Communication

"Communication. It's the first thing we really learn in life. Funny thing is, once we grow up, learn our words and really start talking, the harder it becomes to know what to say. Or how to ask for what we really need.”

Grey's Anatomy

Over the hill

Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you’re over the summit, it’s downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where that peak is. You think you’re still going strong, when suddenly you’ve crossed the great divide. No one can tell. Some people peak at twelve, then lead rather uneventful lives from then on. Some carry on until they die; some die at their peak. Poets and composers have lived like furies, pushing themselves to such a pitch they’re gone by thirty. Then there are those like Picasso, who kept breaking ground until well past eighty.

And what about me?
My peak?
Would I even have one?

I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. Some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines.



Haruki Murakami,
--Dance Dance Dance

Livin' la vida loca

“There is only one way, really, to get into a state of living, and that's live! There is no substitute for an all-out, over-the-ramparts, howling charge against life. That's living. Living does not consist of sitting in a temple in the shadows and getting rheumatism from the cold stones. Living is hot, it's fast, it's often brutal! It has a terrific gamut of emotional reactions.
If you are really willing to live, you first have to be willing to do anything that consists of living. Weird. But it's one of those awfully true things that you wonder why one has to say it. And yet it has to be said.”

--L. Ron Hubbard

Small moments

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments – we hear a word that sticks in our mind – or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly – we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed the mallard ducks in the lagoon…

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we could see certain trends emerge from our collection – certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realise that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real – this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story making events of our lives.


---Douglas Coupland,
Life After God

So true!

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans”

--John Lennon

Drama that is your life

“I think everyone writes a story in their head that eventually becomes their life. If you don’t write it for yourself then someone else is going to write it for you.”

--Flicka(2006)

Don't Panic!

“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.”


---Douglas Adams

what just happened there?

“Just remember, the same as a spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close you follow the jumps: Continued on page whatever. No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up.”

--Chuck Palahniuk