Waarheid in Actie
Blog
Mijn persoonlijke gedachten (wel in het Engels)
Fear
(coming soon)
Guilt
(coming soon)
Faith
(coming soon)
Loneliness
(coming soon)
Out of Love
door Daniël Maliy
Een emotionele en autobiografische reis uit de jonge jaren van Daniel. Een geschreven zoektocht naar begrip over liefde en een ontsnapping uit depressie, tot uiting gebracht in een collectie van aangrijpende gedichten. (Engelstalig)
E-mail lijst
Updates over (gratis) seminars, events en aanbiedingen.
Dreams and Honor
“Embrace your dreams. And whatever happens, protect your honor”
- Zack Fair (Final Fantasy) -
I need to keep my dreams close, for if they drift away, I will fall into that dark place of hopelessness and despair. This is the thought that keeps me going.
Every day I wake up with the same battle brewing inside my head. Should I even bother to get up? Am I ever going to achieve what I’m trying to? Is it worth it? On one side stands the realization of my current position in life and society; this is the attacking force.
On the other side, my ambitions, where I've dedicated the largest portion of my life to; this is my defending stronghold.
It's impossible to defeat the invaders, for my reason points out the undeniable facts about my life. That my wasted past and fruitless present can only predict a grim future.
I have spent all that I have chasing my believes in justice, hard work, and self-fulfillment. But maybe my investment in dreams and honor was a waste after all, and it's time to face the facts..?
And so the attack presses on.
Dreams are our motivators. The stronger the desire to attain a dream, the more we will be able to push and surprise ourselves.
"Should I even bother to get up? ... Is it worth it?"
It is only when we take on a challenge that we discover what we are truly capable off. And it's with these dreams that we put ourselves in challenging
situations whether by choice or mistake.
Honor is that what protects (or even raises) the value of our actions and our goals. A virtuous way of living is the hardest way of living, and therefore honorable and respected.
Those who achieve their goals through honesty and hard work, can righteously be proud of their reward and effort. But those who have cheated and lied to get
their prize, can only brag about their cunning deceit of others, because everything else has becomes valueless.
Dreams and honor, this is what my stronghold is built of.
If I give in and let go of my dreams and integrity, then my stronghold will collapse, and I will fall captive to the enemy. That dark place of hopelessness and despair.
What will be left to live for? What will be left to die for?
If we take into consideration that one day we will all die, doesn't that make us almost obligated to live and die for a greater cause than just our personal survival?
Letting go of the only things that give reason and value to my life is not even an option, for there is no actual life without it.
It doesn't matter how strong or intimidating the attacking force will become. The walls are unbreachable from the outside. So if they would collapse, it could only be my own doing.
It would be a waste of life not trying to aim for the sky and beyond.
The battle for today is over, and once again I find the strength to get up and start my daily routine, with wings of dreams and weights of honor.
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all”
- Hellen Keller -
Reading Books
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
The only way to know a book is to read it. Predicting its content based on the cover, already agreeing or disagreeing with it based on the subject, or even skipping parts, will never give you a clear understanding of what that book has to offer. Thinking otherwise is simple arrogance.
Unfortunately for me, most of the time I catch myself to be that arrogant, judging things on their appearance and missing out on so many inspirational and educational stories.
It’s an undeniable human trade, to instinctively judge things based on your own previous experiences. But we possess critical self-awareness to override our uncontrolled instinct education if it’s needed. And most of the time, it is
needed indeed.
I should not be a hypocrite, not wanting to be judged at first sight, but at the same time block myself of from trying to understand others.
Wanting a fair trial to show who I really am, but being arrogant to give others that same right. Judging others by their cover, while wanting others to judge me by my biography.
"I should not be a hypocrite, not wanting to be judged at first sight ..."
People are like books.
The front cover is our daily appearance where we try to present ourselves at our very best to the world. To attract with it, to excite interest with it, to be accepted, liked, or even praised for it.
The back cover is our resumé. It’s the second thing we show after our front cover has been approved. It shows our achievements and awards, or small parts of our book that we picked to insure that we still look acceptable. A rough sketch of who we are but written in a promotional manner.
