and changes people’s lives beyond the shadow of a doubt (check out the link in the comments section below for an example of many).

When or where one meditates doesn’t matter a Dickie bird. Some need a special place while others meditate each time a traffic light turns red on their road ahead. Personally, I fancy twice daily on most days, late at night and first thing in the morning, albeit after the coffee. I can tell it’s a habit now after all these years.

What’s your meditate-experience?

IN THE WORDLESS WORLD
In the wordless world, meditation doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.

IN THE WORDY WORLD
In the wordy world, a common mistake people make with meditation is expecting it to lead to…

– Think of nothing
– Blank out the mind or to get rid of the mind entirely
– Transcend words

A mistake because it is expecting the impossible. Words cannot be destroyed or made to disappear. Words can only be changed from one to another. 

Everything is a word which not only covers the mind but also nothing, hence the fate of the wordy: In the wordy world, there is no escape from words, such is the word-domination. The alternative to the common mistake of going for the impossible, I think is to follow Claude Monet’s advice:

“To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.”

Forgetting the name of the things we have a word for, as suggested by Claude Monet, near as I can tell, comes closest to looking at the world as though we were seeing it for the first time. Not only does it keep you meditating, after all, what this post is about, but it is also risk-free and keeps you curious to the end of your days.

“Call it a dream. It does not change anything.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Remember, it’s about meditation – quiet time – first and foremost. Technique is a distant second. Either way, I hope my post may be of value to you.
#meditation#inspiration#words

Little known fact about speaking pictures

The wordless invented pictures long before they invented the words to describe them wi

That, we know from cave paintings 30,000 years older than the first words on Earth. But it took the invention of many words before pictures could achieve what we now take for granted:

A picture speaks a thousand words. 

It’s not a magic trick, it’s what word-users do — they love to use their words.
#words#picture#love

Language

Words are not language

Maybe because it is so simple, it sometimes gets inadvertently overlooked: Language is already taken by language.

1 idea you can steal

One idea you can steal from “Words ≠ Language” is mistaking a word for another only prevents you from understanding the first thing about either.

Mistaking fake for news, or new for fake, for example, would be forgetting fake describes fake people no matter what they’re doing with their lives. News is a different wor(l)d altogether.

Mistaking words is rather like mistaking people with a difference. The people will tell you, if need be in no uncertain terms, but your words don’t mind for self-evident reasons.

Mistake a word for another?

Words say: “BIG mistake!”

Don’t do it.

Thoughts

The wordless

In the wordless world, also known as evolution, nature, or the wild, think and thought don’t exist for self-evident reasons.

The wordy

Among the word-users, the tendency is to think it is our thinking that got us here, makes us unique, and separates us from the wordless, that is from everything in the universe except us.

As Henry Ford would have it, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Kidding aside, thinking thoughts matters, of course, but at the same time everybody knows the world we live in—complete with the promoters of “Life sucks and then you die,” “The doomsday clock is nearer to apocalypse than ever,” “I see no hope for the future”—is, in fact, the world of our own making, and that it won’t be changed, let alone made better, by the same thoughts that create it.

In the beginning is the thought? Thinking it is our thinking that got us here would be forgetting what got us here in the first place. We cannot change what is.

In the beginning is the word, a fact that can be denied only by confirming it. But you can tip the balance in your favor.

Think good words.

“Words become works.”– Seneca

PS. My collection of Think Quotes Worth Reading Twice

Play Quotes Worth Reading Twice

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. – Tom Robbins

I don’t think of work as work and of play as play. It’s all living. – Richard Branson

If music be the food of love, play on, play on, play on! – Shakespeare

In my house I have put together a collection of small and large toys I can’t live without. The child who doesn’t play is not a child, but the man who doesn’t play has lost forever the child who lived in him and he will certainly miss him. I have also built my house like a toy house, and I play in it from morning till night. – Pablo Neruda

It goes without saying that as soon as one cherishes the thought of winning the contest or displaying one’s skill in technique, swordsmanship is doomed. – Takano Shigiyoshi

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. – Heraclitus

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved, he is at play or leisure. – Marshall McLuhan

Manage the top line – the strategy, the people, the product – and the bottomline will follow. You want a team in which players keep each other’s negative tendencies in check and balance each other – a team where the total is greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people. – Steven Jobs

My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging. – Hank Aaron (Hall of Fame baseball player)

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward. – Frédéric Chopin

Stop wasting time playing a role or concept. Instead, learn to actualize yourself, your potential. – Bruce Lee

The failure to understand the significance of play in maturing human beings has had incalculable consequences, because play is not only crucial to learning but, unlike other drives, is its own reward. – Edward Hall

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both. – James Michener

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play. – Arnold Toynbee

There is no passion to be found playing small, in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. – Nelson Mandela

We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing. – G.B. Shaw

We expect kids to sit for hours and do what they are told, and if they can’t, we don’t kindly say, I see you are restless. Get up and play. Rather it is, Better get tested for ADHD and the potential to be put on drugs. – Peter Gray

Work begins when you don’t like what you’re doing. And if your life isn’t play, or if you are engaged in play and having no fun, well, quit! The spirit of the sacred space is Śiva dancing. All responsibilities are cast off. There are various ways of doing this casting off. and it doesn’t matter how it happens. The rest is play. – Joseph Campbell

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. – Plato

You won’t amount to much, the people all said ’cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head. – Bob Dylan