# Introduction

![Soul Candy](https://2207359959-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-MD480syLaySAqGN4IGB%2Fsync%2Fefd56d963f0f96734f11735f84b8a92a1a64da05.jpg?generation=1595666651176652\&alt=media)

Dear Reader!

Before we start, let's make one thing absolutely clear:

I don't think that what's written here is truth. I am not advocating anything. I have nothing to sell. I am an entertainer.

This book is not a medicine, it's a candy. It's unlikely to stop your aging, but may help you enjoy the process a bit more.

The point of view at life presented in this book is \[partly] what helps me be one of the happiest people I know. These thoughts make me happy, so they may very well do the trick for you as well. Or not. Try and find out.

Enjoy your soul candy, but don't take too much at a time.

Hugs,\
+G

Summer 2014. Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Kathmandu and all the air in between.

p.s.\
Most of the things in here are pretty obvious. But it's the obvious that we forget too often. None of the things in here are original thoughts. They are all borrowed from a wide range of people, famous and not. Some of these people are cited in "read more" sections. Others, I hope, will forgive me.


# Be here now

Over the course of evolution, humans have become extremely good at one thing that really matters to evolution: ability to survive.

The strategy that we've chosen though is very different from what our fellow animals do. We are not stronger or faster. Our skin is not thicker. We are more fragile than most of other animals of similar size. In physically challenging situations we are very likely to die. But our strategy is to be one step ahead: we are very good at predicting and preventing (or avoiding) those situations.

The strategy of survival that has proven successful to us \[so far] - is developing extraordinary ability to learn from previous experiences (first personal, later group experiences, then cultural) and predict what can go wrong in the future.

This may be good for survival, but definitely not so good for emotional wellbeing. Our ability to constantly live in multiple futures that can go wrong has robbed us of the ability to live in the now.

This very moment, if only you choose to pay attention to it, usually turns out to be safe and wonderful. But instead of focusing on enjoying it, our always-buzzing disaster predicting machines turn on to computing the next awful thing that has a minuscule chance of happening.

In this sense you can say that unhappiness (in the form of constant worrying) is a necessary byproduct of the kind of intelligence that has evolved to dominate in us.

So are we bound to unhappiness then? I don't think so. The trick is that we haven't \[yet] lost our senses. Nor have we lost the parts of the nervous system that make us capable of living in the now. We simply don't associate the "self", the "I" with those parts.

The only thing that you need to do then is to slightly shift your center of consciousness from the worrying parts to the sensing parts.

After all, the choice of what you call yourself is yours at any given moment: do you want to be the worrying one who lives in the imaginary disastrous futures or would you rather be the sensing one who lives in the ever-pleasantly-surprising now?

Read More:

* Alan Watts
* Laurence Gonzales


# Tune in

All suffering comes from a \[false] perception of being out of tune with the universe.

So when troubled, all you need to do is tune back in. If you were an out-of-tune string on a well-tuned guitar, here is how you would tune yourself back in:

1. First, you would stop listening to yourself and start listening very carefully to what the rest of the guitar is doing. The trick here is to listen not just to some strings around you, but also to the sound the guitar is making as a whole.
2. Second, you would come back to yourself and try to find in all the different sounds, that you are currently making, one that resonates the most with the rest of the guitar.
3. Third you would adjust your own vibrations in a way that would produce best possible harmony. The closer you are to being in tune, the less you can hear yourself as a distinct vibration. In other words, if you can hear yourself distinctly, there is still some tuning to be done. 

A perfectly tuned string can't be heard at all \[on its own]. It only contributes to the overall volume and richness of the music that is being played.

So when you feel bad, here is a simple recipe:

Shut up, Calm down, Tune in!


# Enjoy the ride

Watch out! You are in the water.

Everything is moving in it. It's moving way too fast for you to grasp its patterns, predict what's going to happen and put it under your \[imaginary] control.

Best of all, you are moving with it.

