Focus on Life™

“Politics is not about public interest but someone’s special (economic) interest.”

“Life is about giving, and the rest is taken care of.”

“Nothing has any meaning except the one we give to it— everything simply is.”

“Humbleness is all it takes.”

“The impossible happens when the possible is ignored.”

“If you don’t know what to do, meditate.”

“The (future) wealth is in the people, the past is in the tangible assets.”

“Skills, knowledge, and experience build the future.”

“Life is simple—thinking is complicated.”

“Only two things: the ones you think are important, and those that are.”

“Happiness is a continuous flow of life.”

“Nothing to say, everything to realise.”

“You are what you think, say, and do.”

“Your senses know nothing, they merely register movement.”

“Only when you have done enough, you can be.”

“Complexity is easy, simplicity requires mastery.”

“Society is persons.”

“Separate money from politics and you find very little interest on public matters.”

“Poverty is a relative term. Don’t expect it to disappear from the lexicon any time soon. One can be poor or rich—it’s just a matter of definition.”

“Enjoy the moment. That’s all there is.”

“Our legal tender is based on a threat of violence, and nothing else.”

We are all after happiness but seldom find it but only for a few glances or passing moments. Most of the time we are seeking to gain it via different things, people, or situations. We try to reproduce the moments and experiences we already had or we are just randomly trying to imitate someone else’s life with their choices. And all these methods fail to provide us anything but suffering and continuous seeking of happiness—they all are external to us.

Happiness is a state of mind that is independent of the circumstances or our surroundings. It is our natural state of being that we have learned to ignore while growing up. We have substituted the internal happiness for objects and desires external to us. They are conditional and related to some activities or specific points in time. What is common to all of these is that they are not present right now. They are projected to the future. This type of happiness is something that you’re always waiting for. Your constant mode is to achieve and ‘earn’ your happiness by actions or circumstances. In other words you are living in illusions filled by your expectations. Disappointments are a frequent visitor when you are dealing with your future projections based on your expected outcomes of the future situations or events. How much in control of your life you really are?

This ‘when..then’ -type of conditioning is very convincing but it is not really living. It’s about building dream castles and denying the moment. You are saying that I’m not happy right now and I’m substituting this moment for another one in the future. You are after the carrot that is always attached to the current moment—the stick stays in the future with the appealing prize as well. This takes many forms. We may prefer to work overtime and then compensate it back in the holidays. Or we are accumulating substantial wealth that we are hoping to spend after retirement. How can you enjoy your life later if you cannot do it now?

Happiness is not a destination—it is a journey. If you are not comfortable being in the journey you are suffering in the destination as well. Life is about experiencing and enjoying every moment you have. It requires that you are comfortable with uncertainty and change. We can only be happy when we have learned to accept the things that we cannot change and regard every passing moment as a gift that has some valuable lessons and experiences to give us. Only when being is enough you can be happy. As long as you need to achieve or become you are not going to find happiness. Life is about change and being in the moment—exploring the unknown.

Constant pace and action are not natural. One needs to relax and wind down as well. You cannot have music without silence. It takes a fine-tuned instrument to recognise when it is the time to blow hard and loud and when it is the time to give away and be quiet.

Peak performance is possible only when one is prepared for it, even unconsciously. Creative ideas and innovations seldom happen in the office environment. It is too predictable and ‘dull’. It is all in the mind but still the man-made landscape is often too ‘square’. Nature does not repeat itself. It creates variance and improvises over the theme.

Dynamics is possible only when you have enough variation. Mechanical performance will kick back in the long run. Getting used to the pattern and repeating oneself may sound like safe and secure, but they are also the way to become stuck and shut down from the unpredictable.

New is always something unknown. Therefore it is also uncomfortable for many. Even though you may not decide to explore and discover new boundaries you can always create variance within the familiar daily life and routines. Take a new route back to home. Do things in a different order or just stop and stare the night sky under the moonlight. Life is about living and living is about creating. You draw you canvas everyday by your actions. Each day is a fresh new start, and a new story to tell. If you are not happy about today’s story, try something else tomorrow. Don’t come up with the same old picture if it did not work out well yesterday. Routines are for machines—people do not have to live like robots. We are artists that create by living.

Titles, categories, and labels—that’s how the life is often perceived. There are different functions, tasks, and roles to accomplish and carry out. Often those names deceive us to believe and do things that we do not like. In actuality we even may do exactly the opposites in a hope of brighter days.

Work, holiday, retirement, hobbies, spare time, and weekend are not real. They are labels or symbols. You give them the meaning and special connotation. Those words often embody many expectations, hopes, wishes, and desires. And they are not real either.

