400

This is the post number 400.
And it's not even a year yet since I started with this blog.
It makes me want to come back to what happened since.
And there's certainly a lot of it.

We, as human beings, undergo constant change. How significant change it is is determined by how much we open ourselves to what we see around ourselves.
If there's something I really take pride in, it would be that I understand what must be done to truly open yourself towards your environment. It's not just listening. It's also thinking. Interpreting. Searching for causes and correlations.
A lot of people are not capable of doing that. Therefore they are what we call "ignorant".

Speaking of which, I argued with someone about success today. She said success is always desirable.
I replied with a story I know - my father's friend became a finance director in a Hong Kong branch of a certain American corporation. Huge success, right? But what did she get from it? Unhappiness. I cam see that living in Hong Kong is simply not good for her - we've visited her this summer.
See, problem about success is that it is misleading. It only counts with the possibility of a person knowing the best what's good for them. To have success you must first establish a goal. Setting up a goal for yourself is like creating an artificial dream. It just doesn't work - and if it does, it may get very scary.

I don't have a problem with this entire notion of "success being always desirable" though. What troubles me and makes my blood boil is, that this is one of the opinion that deny others' of their right to have a different opinion. Do not tell me that I should desire success. There are things more important to me and I have my reasons; go and be successful yourself. I pursue different achievements. Like experience, love (and by that I mean loving. There's nothing one can do to be truly loved. Being loved is a gift. Do not ask for gifts.), or finding the purpose. I consider those more important than some sort of pesky "success".

I also talked to a person that I honestly find fascinating. An Afghani boy who made it to America. Just imagine - being only 17 and already having lived in a refugee camp, having the memory of staring down into a barrel of a gun pointed at you, running away from death. I think this makes you a real person more than anything else does. We talked about happiness. He says his family was much happier in Afghanistan, when having food and drink was enough to make a man happy. In US...finding happiness is complicated.

Maybe that's the thing about happiness. It is one of the simplest emotions. Just searching for it is complex. But you can't find happiness on your own. Happiness is a gift. You can't ask for a gift.

Look at this graph. Psychology says those are all of our emotions. Where's happiness?

...sapias; vina liques et spatio brevi

spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem quam minimum credula postero...