Now you have 3 options: 1. First you can ignore the fact that everything is moving too fast and make-believe that you have something under your control. This works unless \[or until] something else in the currents hits you. 2. Second, you can accept the fact that everything is moving, but ignore the fact that you are moving with it. This leaves you desperately searching for and clinging on to other things "that seem not to be moving". Whether what you are clinging on to is a thing, a person or even your very own self, you are \[eventually] up for a lot of pain: you will be terribly disappointed when the gap between your mental image of your anchor and its actual fluid nature becomes too wide for you to ignore. 3. Finally, you can accept \[and appreciate] both the currents of life and the fact that you are moving in them and with them. Then you can choose to get on with it and enjoy the ride.

Don't fool yourself. You are in the water and the only thing that is under your control - is how you float. So float with your eyes wide open and enjoy the ride.

Read More:

* Shunryu Suzuki
* Alan Watts


# Choose your attitude

If you are feeling bad, chances are, it's because of too many possibilities.

You see, there is an important distinction between possibilities and options: options are real, while possibilities are often not.

Let's play this out.

Imagine you are on your way to a meeting and you get stuck in a traffic jam. The reason you are frustrated (and possibly even angry) is that there are other possibilities in your head: What if you were not in a traffic jam? What if you had chosen a different route? What if you had a helicopter? Those possibilities can drive you crazy while you are stuck in a car.

Your options are very few though: you can spend the next hour of your life frustrated and unhappy or you can turn some nice music on and choose to enjoy.

When you are suffering from a lack of choice, it's likely because you are overly aware of other possibilities that are out of reach.

But you can focus on your real options instead. And the most important choice, the choice that nobody can take away from you, the choice that you have in every single situation in life - is the choice of attitude.

So choose your attitude. In a way, that's the only choice you have.

Read More:

* Viktor Frankl


# Value death

![Value death](https://2207359959-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-MD480syLaySAqGN4IGB%2Fsync%2F3b73a6dd7501b681a01f658f9fbf0bb07f400a9e.jpg?generation=1595666649357883\&alt=media)

We are, after all, all made of stardust. But for some curious reason (and despite all the evidence pointing to the opposite), a temporary chunk of stardust, that you associate with yourself, firmly believes that it is in a way separate from the rest of the world.

This sense of separation causes a lot of trouble and, among other things, the fear of death.

Let us explore this thin (and rather imaginary) membrane that separates you from the rest of Universe. Don't get me wrong, this membrane is wonderful - it's only because of it that everything exists. But it's also the cause of a lot of our troubles, so examining it closer is a useful (and interesting) thing to do.

Think of a soap bubble. Air inside, air outside and a thin temporary film that separates some air from the rest of it. The beautiful film is ever moving and almost transparent. The only reason we know it's there is because it reflects some of the sunlight that hits it.

But what if you were the air inside? How would you know that there is air outside and that it is just the same air? Would you treasure the film \[too much] and fear the fact that the bubble will eventually pop?

You probably would. Because you can see other bubbles around you and they all pop sooner or later and after that their contents are nowhere to be seen. They seem to be gone forever.

Yet if you think about it, why should air, separated by a thin membrane from the rest of air fear the loss of this separation? Why would you treasure your boundaries more than your essence? When the bubble eventually pops, the air that was once inside re-joins the rest of the air and the wind mixes it all up.

In this sense, death is simply when you stop being \[just] yourself and start being everything else. Why would you fear or mourn such a marvelous reunion?

Read More:

* Alan Watts
* Buckminster Fuller


# Bubble up

B1:\
When I cease and desist,\
And forever disperse,\
Will there still be a thing left of me?

B2:\
When you stop to exist\
You'll no longer resist\
Being everything else you can be.

B1:\
When you stop being you,\
Skies will never be blue,\
Winds will always be out of their breath.

B2:\
When I stop being me,\
I'll be all you can see:\
What is gone is a part of what's left.


