Partners in Harmony

A walk in the park only gets better with a glimpse like this! Beautiful, serene partners in harmony.

Shot with iPhone

 

Weekly Photo Challenge– Partners

Quote Challenge- Day 3

Final day of the challenge! My third quote from Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist.

Be thankful for your health, before you start falling ill.

Be grateful for your family and friends, before you start losing them.

Be thankful for your present moment, before you start fearing the future.

Be grateful for your hair, before you start turning bald.

Be thankful for the roof over your head, before you start realizing a life of homelessness.

Be grateful for every grain you eat, before you start starving without food when needed.

Be thankful for your monotonous boring life, before you start begging for things to get normal when life takes bad turns.

Be grateful for this very existence of yours, before you start realizing it’s end!

Everything is a blessing in every way possible. The list of blessings can go endless, if given a proper thought. Embrace them, thank them, acknowledge them, before it’s too late!

 

 

 

P.S: Any blogger who is interested in this challenge or anyone who wants to write regularly but is unsure of what to write about, this challenge is a good start. Please feel free to take this up!

Quote Challenge- Day 2

Thank you Gary of Fiction is Food, for nominating me for 3- Day Quote Challenge. As I mentioned during the first day, I will be quoting few favorite lines from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

How many times have we grumbled about things going wrong in our lives, while doing nothing about them? Though it doesn’t require any effort to lament and blame the circumstances when something goes wrong, complaining hardly makes us feel better. In fact, it makes our state worse. The reason for screwed up lives may not be us always. Yet, there are certain ways to make our lives better irrespective of the pain caused by us or others, or the situations. One such way is self-improvement.

Consider disruptions in relationships between individuals due to differences in attitudes or misunderstandings. During this phase, people either stop communicating due to the sudden eruption of their egos, or slowly turn a victim of emotional breakdown due to the distance from their loved one. Making efforts to amend the situation is the best way to handle a stir in relationships. What if nothing works? You’ve tried to make the situation better, but in vain. The problem might sometimes be beyond the capability of both the individuals involved. What can you do then? Will you keep pondering over the ruined relationship and curse your fate? Will you drench yourself in agony and pain since you are helpless? Thinking of any of the above stated options will not only deteriorate yourself, but also make you weak and vulnerable.

The right way to handle crisis, when situation gets out of hand or when you feel nothing else would make it any better, focusing on improving oneself is the most effective option! Each of us have ample scope for improvement in one way or the other. If you can’t think of any ways to become a better person, then you might have to re- evaluate your perception about yourself! You may get apprehensive as to how can improving oneself make everything better, when the problem isn’t about the individual but external factors? Yes, the dark phase of your life is not an outcome of your actions. It might be because of someone else- Someone’s attitudinal  deficiency, their health issues or circumstances. Irrespective of the reasons for happenstance, improving thyself makes everything better!

How? Focus on improving yourself. You may be good at many things, but may be lacking certain traits or habits. Try to spend time on developing such habits, especially during hard times. It may be exploring a hobby that you always wished to learn, improving public speaking skills that might help you become a better communicator, inculcating discipline in your life to get rid of laziness or focusing on your health by initiating a fitness regime which you never had. The list can go endless on proper analysis! These may sound lame and ineffective at the time of crisis, but the impact of improving ourselves can make a huge difference on our outlook and our lives. After a good number of days of being involved with making yourself better, you will notice that your life will magically turn better! The circumstances that resulted in your pain, will slowly start vanishing for whatever reasons. This is no wizardry! You were so involved in making yourself better, that the time invested in self- improvement has never made you realize the time that has gone by! Which otherwise would have appeared ‘forever’, if spent lamenting, worrying and depressed!

Time heals everything. Every pain, every obstacle, every fear, every failure that you are going through now is as temporary as the season. Meanwhile, strive to make yourself better and everything will fall in place eventually, magically!

“Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t.” – Rikki Rogers

Quote Challenge- Day 1

I was nominated for 3 Day Quote Challenge more than a month ago. Thank you Gary for giving me a way to keep myself motivated to get back to my blog after being dormant for a while.

Rules of the Challenge:

• Post 1-3 quotes for three days
• Nominate three other wonderful bloggers to the challenge
• Thank your nominator

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is one of my all time favorites. This book never fails to raise my spirits after an unexpected failure or hopelessness. I planned on writing about few favorite lines from the book through the three day quote challenge.

Everybody has dreams and aspirations, but not everyone achieves them. What could make the difference? There might be ‘n’ number of factors that drive success/ failure, but the most important of them all lies within us. Our ‘psyche’ or the mind is the true culprit. As I keep citing at every opportunity possible about the greatness or the incompetency of the human mind, this is no different. This quote from the Alchemist refreshes on reminding us, that we may eventually become our own hindrance in our path to success.

The fear of failure is dangerous than the failure itself! When we have ambitions that appear or sound impossible, it is quite hard to progress towards achieving them with a doubtful, fearful mind. While the fear may be an outcome of evaluation of the risks involved, it can definitely make us lose the motivation to achieve. The ‘What-if’ phenomena never stops haunting us, if it is a dream involving lot of risks and liabilities. Plan B may not always be the solution, hence the fear of failure. But this fear impairs our true potential and holds us back from moving forward towards our goals.

“Do your duty and never bother about the result.”- Bhagawad Gita

One way to handle the fear of failure, is to follow the above principle as cited in the Bhagawad Gita, a sacred text for the Hindus. To achieve a goal, the right amount of hard work needs to be invested without thinking about the results. Thus diminishing the fear of failing, as we work without being conscious of the outcome. If the result is positive or a success- Well! The determination and hard work paid off! But if it is on the contrary, there is something lacking in the amount of work needed. Trying again with the same or much higher amount of work, is definitely hard for most of us to do. This is where the difference comes. Success does not come in a day, nor does failure last forever. Working and struggling each and every time with the same and escalating amount of motivation, irrespective of the result drives way to success eventually.

“I haven’t failed. I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”- Thomas Edison

Thank goodness, this great man, never feared failure! Else, we would’ve been living ignorantly in the dark!