I can temper with my cover, even lie about my social, financial, and emotional state on it. And I can always refuse to open up my book to others if I choose
to do so. But I can never change the story that is written inside, none of us can. We can only mask it, or hide it.
"... I can never change the story that is written inside, none of us can."
It’s a very strange way how our (media inspired) culture is behaving. The practiced rule of behavior is just bizarre, but is still the accepted standard that we all measure up to. It feels to me as if it is being expected of us to look wealthy, sexually attractive, confident, popular, and such.
But mind you that the rule is to look the part, not actually be all those things. Because if you do succeed in looking like this fictional role model, and you get allot of people reaching to you out of idolization, you would have to keep them at a distance. Because the
authentic human character is the opposite of the shallow pop-star image. And if others find out that you are just as human as anyone, the illusion will be shattered, and you and they both will be left to deal with the reality of things.
Everyone wants to be accepted for who they are, but is afraid to show themselves out of fear not to be accepted. The closest thing to it, is being liked for things that are socially accepted, while trying to hide the rest. Why should anyone deny themselves and pretend that they are not human, that they
don’t have flaws and weaknesses, don’t have different
talents and traits, and don’t have personal dreams and desires, when we know that we all do?
Picking the unblemished, spotless minded, non-existing "life-enjoyer" as a role-model, is a self-deceiving and self-destructing choice.
The real role-models that we all admire (secretly if necessary), are those who are brave enough to be honest and most of all real. They inspire us the most when in spite of their open weaknesses and public failures, they refused to give up, and eventually got what they were fighting for. This is everyone’s story, this is everyone’s life. The ones who were willing to endure humiliation for being honest about themselves, won. Maybe not at small scale desire, but definitely
at life. And their story - their actions - give us permission to do the same, to be human.
Every human is a complicated masterpiece, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, joys and grieves, fears and victories, exposed lies and hidden truths.
To know someone is to be able to predict his or her choices. And to be able to do that, one would need to experience what it means to be that person, to see
life through his or her eyes, to become humble enough to accept that you cannot judge a book by its cover.
"Every human is a complicated masterpiece, "
“All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual”
- Albert Einstein -
Truth and Reality
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” said
Alice. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat. “We’re all mad here.”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
What is real?
Does anyone care anymore what the reality is?
We all inhabit the same world. Humanity is in this together but collectively we can’t seem to produce an answer to that question.
From an early age we discover the world as our authoritative figures teach us. With our gradual development of critical thinking abilities, our own individual life starts to take more shape. We get to re-question everything that was taught to us, and are free to decide what we think the right way to live is. What the truth is. What this life is.
Truth is not relative.
The world is black and white. Absolutely everything has a right and a wrong way of being done depending on the outcome you desire. There are no exceptions.
Every choice you make for the achievement of a goal can either be productive, or counterproductive. It can either push you closer to it, or stray you further away.
The first time this thought infested in my head, it felt like it had trapped me in a spider’s web. I couldn’t really live my life until I unwrapped myself from it.
"Truth is not relative."
In this modern society, truth has become somewhat of a sales product. Uneducated religious fanatics and parrot-minded atheists play monopoly with it, both using the same “non-factual, narrow minded,
feel-good” strategy: talking degradingly about and to each other to convince you to follow their club.
While modern-day philosophers try to make big money by pretending that truth and facts are like fashionable trends that change with time and opinion. Their self-contradicting, post-modernistic nonsense excites only those who not only still childishly let others do the thinking for them, but also wish to be trendy in front of their peers.
Truth will remain true, whether you believe it or not.
I was fourteen years old, standing still in life because of the fork in my road. My dilemma was as follows: The idea that everything in existence - in its extreme intricate cooperating form – , naturally, could never pop into being without a cause (pointing to a powerful, intelligent, and creative Force).
On the other hand, the concept of a Creator, God, or gods, seemed unimaginable to me. Never mind figuring out the origin of a god…
Yet I desperately needed an answer, I needed to know the rules of life to live with purpose.