# Attach

![Attach](https://2207359959-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-MD480syLaySAqGN4IGB%2Fsync%2F7970171cc98c30c769f0ece729cf92787190b65d.jpg?generation=1595666647202484\&alt=media)

What brings you joy?\
Here are a few things from my list (in no particular order):

* Simply being with people I love, doing something together
* Coming up with ideas and making things up
* Finding things out, solving interesting problems
* Learning new skills
* Walking, running, cycling or swimming, surrounded by nature
* Listening to music and playing music
* Wandering through busy cities

At first sight, the list looks quite random.

If you dig deeper though, there is a pattern: all these activities are about immersing myself in something, resonating to something, being at one with something. They all involve some interaction. Many involve solitude, but this solitude is of a very special kind: the solitude of losing myself, the solitude of total immersion.

So I believe true happiness is about being at one with something. When you are an integral part of something - there is a reason for you to exist. A purpose, if you will, even though the word purpose is too loaded. The whole, of which you are a part, needs you to be a part. This whole can be anything you want, large or small, as long as it's bigger than yourself. It can be your family, your work of art, your project, or even Universe at large.

The larger the whole is - the harder it is to truly belong, to see and feel yourself as an integral part of it. Very few enlightened people can truly and continuously feel that they are at one with Universe as a whole. The rest of us have to find smaller things to belong to.

So don't be afraid to find something (or somebody) to attach to, to be at one with. It doesn't have to be something or somebody special. Because once you are at one, you two will be special by the very fact of your oneness.

Don't be afraid to need somebody, or to have somebody who needs you. Any oneness is temporary, except for oneness with the whole world. But why knowing that should stop you from enjoying oneness while it lasts?

Read More:

* Buckminster Fuller


# Give and take

Imagine you are at the airport, waiting for your boarding to begin.

We all know this feeling - the crowd of strangers, sharing the same room and the same reality, doing mostly nothing, except for avoiding eye contact and trying not to connect to each other. The reason for avoiding connection is practical: everybody you connect with has a certain degree of power over you. They earn a tiny portion of your heart. It's much harder not to care about somebody you smiled at or have been together with, compared to somebody who is a complete stranger.

There may very well be a good biological reason for not connecting: humans have evolved to live in small groups of up to 100-150 people or so. Everything above that number creates an overload. So we have to find a way of coping, and filtering is an easy way out.

Let's get back to our airport gate though. Imagine somebody from the crowd faints momentarily. People around that person rush to help. Somebody calls for the doctor to come. Through this shared reality, shared need, and a sense of shared responsibility - connection arises. The group of those closely involved - is no longer a group of complete strangers. They are united by the common experience they have just had.

If you think about it, their shared experience is only slightly more intense than the shared experience they were having a minute before: a shared experience of sitting in the same room, waiting for the same plane. Yet somehow when emotional intensity passed a certain threshold, it made a big difference: we all now belong to a temporary group.

On one end, you are more vulnerable now since you care for the other people. On the other hand you are more safe, since they care for you. In fact it is by choosing to care for people and things that you invite them to choose to care for you as well.

In the case of fainting, the phase change in the state of the group was created by an exposed vulnerability - and then, even more importantly, by accepting help. When one person needed and accepted help and others gave it, the emotional exchange turned a crowd into a group. There is now a "debt", a difference of potentials that charges the group and creates structure where there was none. The group is now polarized, charged, it is alive. This happens in very much the same way as the difference in electric potentials or concentration of chemicals can create energy, and ultimately conditions for life itself to arise.

It is interesting to notice that emotional ties and total energy of the group is directly related to the intensity of their shared experience: connections that arise from extremely intense experiences (for example, enduring life-threatening situations or somebody giving birth) are very likely to survive beyond the short life-span of the circumstances that put the group together in the first place. In other words, if we are likely to connect with others in the face of danger, may be connecting is more of a good thing, than a bad thing after all? May be giving away a share of our heart to strangers makes us stronger, not weaker?

