Tag: dreams

Heaven is a place on earth.

I turned 35 just about a month ago.  About two years ago, around the same time as my birthday, my grandmother died. I was living in Los Angeles back then and for some reason I couldn’t go home to the Philippines. It was one of the biggest regrets I had in the last two years. I remember posting this on Instagram in honor of my grandmother:

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The post was inspired by an episode of Black Mirror which featured the song of the same name  by Belinda Carlisle. I had watched the episode to distract myself around the same time as my grandmother’s final days before she died. I was deeply moved when I watched the ending (oops…spoiler alert) wherein the two female protagonists sailed off to San Junipero (also an actual place near Carmel by the Sea in San Francisco named after a Spanish missionary) a mythical place or rather, literally a “cloud” in the context of  digital computing. A place where people extend a virtual version of their lives — which is pretty close to the concept of heaven in true fashion of a Black Mirror imagination of our future. I was thinking and wishing my grandmother was in a similar concept of heaven.

As I celebrated my birthday last month (alone and lost in a beach somewhere), I was reminded that in a few years, I’ll turn 40, and of the regrets of missing my grandmother’s last few days. In the last 3 months, I’ve been working at one point for 17 hrs. a day on average and had never fully enjoyed a Holiday or a weekend. I barely saw my sister who came to visit from the US and was home for two weeks. I missed celebrating three of my siblings’ birthdays and even my own birthday celebration with my family. I also missed seeing my new born niece until about two weeks after her birth even if we practically live in the same compound in the same village.

Life is short and sometimes unpredictable. What if we keep missing on life and tomorrow someone close to you or you yourself will be gone? Despite all the stories of how a “brilliant jerk” Steve Jobs was, he is truly “brilliant” and I will always go back to his famous speech whenever I feel l need guidance, especially when it came to the “pursuit of happiness” and goals. I kept “hearing” in my head this part of his famous commencement speech at Stanford:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Though it might sound cliche and how much referenced these thoughts are to the imagined and unreal, sometimes a brief distraction is what actually brings us back to reality. If only we could upload and extend a virtual version of our lives in a “cloud”, but in reality, we can’t. Our time is too limited.

I don’t want to go to heaven yet, but I’d like to experience heaven now, in most days. Heaven can be a place on earth, only if we have the courage to find what it means to us and if we choose to pursue it.

“Butterfly Effect”

On Small Changes And The Predictability Of The Future

“A single drop of a pebble in a pond creates ripples of waves.”  This phrase is often quoted to empower people to make small changes in their daily lives to achieve bigger goals they set for themselves.  After contemplating and assessing the recent decisions and plans I’ve made about my future,  it occurred to me that 80% of the time, none of my original plans turned out the way as I hoped they would. (Is the Pareto Principle at work here? More on this topic in another entry).

They say goals are dreams with deadlines, but what if you didn’t achieve your goals the first time you attempted? What happens then? How does one decide to keep chasing a dream that failed at the first try? When people say, don’t give up on your dreams, you have a voice in your head that says, “Yeah, you say don’t give up, but it’s easier said than done.”  Reality hits you in the face and life happens in between, external forces of nature that could either help you speed up your journey or slow you down towards your intended path. There are so many variables and unknowns along the way.

Motivational speakers will tell you that anything is possible if you set your mind into it and make the necessary marginal improvements to reach your goals. Just watch the inspiring TED Talk by Stephen Duneier below. He went from an average C Student in school who couldn’t even concentrate in class to someone who had continuously broken world records and achieved new goals for himself defying all the limitations we think we have with age.

 

And what about the predictability of the future? What if while we’re exerting all our efforts, nothing seems to come our way? How do we know that what we invest now will reap bigger rewards eventually? How does one keep going without any assurance of some level of success?

The thing is we don’t know, and we know that this is how it is with anything in life.

The meteorologist Edward Lorenz once coined the term “the butterfly effect.” According to several scholarly articles online, in Chaos Theory, this is the sensitive dependence on primary conditions in which a marginal change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system could result in bigger variations at a later state.

A simpler interpretation of this theory in plain English can be explained by a metaphorical example by Lorenz which was started with a question:

“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”  

While in popular culture this had been often used to make poetic references about how small things can have big impact, the original theory’s intention was to actually demonstrate the complexity of systems (most of the things that happen on earth everyday–the weather, hurricanes, etc.) and the unpredictable nature of these systems–that a small change may have a massive impact or nothing at all.

So, where am I going about with this theory? This isn’t a motivational piece of knowledge at all.

It attempts to prove however that with the same nature of unpredictability is the existence of a possibility. We can do small things and it may still lead to something big, even if it’s a 0.000001% chance or that it takes us much longer.