Most of the titles have also their opposite counterpart. Work is considered as an opposite of pleasure or holiday. One needs to ‘work’ in order to have fun, later. This labelling is an excuse to delay or deceive oneself from the current moment. Categories are necessary as long as one needs the counterpart as well. This fragmentation is entirely useless in reality—unless you are living under its spell.

Replace the counterparts with their opposite adjectives and you start to see the absurdity. It may not be any big surprise to realise that most of the daily activities are filled with those more or less negative connotations. Wouldn’t this mean that you’re spending most of your time doing something you rather not like to do at all? If that’s the case maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your priorities. We can only live now and it happens 24 hours a day, every single day. No holidays or exceptions.

There are two ways to cope with the situation. Either you can take a new course and start to drop off the unpleasant things and replace them with the things you love to do or you can change your state of mind towards the various engagements and tasks in your life. Nevertheless the end result is that there is no need to have various labels in order to contrast things against each other. To say it more bluntly we are taking responsibility and control of our lives and this shows in the way we carry out our daily existence. Every moment we declare by our very presence who we are. We show it by our actions, possessions, social network, even by the way we treat total strangers. No labels needed—we simply are.

Integrated living means that one’s life is consistent and in balance. There is an overall harmony and ‘lightness’ without extreme fluctuations or sudden ’highs and lows’. If you need to ‘party hard’ in order to wash off the work stress are you really enjoying your work? Life is too short to do things we do not appreciate and enjoy doing. Even hard work is fun when you’re engaged with the activities that are close to your heart and bring fulfilment to your life. Compromising seldom brings good overall results in the long term.

Still not convinced? Check again the second paragraph. It’s all about your own expectations and assumptions. The catch-22 does not open if you do not reconsider your values and priorities. If you still need those lavish expensive holiday trips and you ‘work’ only to maintain your expensive ‘lifestyle’ aren’t you saying at the same time that most of your hours are sacrificial for the few moments you spend enjoying the ‘fruits’ of your labour. As long as you cannot enjoy your life now but later you’re living in dreams and illusions. Life happens now—never later. How can you appreciate the destination if you do not value the journey as well?

We like to have our freedom. It is great and fun to explore and extend our boundaries. We love to take the credit for our actions, but only selectively. Positive consequences are naturally ours to claim but what about the not so desired effects?

Freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand—the greater the freedom the greater the responsibility as well. Our current society does not encourage personal freedom. In practice we are sanctioned, monitored, and restrained in almost all aspects of life. We have learned to behave obediently and not to question the behaviour patterns or norms of the society. Like Goethe once said: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

We have created an artificial layer that is expected to protect individuals from harms and consequences of their personal actions. This has created a culture where people have become accustomed (or learned) to be passive and not to take action themselves. We expect someone else to tell us what to do or help us out of our own problems. This has come so far that we even regard we have the right and the others’ the moral obligation to unilaterally support us. We have isolated ourselves from the effects of our actions.

Our personal initiatives and responsibility are very limited, but so is our freedom as well. We have given up our rights in order to gain something for nothing. We prefer to have it easy and let others to bear the consequences for us. Unfortunately this is a zero-sum game in an aggregate level and as a result everybody is worse off. There are no free lunches—there is always someone paying the bill.

Isolating individuals from their actions’ consequences is a double-edged sword. It creates an illusion of safety and protection but at the same time it removes the control from the very person. And this creates uncertainty, fear, and self-esteem issues among others. Simply we do not feel anymore that the life is in our own hands: we are on top of the issues and have the solutions available for us. Confidence and security build from experience and the knowledge that we have the tools and the means to cope with our circumstances.

It requires practice and experience to become good at something. This means that we have learned something by experimenting and sometimes even making wrong choices that have guided us to do something differently in the future. In other words we have the motivation to keep going and get better. All this requires responsibility. Responsibility is the feedback mechanism that shows us how we are performing and the results of our pursuits. Mastery is only possible for those who are aware of their actions and their consequences.

Look around you—how much responsibility are we taking for our actions?

This is a very compact but complete system of ethics. It is very simple, brief, and yet powerful based on the following:

The Guiding Principal

All (human) beings are born equal and remain equal every day of their lives.

The below Principals are only sub-principals for the first one

2) Person is the measure of all accounts.

3) Everyone is free to pursue their own happiness and the results of their pursuit and obliged to respect everyone else’s equal freedom without limiting anyone else’s freedom.

You can find the rest of it here.

This is a very compact but complete system of ethics. It is very simple, brief, and yet powerful based on the following:

The Guiding Principal

All (human) beings are born equal and remain equal every day of their lives.

The below Principals are only sub-principals for the first one

2) Person is the measure of all accounts.