Going back to the airport once again, I want to point out that a group can emerge not just through a "debt", but through a "gift" as well. Instead of fainting, one person in can take out her guitar and start playing music - then she puts a gift out there for the group to enjoy. She creates the commons for the group to unite around. The most critical person in this process is not her though. The critical person is the first one to explicitly start listening, tapping and singing along. By accepting and taking her gift, the first receiver signals to the rest of the crowd that in fact, the community has already been formed. It's much easier now for others to join in.

Whether the original connection was initiated by the "giver" or the "receiver", once the crowd has joined into the shared reality - they are now together. The powerful charge in the form of emotional "debt" has been created. From now on the group can grow its potential or let it fade. When the charge is passed from one person to another - it grows, and with it the potential of the whole group. As soon as the charge stops moving through the group - it starts to fade, until there is none left. Then, homogenized and discharged, the temporary group ends its lifecycle.

Belonging to too many strangers is hard. Shutting yourself down is easy. But I think we need a better way of coping with emotional overload. Filtering connections out, putting the people physically around you outside your circle of empathy does not make you stronger. It makes you less human, less alive.

When you were born, you received the gift of life, whether you like it or not. In this sense, you are in debt by the very fact of being alive. This debt can never be repaid. You can't settle it down, and you don't need to. It is a true gift and so it was given to you with no expectations of repayment. You can choose to waste it, hide it away. You can choose to discharge the potential that it created. Or you can choose to accept it, take responsibility, handle it with care and pass it on.

And by taking it, appreciating it and passing it on - you will grow it. Even if you didn't like the gift in the first place, even if you didn't always enjoy it thoroughly, you now have a chance to add a little bit of your own soul to it and pass on something bigger and better than what you received.

Don't waste this chance.

Read More:

* Lewis Hyde
* Jill Bolte Taylor
* Viktor Frankl


# Just do your thing

If you look closely at what you associate with yourself, then it becomes clear that you are a process, not a thing.

Most of the atoms that your brain is made of right now will be gone in 2 weeks. One may say that it's not the material, but the pattern that matters. Still, even the pattern is going to be significantly different in 2 weeks. You will learn new things and forget old things, you will have experienced a lot and that experience will manifest itself in new connections made and old connections rewired. After all, the person that woke up this morning is not entirely the same person that went to bed last night.

Now being a process is a wonderful thing. If you think of yourself as of something that Universe once produced in an awkward accident and threw into the oven of existence, then you may feel lonely and uncomfortable. But hey, what if you are not the wood in the oven, but the fire itself? As soon as you start thinking of yourself as something that Universe does (together with millions of other things), rather than what Universe produced, you can only feel wonder: wonder about yourself and about Universe that is doing you.

There is a difference, you see, between saying that it made you and saying that it's doing you. Because if you say that it made you, then you are not it. But if you say that it's doing you, then you are it, for a true dancer can not be known from the her dance.

And so you are it. Yet you are a verb, not a noun. Thus in order to be it, you need to do it as well. You are doing Universe as much as it is doing you.

Just keep doing your thing then, the human thing, like a bird keeps doing the bird thing and a rock keeps doing the rock thing. And wonder. Because if nothing else, then wondering may very well be the human thing.

Read More:

* Alan Watts
* Shunryu Suzuki
* Richard Feynman
* Buckminster Fuller
* Willam Butler Yeats


# Keep wandering

Beware of everything you know!\
For to the ocean rivers flow\
And bring with them what once was known\
As nothing, but a solid stone.

Yet now it flows. Then it will grow.\
And then - it's you, before you know.\
Keep wandering! For wind that blows -\
Is all that anybody knows.

Read More:

* Henry David Thoreau
* Richard Feynman
* Robert Frost


# Care for what matters

![Care for what matters](https://2207359959-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-MD480syLaySAqGN4IGB%2Fsync%2F1fa5a6a8c953203a39cf4a8a7d729252d29e49c4.jpg?generation=1595666651350603\&alt=media)

At any given moment in time, you can only truly care for just a few things. Start caring for things that do not really matter - and your caring soon runs out and there is none left for the things that do matter. I'm using the word "caring" and not "paying attention" for a reason: we pay attention to things that we care for. Not the other way around.

