Category Archives: life stuff

fear and anger

09 Wednesday Aug 2006

Posted by in health & happiness, life stuff, musings

≈ 57 Comments

yoda.jpg

I sense much fear in you,
Fear is the path to the Dark Side;
Fear leads to Anger,
Anger leads to Hate,
Hate . . . leads to Suffering.
– Yoda

Is it possible to feel anger without fear? Does fear always come first?

Recently rewatched the original Star Wars trilogy and was struck by how many times this Fear/Anger theme was mentioned. Especially with regards to Luke having to let go of his internal fear and anger in order to confront the ‘outside’ things that he fears.

I can certainly recall feeling fear without any anger. But I’m hard pressed to think of a situation in which I felt anger without also feeling either afraid or threatened somehow.

So, is Yoda right? Or is it a chicken & egg scenario?

the cult of skinny

06 Sunday Aug 2006

Posted by in life stuff, media, musings

≈ 26 Comments

tooskinny.jpg This Observer article provided some food for thought this morning.

Though I think the writer’s suggestion that “women are to blame for our obsession with being thin” is much too simplistic. It’s also ironic that while the ‘ideal body image’ has been getting thinner and thinner the average size of real people is in fact getting bigger.

The article mentions how past beauties such as Marilyn and Sofia would be out of work today, which made me wonder what would happen if the likes of Posh and Keira were transported back to the 1950s. They’d probably be hospitalised for their own good.

How did the ideal female body image end up becoming one that resembles a scrawny adolescent boy with breast implants? How far will this trend be allowed to go?

The small pic here is linked so it can be enlarged if you click on it. I cropped the model’s head to focus on the body. The collar and shoulder bones are almost poking through the skin, the elbows look creepily oversized and yet there are these two gravity-defying orbs stuck to the chest. f_huh.gif

nine boxes

03 Thursday Aug 2006

Posted by in life stuff

≈ 12 Comments

nineboxes.jpg Ever done this?

Please bear with me. It’s all part of trying to get myself better organised and hopefully become more disciplined and focussed in the process.

What you do is draw nine boxes on a piece of paper (as shown in the pic) and then fill them in with things that are important to you right now. Here are mine as of 5pm on August 3rd, in no particular order of importance (well, except for the first one f_loveblush.gif).

    • relationship
    • friendships
    • health related stuff
    • cats
    • writing
    • clothing biz/work
    • improving my Spanish
    • meditation/focussing
    • reading/learning

      The point of this exercise is to make sure you do something with each of the nine boxes every day that help you progress with them. And also review the boxes once a week or so to see if something new has come up in your life that needs attending to. It seems that many people tend to daily focus on maybe two or three of their boxes (perhaps work, family, friends) and don’t make time for the other stuff. The idea of the nine boxes is to create more balance in our lives.

      What would your nine boxes contain?

      what to do, what to do…

      03 Thursday Aug 2006

      Posted by in life stuff

      ≈ 14 Comments

      list.jpg Do you write ‘to do’ lists? Do you actually do what’s on them?

      I used to write lists all the time. I didn’t always get everything done on them by the end of the day but then I’d just transfer that stuff over to the next day’s list. And then somewhere along the line I just stopped writing them.

      But in an attempt to become a more disciplined and organised little orange blossom I am going to get myself a notebook today and start writing lists again. And I’m going to include everything like ‘write novel, lose 25 kilos’, as well as stuff like ‘buy catfood’ – just to remind myself to keep working on the long-term goal things too.

      Do you think it’ll work? Does it work for you?