3) Everyone is free to pursue their own happiness and the results of their pursuit and obliged to respect everyone else’s equal freedom without limiting anyone else’s freedom.

Freedom

Freedom is the most powerful concept there is. Unfortunately it has not been properly understood and applied to this day.

Everything starts with a personal freedom and also ends to it. This is clearly stated in the first Guiding Principal: ”All (human) beings are born equal and remain equal every day of their lives.”

When we are born we are all purely naked and have nothing except our being (existence). All the rest is either learned, assumed, assimilated, or gained by some means (voluntary or involuntary). And this latter process can happen only together with other people.

It is not possible to alienate a person from his/her freedom. There are only ways to suppress or give up degrees of personal freedom voluntarily either consciously or by ignorance.

The level of power other people can have for a person is in direct proportion to the level the person has surrendered his/her freedom in any given moment. Like suppression the voluntary surrender needs to be exercised continuously over time. In the first case the person can once again exercise freely his/her freedom when the suppression stops and in the latter case one can do it immediately upon personal decision or when becoming aware of it.

Responsibility

Responsibility is the other side of the coin with freedom. All the actions (including non-actions) and their consequences are born by the person carrying them out. The object(s) of the actions are not relevant in respect to the responsibility.

Full responsibility (and full freedom) means that the person does not even have to be aware of all the implications of his/her actions. Ignorance is merely poor perception and lack of understanding from the actor’s perspective (e.g. bad choice).

The Second Principal states that all the responsibilities can be originated to persons. Like freedom the responsibility cannot be alienated from a person. The person can make voluntary agreements but these agreements cannot remove the final responsibility.

The Third Principal underlines a person’s responsibility first of all towards his/herself but more importantly towards everything else.

Cooperation

Interaction between people can happen either voluntarily or involuntarily. Forms of suppression and acts of violence or threats of actions of violence are not discussed here at all. Humanity has enough evidence of its use already available.

Voluntary cooperation is based on the free will of people to interact with each other. This can happen between two or more people for any period of time. The cooperation is based on trust, and the level of trust defines the ways of cooperation and the means to accomplish the desired actions. A low level of trust between individuals focuses a great amount of effort to secure the parties in the cooperation and thus making the interaction less efficient. This consumes time, effort and energy with increasing complexity the longer the time span of the intended cooperation extends to the future.

High level of trust makes the interaction more organised, forward-orientated, and allows more complex relationship and cooperation forms to emerge. High level of specialisation can only happen when people are trustful among each other and can focus on their specific areas of interest and needs. A highly sophisticated society is dependent on trust among its members.

Agreements

Voluntary cooperation is based on trust, which can be reflected either in tacit or tangible forms of agreements. Agreements can incorporate two or more parties for any period of time. Agreements are ways to stipulate the desired actions (and non-actions) among the voluntary parties of the agreements and also a way to record the stated matters.

Agreements are only the means for carrying out the will of the people incorporated for the action. Therefore the agreements are expressions of freedom between the participants, and full responsibilities of the actions (and non-actions) lay among the parties of the agreements as indicated in the third Guiding Principal.

Society Is Persons

The second Guiding Principal states that “Person is the measure of all accounts.” No person, structure or concept can be above any person living. Human based actions and their consequences are always borne by the persons involved, and these responsibilities cannot be alienated. The Guiding Principals clearly describe the nature of voluntary action of any individual in respect to every other being.

A society or any collective entity or cooperation between persons is always only a mutual expression of each and every individual incorporated for the action(s). No collective or structure can be compared to a living person. They can only act on behalf of the people incorporated with the entity, and thus representing expressions of these people.

Self-Defence

Freedom consists of two things: positive and negative freedom. The positive stipulates that the person can engage to something, and the negative that the person can restrain of engaging to something.

The latter case states that the person cannot be involved in something against his/her permission and thus restrain the person’s freedom (under the third Guiding Principal). Shall this be the case the person needs to have a right to protect his/her freedom in order to be capable of exercising his/her expressions freely.

The self-defence does not remove the responsibility of the actions (and non-actions) carried out. Therefore any action in excess of protecting one’s freedom is a direct breach of the (third) Guiding Principal(s).

This site focuses on life. You will find inspirational, thoughtful, mind-provoking, insightful and sometimes artful writings, ideas, visions, and practical knowledge covering various aspects of life based on freedom and pursuit of happiness.

Where to Start?

• Read the Blog for the latest items
• Check some of the popular articles:
  • Happiness
    
  • Time Management
    
  • Responsibility
  • Peace
  • Money is not the wealth
  • Having vs. Being
• See also Fragments of Reality
• Find out Petri’s recommendations for books, music, and movies.