So if I am running in a park and start caring about what other people think, then there is a good chance that I have no caring left to pay attention to the amazing bodily experience that I am having. Once I stop caring about running, once I stop listening to the feedback that my body and the path are giving to me, I am on my ways to self-doubt, dissatisfaction and injury.

Yet if you ask me why I'm out in the park running in the first place, then I'll tell you that it's because I enjoy movement or that I want to stay healthy. So, you see, there is a disconnect between what matters to me and what I care for.

The good thing is that if you accept that you can only truly care for very few things at any given moment of time, then you'll have to make conscious choices about it. You'll have to decide what you are going to care about in everything you do.

You will also have to decide what you are not going to care about. And that is a very powerful thing to do.

Read More:

* Richard Feynman


# Unfocus

I met a man, a bright young man,\
His eyes would shine and glitter.\
He always thought and always planned,\
Alas, he danced too little.

Oh, boy, you've got to know on thing:\
This world is hocus-pocus,\
It's not as sharp as you may think.\
Get drunk! Get lost! Unfocus!


# Look back

Whenever you come to a fork in the road\
And there is nobody to lead the way\
And it's not clear, which road to take\
And which one you should but forever forgo

Stand back for a moment, and think of the times\
You had all too similar choices to make.\
Remember the roads you decided to take,\
Remember the ones you let go with a sigh.

Sit down with the man you were long ago,\
Forgive him for all the roads he forwent,\
Ask him, which one he would like to go,\
Look back to remember, but not to regret.

Two roads will always be here to find:\
You've travelled them both already. Hence\
There is no reason for you to sigh -\
Which one you take makes no difference.

Read More:

* Robert Frost
* Viktor Frankl
* Dogen


# Forgive

The only thing I can be sure of is that I have been.

I can't even be sure of the fact that I am, because by the time I can process this fact through the circuits and loops of consciousness, "I" is long gone. But that I have been is certain. Having been in this sense is the surest kind of being.

The trick though is not to get caught by it, not to assume that "you" that have once been is the same "you" that are now.

She is, in fact a very different person. She was once you, but she is no longer you, for you are not your past. The choice for who you want to be in this very moment is yours. But this choice can be much more informed, much more conscious if you take time to talk to the myriads of your previous selves.

Before you do that though, you have to let go, you have to forgive them all. In fact, I don't think you can (or should) talk to anybody unless you forgive them completely, unless you learn to listen and appreciate them as they are. This applies to your old selves as well.

Once you've forgiven them for not being who you want them to have been, once you are not embarrassed by them, once you have empathy for them, you can find that they have a lot to offer. Your previous selves can give you a different perspective. They can remind you of things you have forgotten. They can challenge your assumptions with more credibility than anybody else.

Forgive them, listen to them, learn from them.

And then forget them. For they are gone and you are in this very moment.

Read More:

* Viktor Frankl
* Lewis Hyde
* Dogen


# Uncorner

Kids don't think of themselves as of something distinct, and so they are everything. When a child hears music - she becomes a dancer. When a child sees a playground - she becomes an athlete. When a child sees a handful of building blocks - she becomes an engineer.

As we grow up though, we increasingly put ourselves (and others) in corners. She is an artist. He is a developer. I'm a writer. A degree in something is often seen as a permit to practice it: if you don't know how to dance - get the hell out of the dancefloor. The only thing you can do on a dancefloor without a "dancing degree" - is embarrass yourself. And that - we are told from early age - is a very bad thing.

The real world, obviously, works the other way around: 1. You first try something out of curiosity. 2. Then you get very bad at it and repeatedly embarrass yourself to everybody's amusement. 3. Then, if you persist, you slowly get better. 4. Then you may get a recognition of your skill, or a degree (if you care for that kind of thing).

