Analyze This - Vinod Chikkareddy

From a book that my brother was reading:

Whatsoever you do, just do it as totally as possible. Everything should be done in such a relaxed way that there is no effort in it. If you enjoy walking, good! If suddenly you realise that you no longer have the urge or desire to move, then sit down immediately; not even a single step should be taken against your will. One should not drag oneself. That dragging is the whole mechanism of the ego, the manipulator.

In Zen they have a very beautiful saying. They say,
Sitting,
just sit.
Walking,
just walk.
Above all,
don’t wobble.

I was going through a friend's blog recently, and had a "hmm, sounds familiar" moment.

The line that got to me was - Instead of thinking "Is this the right thing to do" you start wondering "Is this what's expected".

In trying to work through layers of systems and processes, you sometimes tend to forget what you really need to do, and focus on what you think is expected of you. Worse, it starts to happen mechanically, unless you step back a bit.

It is funny, in a way, that the most successful(?) social arrangements are built on processes and collective adherence, and not on individual beliefs.

From Verlyn Klinkenborg, on NYTimes:

For the past week, I’ve been staying in northern Finland, just south of the Arctic Circle and a few kilometers shy of the restricted zone that marks the Russian border. This is the boreal forest, a place of almost surreal silence this time of year, when most of the birds have already migrated.

The first night I was here I stood in the middle of a bridge over a broad, slow-moving river that flows into Russia. It was dusk, a clear night, and I had come out to listen to nothing. There was no wind in the trees, not even the slightest breeze. The river below me was silent, and for the half-hour I stood there I heard not a sound.

I found myself checking, again and again, to see whether I had gone deaf. I popped my ears. I scuffed a shoe. I tossed a rock into an eddy along the river’s edge. I tapped the guard-rail with a knuckle. There was nothing wrong with my hearing. The human ear is not really meant for straining, and yet I was straining to hear. The silence felt more like an unnatural muffling of my senses than the porous stillness of the natural world, of which I was a part.

The next week I spent in and out of the forest, listening with my eyes, so to speak, and not my ears. It has been a cold, wet summer in Finland, a season filled with the sound of rain falling through the spruces and pines. All of the Finns I met grimaced when they talked about it, as if the summer had tasted like cold, weak coffee. But the past week has been dry, and every night there has been frost. The leaves are turning fast. A fog hangs above the river in the mornings, which only deepens the illusion of silence.

I say illusion because on my last night here, I went back to the bridge, again under a clear sky. There are long shadows even at midday this time of year, and dusk is still reluctant to give way to real darkness. As I stood there, I heard the faint, but quite audible roar of the rapids a half-mile downstream and around a great bend. Why had I not heard it that first night? The answer, I suppose, is that I was too busy not hearing the things I’m used to hearing, including the great roar that underlies the city’s quietest moments. It had taken a week to empty my ears, to expect to hear nothing and to find in that nothing something to hear after all.

A few years back, I was in a good discussion about how silence is what we really seek when we listen to music; about how music is structured silence. This article reminded me of that.

Well, crude has come down to $124, from $147, but even 124 is high.

Petrol prices continue to be at an all-time high. So, here you go.

20 tips from Shell, for fuel-efficient driving.

On humanity's eternal search for recognition and praise. Taken from an episode of M*A*S*H.

"God didn’t put us here for that pat on the back. He created us so he could be here himself. So that he could exist in the lives of those he created in his image."

Go thrive!

Larry Mann, in The Big Kahuna : We are like the dinosaurs when the climate changed. There is no longer any reason for us to roam the earth.

That reminded me of Al Gore.

Scott Adams speaks about a past mistake.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/the-loser-decis.html

He smartly summarizes what to do with one's ego. :-)

It’s an objective fact that life often presents us with choices where the comfortable decision leads nowhere and one that threatens your ego has all the potential in the world.

You need a healthy ego to endure the abuse that comes with any sort of success. The trick is to think of your ego as your goofy best friend who lends moral support but doesn’t know shit.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22041046-5005961,00.html

ROGER Federer emulated the legendary Bjorn Borg when he captured his fifth successive Wimbledon title with a 7-6 (9/7), 4-6, 7-6 (7/3), 2-6, 6-2 win over Rafael Nadal in a thrilling final on Sunday.

It was a tough match. It was good to see that Nadal stretched him well, over almost 4 hours, unlike the limp way in which Federer handed Nadal the French Open last month.

Federer's 5th consecutive Wimbledon, 11th Grand Slam and 53rd straight win on grass.

At the D Conference this year, Steve Jobs made an interesting statement - If you want to hire bright and creative people, you can’t over rule them ... You can do that once or twice a year.

At the same conference, he also made another interesting statement during his much-hyped discussion with Bill Gates. When asked what he wished he could learn from Bill, he said it was Bill's (Microsoft's) ability to partner with other companies.

2 useful thoughts for the day.

Steve Jobs is notorious famous for his quirky management style. Fortune magazine famously called him "one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs". So when this guy speaks about other "bright" people and about "partnership", you listen; he speaks from long experience.

This article on CNN Money speaks of a set of people who got into the business of owning web domains. My favorite in the list is Garry Chernoff, who earlier was a "hospital electrician, and he now lives on a 10-acre lakefront spread in British Columbia".

If you really desire to make it big, you can. There is no dearth, for the right kind of seeker.