Author: quiriagos

This is about how we go through life trying to alleviate stress. Sounds like a modern facebook post by a page that wants to provide life-hacks to the people browsing news feed. I guess stress is a common enemy these days. Everyone seems to be on the right track with many things: greener environment, more equality on several levels, healthier bodies and also about enjoying life more. When i say people i include myself as well as everything i write here is my own perspective and hence subjective. Why is stress such an issue? Watching Don Draper from Mad Men contemplating his life and his decisions in a skyscraper apartment, being drunk while drinking whisky and smoking a cigarette I can’t stop and think of why do some people suffer so much? Why do some real people get to put their lives in such a disorder while spending the rest of their lives trying to bring it back in order? Why don’t we get things right from the get-go? It seems like we are wild animals thrown in a new jungle and we are having a hard time to adjust and it seems we are out of place. Like we designed our life’s environment for ourselves but we can’t fit in there. How are people so bad in doing what is healthy for them, in every way? I think it’s because we missed going through some basics in the process of reaching our ‘ideal self’. We missed going through the basics that make us happy: relationships, needs and fulfilment. I guess it is true that people are naturally drawn to challenges and puzzles, we are restless either because we are wired that way or because we choose to be flooded daily with information that doesn’t help us to focus, to calm down and think in simpler terms. That’s why we have to prioritise, to be less thinkers and more doers, so much to think and so much to do but for some, including myself, so much easier to do the former just by reacting to various stimuli we expose ourselves to, every single day. Why all this confusion? Why does this post approach the problem of confusion-generated stress through even more confusing questions? I guess being a person within modern societies one is naturally confused in the path of finding ‘the truth’, ‘oneself’ or happiness. Calmness inducing activities that bring you closer to a simpler, less confused self such as meditating, travelling or being exposed to nature tend to reduce the confusion. As a software programmer tries to find what doesn’t work in his line of coding, or tries to find a simpler way to achieve B from A, thinking about the way people think allows me to use an analogy for a biological glitch, a confusion within our brains. Focussing too much on the problem sometimes turns to be inefficient and a waste of energy. The glitch doesn’t go away by doing more of that necessarily. It is more likely to go away through doing something differently and if you are lucky, with less resources i.e. with less thinking time. A popular saying is, insanity is doing the same thing every time and expecting a different result, and i think it can explain the above in some way or an other. Another pop-philosophical approach suggests that the objective or goal is not as important really as the journey and the experiences within that journey. Being a person who has found great joy from new experiences and literal journeys through travelling, I think journeys are increasingly responsible for facing glitches, either by correcting them or bypassing them. Is a problem you focus on of such great importance? Maybe you are focussing on the wrong problem. Maybe you have more options than you would like to think. Maybe multiple options create more obstacles than they would encourage moving ahead. Regardless of more and more confusing thoughts, I think it’s important we do things that makes us come closer to a simpler self either that is travelling or in general experiencing something new, in order to eliminate or to certainly be aware of our own glitches so that we feel in control and reduce the stress in our lives. I think it’s a solid solution to what we can do before we can gain the maturity and wisdom of old age when glitches and confusion will be things of the past, strange little puzzles that stand between us and our honest self, giving us a hard time and not allowing us to see what the problem really is. Until then, let’s be simple, let’s think in a more ‘tidy’ manner, one step at a time.