This misconception - that you have to be good at something in order to start practicing it - creates a lot of problems, on both personal and cultural scales. Essentially for both sides - for those in a corner and for those outside of it.

In Ancient Greece everybody was an athlete. Then being an athlete became a corner. So now a few people, known as professional athletes, hurt their bodies and take drugs to achieve humanly impossible performance levels, and the rest of us hurt our bodies sitting on a sofa watching them do that. Our excuse? We will never be as good as those guys.

Same thing for science. A small amount of people get deeper and deeper into corners of knowledge until they end up knowing practically everything about practically nothing. And the rest of us refrain from being curious and finding things out ourselves. Our excuse? Some people in a corner have already figured it all out.

Uncorner! Be everything. Embarrass yourself. Once you get used to it, it becomes a lot more fun. After all, if the dancefloor is mostly empty and everybody is hiding in their corner, then it doesn't sound like a good party. Does it?

Read More:

* Raph Koster
* Seymour Papert


# Be more

![Be More](https://2207359959-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-MD480syLaySAqGN4IGB%2Fsync%2F3d4c2296ac28bbb38afeb0dd06ffdaef5390db2f.jpg?generation=1595666646808477\&alt=media)

There is a big mountain not too far from where I am right now. On top of it there is a pine tree and a little ant is marching on one of its roots. All of them - the mountain, the tree and the ant - are perfectly expressing their nature at this very moment. Nothing more, nothing less.

But if I look in the mirror, what I see there seems to be different. I am only a shadow of the man I want to be, only half of the man the world expects me to become. Most of the time I can sense a gap between who I am and who I ought to be, what I am doing and what I should be doing.

When I'm looking in the mirror - I am standing at the edge of this gap. Looking down into the abyss in front of me, on the other side, and feeling dizzy. This dizziness comes from the sense of possibility: What if I could jump over? What if I fall down? This freedom to try and bridge the gap is powerful and frightening.

The gap has been with me for as long as I can remember. It is, to a certain degree, what I call "me". Wherever it comes from, it creates uneasiness about being myself and also the need for some bridging action.

So I start to define myself through my possibilities, my goals, and more than anything else - through the things I do. If the ever moving horizon of the man I need to become is unreachable, then the best I can do is measure myself through how fast I'm running, through the number of things I do each day. And very soon I need to keep running in order to just stand still.

But what if there is no gap? After all the mountain is perfectly expressing its nature not because it's striving to be a perfect mountain. It simply can't stop being a mountain. That's what it is.

Hold your breath. Or your thoughts. If you try to hold it for too long - all your goals, all the feeling of the gap disappears. Your whole nature refocuses on resuming itself. Eventually you start breathing (and thinking) again. And so just like a mountain, you simply can't help being yourself. That's who you are.

Nature does not have goals. Yet it accomplishes so much. You come out of this world, just like the mountains, trees and ants do. You are the force of nature.

And so there is no gap. True freedom - the freedom to be who you are - has no false possibilities and so it comes without dizziness. You just need to learn to be comfortable with it, learn to be comfortable with who you are.

Stay Put. Do Less. Be More.

Read More:

* Shunryu Suzuki
* Alan Watts
* Søren Kierkegaard


# Practice

You are what you repeatedly do. Think a lot - and you become a thinker. Dream a lot - and you become a dreamer. Worry a lot - and you become a very unhappy person.

In this sense, happiness is also a skill, a muscle, and it is to be exercised, stretched, practiced. And as you practice - you get better. You find it easier to be happy in more difficult circumstances.

Now where do you start? You can start anywhere, the hardest thing is simply to start. When you first practice something new, it feels weird. It feels "against your nature". It requires intense concentration. You get tired and drift away in just a few minutes. For the first few minutes, days, weeks and possibly even months of practicing anything new, you will very likely look & feel awkward.

But hey, would your rather suck at something for the next few months or for the rest of your life?

You are what you practice. So practice what you want to be.

And most importantly, start right now.


