I do not believe you will become happy with living out others’ expectations of yourself. If you do not follow your heart, you will become restless and perhaps even unhappy. When disrespecting or disliking yourself why would people respect you or like you at all? Follow your heart and be proud about the choices you make (and have made) in life. Then, and only then, you will be proud of yourself. Do what you feel like and follow your heart. If not, you will regret lather in life that you did not give it a try. Experience makes you a wiser person and gives you a better insight of the world around you. When you grow old you may regret what you did not do in your life and the chances you left behind. Be proud of what you have done. Time waits for no one. Spend the time you have in possession well. Death is no more than a heartbeat away.
Have faith in yourself and accept yourself for being the one you are. Then, and only then, people will be able to respect you and look up to you. If you want to change the world first change yourself. Do not be superficial but be true to yourself. How can you change the world if you cannot change the one you are? The biggest mistake is to take and not give - from within. Share your knowledge with people around you. You are the only person that got your perspective on your surroundings.
Pass on what you have learned. The knowledge you have is unique. If any, few persons got the same knowledge and point of view as you do. Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try. Why bother half-finish anything? Instead of half-finish something why not complete it and do this properly? Whatever you do in life, be patience. In seeking your destiny patience is you allied. Nothing gets any better if you hurry or rush things. This is also important in seeking your destiny. No one can choose your faith for you. You, and you alone must follow your own path. Let no one live your life and make important decisions in your life.
Keep your promises. This will bring you far. Why bother promise to do a task you will not complete? This will only make people lose faith in you. And when people are losing faith in you, what kind of impression do you think they will get of you? Be honest and sincere about what you do in life. No one values false people.
Have faith in your friends. They are your strength, not your weakness. Your friends are the family you choose for yourself. They are the blood you choose. Remember that the truth you claim to depend on your own point of view. Ask your friends about things you have done together - I am sure all of you will remember things differently. Do not judge people for having other points of view than you - by doing that you may provoke intolerance which may strike back at you. When calling someone a fool, ask yourself: who is the fool? the fool himself or the fool who follows him? Accept and respect people for whom and what they are. Try to understand why people have the opinions they have.
Live every day as it could be your last. Death is no more than a heartbeat away. Death is smiling at us all, smile back when you have the chance. Life your life today. Tomorrow it might be too late.
When you dance with the devil the devil doesn't change. You do. As a person you are a result of all your experiences combined. When you go to bed tonight you will have experiences you did not have when you woke up this morning. These experiences got an influence on you as a person and your point of view. Do not let your eyes and ears deceive you. They are there to fool you. What the eyes sees, and the ears hear the brain believes, but is this the truth?
I would like to quote G'Kar who is a character in the science-fiction television series Babylon 5: If I take a lamp and shine toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume the light on the wall is God, but the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a lantern with him, sees nothing. What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light, pure and unblemished. Not understanding that it comes from us, sometimes, we stand in front of the light and assume we are the center of the universe. God looks astonishingly like we do. Or we turn to look at our shadow and assume all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose - which is use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty and all it flaws, and in so doing, better understand the world around us.
To keep this article in the scope of popular culture I sometimes feel like being a crossover between Sheldon, Spock and G'Kar. The amusing thing is that all three men begin with the illusion that life can be mastered through understanding it. Spock trusts logic. Sheldon trusts rules. G'Kar trusts struggle. Each believes, in his own way, that reality will finally surrender its secrets if only he thinks hard enough, organizes carefully enough, or fights nobly enough.
But life is not a problem to be solved. It is a dance.
Spock is perhaps the most elegant of the three. He stands between two worlds, human and Vulcan, emotion and reason. His journey is not really about becoming more logical. It is about discovering that logic itself is incomplete without the living pulse of feeling. He learns that wisdom is not the triumph of reason over emotion, but their harmony.
Sheldon is a comic expression of the same predicament. He constructs elaborate systems, routines, and agreements in an attempt to make the universe predictable. Yet the universe stubbornly refuses to cooperate. Friends arrive unexpectedly. Love appears without permission. Human beings violate the rules. And so Sheldon discovers, slowly and reluctantly, that genuine relationship requires surrendering control.
G'Kar walks a different path. He begins with anger, pride, and the certainty that history can be corrected through will and determination. But suffering transforms him. Loss strips away his illusions. What begins as a quest for justice becomes a search for understanding. Eventually he discovers something the others only glimpse: that liberation comes not from conquering one's enemies, but from transcending the self that needs enemies.
From a Jungian perspective, these three figures represent different stages of the encounter with the Self. Spock embodies the Sage, Sheldon the defensive intellect, and G'Kar the wounded warrior who becomes the mystic. Each must confront the limits of conscious control. Each must meet the Jungian shadow. Each must discover that reality is larger than the frameworks they use to explain it.
And that, perhaps, is the joke. The universe keeps presenting us with evidence that we are not separate from life, while we continue to behave as though we are auditors inspecting it from the outside.
Spock attempts to think his way into wholeness. Sheldon attempts to organize his way into wholeness. G'Kar attempts to fight his way into wholeness. But wholeness was never missing. The wave spends its life trying to understand the ocean, only to discover that it has always been the ocean.
In Babylon 5 there is a race called Minbari, which in many ways can be compared to elves in the fantasy-genre. Even though they are a race in a science fiction-series I find their religious believes interesting. Here is an example:
Delenn talks about the Minbari belief systen.