This one is about making decisions for the future, decisions that if foresightful enough, your future self would like to enter a time machine and come back in time to thank you for them. How foresightful can foresightful be though? And why do we include foresight in the conversation of life decisions? While the modern age is one of planning and strategising, everything from mindfulness to love is all about living in the now and living life to the fullest, a cliche expression that is so cliche that it looks like no one has really managed to really do that in life and is just using it as wishful thinking or to feel part of the ‘new’ age of thought, which is anything but new however as it’s trending in and out of pop culture i assume it catches the attention of new people every time. So what is in life other than surviving for as long as possible? Is it to be understood? To contribute to society? To become more powerful and influential than your parents? To serve a family name? While the answer may be scientifically answered by existing research pondering about it seems important, ever evolving and never ending, at least it is for me. Human beings are supposed to differ from other animals in that we have consciousness, thinking about life and death, contributing to unproven theories with our conversations and blogs. What is it so important for us in life that we constantly review decisions and plans that have already expired? For sure learning from past mistakes is key to survival however it seems that we plan for something bigger than ourselves. Do we even know where we are getting at? Of course not, however we like to think that with practice we can become more precise in our planning and while this approach serves to reaching a goal that we have clearly or not in our head this whole process helps us becoming masters in travelling through life and while we don’t live in the now, we spend a lot of time to make sure we reach an abstract goal or reality. I guess when what you focus and plan on is inexistent and a thought of the now, it is another form of living in the moment but perhaps one that puts you into a maze of gradual realisations in contrast to a form of living that includes a road that one doesn’t care how long it is and what is at the end of it, if it ends at all. It’s important to understand that life is more than achieving goals and reaching checkpoints, to understand that is rather about all the work, time laid forward and experience received to reach something. Are people greedy in their pursuit of goals? Surely we all know of people who while they claim that the next goal is the ultimate goal that will change their lives, reaching that only reveals the next goal and reaching the latter reveals an other goal. Should one be discouraged by this continuous replacement of the ultimate goal by another ultimate goal? I think the answer lies in the feelings we have when reaching a goal. If you felt that this wasn’t the ultimate one then maybe you are not setting goals in the right place. If you set goals to make your life fuller and time after time the achievement falls short to that task then maybe those goals are not the ones to fulfil your life’s purpose. So what is life purpose anyway? Is it really a fixed concept or does it change as we take each and every one step. Looking back ten years from now, will a ‘life’s purpose’ be the theme of specific 10 years of your life? While we may all think as life purpose one single thing that serves and fulfils every aspect of our life once realised, rather it looks like it’s something that keeps you going through challenging times, through times of growth. The growth that is made up, not of the goals as such but of the pursuit of goals, the grinding in the meantime. So there is something to remember in consequence. Let’s appreciate our self of today. Let’s not be snobs of ourselves in the now thinking that where we are now is something our future self will not want to be associated with. Our self now is the one putting in the work. Working every day for that goal, learning about itself, exploring and acknowledging ultimately that the now is what we should put in our memories and not reserve the front-row memory slots for the future. The now is the creator, the inventor, the worker and the dreamer. Respect what yourself is doing now as yourself now is all you are at that time and place. Respect the feelings of sadness, of uncertainty, of regret, of hope, as these feelings are the fever reaction of yourself struggling through uncertainty, grinding, keeping on, standing proud for while the future self is the one that will please the outsiders, the self of the now is the one that really only matters and the one that should be respected the most, most importantly, by you.

What is this blog about, what sparked the name awenesty and why the play with the two words? These are some questions that i need to clear out for myself as well so i’ll go ahead and attempt that. I recently graduated from my masters and i’m in the process of finding a job as the unsaid rules of society dictate. You see there are steps that you follow from the day you enter the educational system and i’m so glad those steps are finally over as i’m not planning to follow any phd route that would be the next logical step when it comes to academia. Now, am i truly free to make up my own mind? To choose from any type of options and opportunities or is that not really the case? These are some of the big questions that roll in my head as they would also roll in the heads of people who while living their life, make use of the question why very often, especially when faced with pre-made choices. Why this? Why that? Why yes? Why not? You see, i believe freedom is a beatiful and terrifying thing at the same time. One way to achieve true freedom of mind is to ask honest, intuitive questions. While this process can be empowering, it can also be terrrifying, for to reach empowerment one has to face his demons and the more you ask those honest questions, the more you play with fire, the more that fire becomes familiar and, in time it becomes essential to achieve a true self, the true you. How strong does someone feel after facing his own demons, after having a discussion, understanding them, becoming familiar and understanding the reasons why they were put there in the first place. As with everything practice makes perfect and so with asking questions; find your own ‘million dollar question’s and realise in turn that they are priceless. The truth lies within, you are your own enemy, you do it to yourself and other pop culture expressions have one thing in common: you. The self, the identity, the personality of the human being.
Is this ‘first world problem’-worthy as internet memes would suggest? I think while my life experiences and struggles can be considered of the first world, the process of playing with this fire can apply to anyone. So back to ‘Awenesty’. I guess now that you’ve reached this point it makes more sense: asking honest questions to explore your own self, your true self. Reaching that at first uncharted territory is awesome; is showering you with the feeling of awe. How could all this information be within me? How could joy and sorrow be locked inside my head? How could i not make use of this to understand myself better, to get to know who i am, what drives me, what makes me happy and which are the ‘mysterious ways’ my mind works in? I like what awe and honesty do to me so i decided to put them together and see for how long they can coexist creatively, and what they can bring in this web-space. I would encourage anyone: explore yourself, don’t be afraid by what you see, demythify fears and come back stronger, calmer and more ready to live life more happily in a more fulfilling manner.

I encourage anyone to reach me and share with me explorations of self, narratives of awe and honesty and let’s make the Awenesty blog an environment for anyone who thinks  that finding yourself is the way to freedom.