# Be confused

Humans like predictability. In fact, we are addicted to it. Predictability means control, and control means safety. From an evolutionary standpoint this is not surprising: unexpected situations mean danger more often than they mean opportunity. So over the course of evolution we gradually got better at predicting what can go wrong: we identified the causes of chaos in our environment and found ways to avoid them, restrict their effects or even modify the environment to get rid of them altogether.

This is why when we meet something not yet familiar, something that doesn't fit the pattern, something that we can't predict the behavior of - we are confused.

Confusion is a powerful mix of fear and curiosity. Like our fellow animals we are, most of the time, sort of curiously afraid. Curiosity is in the mix together with fear, because no species can survive in a changing environment by always doing exactly what they did before. Evolution rewards and even requires a certain amount of risk-taking.

This is why, when faced with something that you don't know what to expect from, you are confused, or curiously afraid.

From here you have a few ways to go: 1. You can run away and try to forget about it as fast as you can. That's always a fair choice, unless the unique thing keeps hunting you down, as it often does. 2. You can ignore the uniqueness of the experience you are having and pigeonhole it into one of the groups of previously known things. You will thus have a set of false expectations and that in itself may or may not become a problem. 3. You can get angry. If the unkown thing brings discomfort or fear - you can try to scare it away, to let it know that if it doesn't stop messing up with your worldview it may be in trouble. 4. Or you can choose to overcome fear, bypass anger and focus on curiosity. You can try and figure it out. You can form a new model, test it against reality, fail and try again. You can learn. You can allow the unknown and the unexpected to enrich your worldview.

Embrace confusion. All the tensions and possibilities of the world are in it. Enjoy the taste of not knowing.

If you are not confused, suprised or puzzled at least a few times a day, then you are probably missing out on a lot of what Universe has to offer.

Read More:

* Temple Grandin


# Run and find out

![Run and find out](https://2207359959-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-MD480syLaySAqGN4IGB%2Fsync%2Fff7e8987120f637f945d1ca4d3913159a74907fd.jpg?generation=1595666648873415\&alt=media)

The world is a diverse, wonderful place. And there are many ways to wonder at it. One can wonder at the beauty of a flower by looking at it, smelling it, drawing it and taking it a part. One can wonder at how it grows, blooms and fades, at how it can heal bodies and souls, at how it evolved to have an intricate relationship with insects and at how it found new meanings in various cultures.

For a curious mind, there are always new angles, new dimensions, new questions to ask, new things to find out. The circle of your knowledge is ever-expanding, so the more you know, the more there is to know. The more you wonder at the world, the more wonderful things you get to discover. Stay curious and you will never run out of sources of joy.

The pleasure of finding things out is a pleasure of developing a better understanding of how things work, a pleasure of building models and playing with them.

Take a beautiful melody. If your ears are not shut - you can appreciate it. Yet if you manage to understand the underlying pattern of sounds and silence that makes this melody possible - you can have so much more joy. This understanding can be intuitive, mathematical, bodily or anything else. What's important is that it gives you a new dimension of possibilities. Because now you are appreciating not just this melody, but all the other melodies made possible by this pattern. You can play with it, improvise, you can break the pattern and get back to it - and that's a lot of fun.

So every time you are puzzled - be grateful. That's Universe being playful, giving you a chance to have fun. Your best way out of this puzzle is almost always through.

Stay curious. Dig deeper. Run and find out!

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* Rudyard Kipling
* Richard Feynman
* Robert Frost


# Leave no footprints

You are now or never.\
In between you're thrown.\
You are not together.\
You are not alone.

You are not forever.\
Not in space or time.\
You are happening right now\
In between these lines.

You are not your body.\
You are not your mind.\
There's no you in front of you\
And there's no you behind.

There's no you to worry.\
There's no you to hide.\
There's no you inside you\
And there's no you outside.

You are not your future.\
You are not your past.\
You are not the things you make -\
None of them will last.

You were born this morning,\
Next one you'll be gone.\
Great man is one sentence.\
Still greater man is none.

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* Lao-Tzu