Alice came to a fork in the road.
“Which road do I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” responded the Cheshire cat.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
If God does exist and all is His creation, then my success and happiness lies in my obedience to His plan for me. His manual to life (if available), and His support.
On the other hand, the absence of a God would mean that there cannot be any ultimate law, and all the rules of society are just men made tools to keep order and control. In such a case, lying, steeling, and even killing could be justified by my own opinion. And success in life can only be measured by valuable possessions and pleasurable experiences.
For both of these there is a right and a wrong. One is true, the other isn’t. Trying to create a midway, is making up an imaginary world to live in, which can only fail to correspond with reality.
"... making up an imaginary world to live in, ... can only fail to correspond with reality."
Truth is not made, it is discovered.
I cannot create reality like some of the modern “philosophers” like to claim. I cannot imagine for there to be money in my wallet, and I cannot send myself to
heaven if I decide that I deserve it.
Twisting and imagining the laws of reality to match the world to my comfort will still leave reality untouched,
and me out of touch with reality.
I need to find, judge, and puzzle the facts together myself. This is what healthy humans are capable of doing. This is what we are made to do.
This might very well be the most important task of life. Claiming it’s impossible or too much to handle, is ignorant fear of a possible outcome.
The truth might not always be what I desire it to be, but that must not be the reason to deny it.
“Who in the world am I?"
"Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Depression and Hope
“I do suffer from depression, I suppose. Which
isn't that unusual. You know, a lot of people do.”
- Amy Winehouse -
“Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have
ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling,
which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.”
- J. K. Rowling -
Depression, the cold secluded place of overpowering numbness. A place where life once
resided but now only hazy remnants of it remain. Dominated by the terrifying thoughts that there is no joy left, no prospects, no willpower, no way to
escape. Stripped of any motivation, drained of all desires, just an empty shell, a leftover waiting to expire. The reign of anxiety, of inability, in a battle against superseding forces that tower over.
Everything around loses its value and meaning, everything becomes pointless. The beautiful colors of life that others claimed I wasn’t seeing sounded like a lie, a placebo drug they all swallowed to avoid seeing my reality. To avoid seeing the reality.
"Everything around loses its value and meaning, everything becomes pointless."
There were no colors for me to see, unless I pretended. All I really saw was a black and white petrified picture that symbolized my life, and I was getting tired and frustrated of looking at it.
Nothing works when depression embraces you with its soulless, smothering, empty touch. There was no change no matter what I tried. I was submitted to an
unassertive lifestyle, doing the absolute minimum to get by, waiting passively for it all to finally end.
When you are no longer expecting anything to work, to save you from its grip, all you are left with is to embrace depression right back.
I didn’t want to resist it anymore, why should I? All I can gain from that is a prolonged state of this suffering. The thought of death no longer frightened
me, not because of an abundance of courage or understanding, no, it was because the thought of life frightened me more.
If there is nothing to look forward to, what else is left besides the escape through death?
Living from one small expectation to another, from one small satisfactory achievement to another, feels like a state of constant drowning with occasional opportunity to take a short breath, just enough to continue drowning, but not quite enough to die. This annoying repetitiveness exposed my dependence on it, my inability to function in life without something petty but enjoyable to look forward to. This type of merry go round stops being so merry once you realize you’re stuck and can’t escape. After a while even the most exciting things in life become tedious.
"Living from one small expectation to another, ... feels like a state of constant drowning ..."
“I don't want any more of this try, try again
stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.”
- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
Depression is a hopeless state of being, which would make hope its cure. Unfortunately whatever I hoped for never seemed to last.
I cannot trick my own mind into looking forward to something I don’t care about or isn’t even real. Lying to myself is just another dysfunctional way to cover
up my problems and pretend I got over them.
I needed something permanent to look forward to, something ceaseless I could hope for: real hope, lasting hope. Hope for something that I do not really expect to occur would merely be a wish, and to live motivated solely by wishes is to cowardly live outside of reality and avoiding the necessary encounter with
the painful truths.
"Actual hope is ... an intelligent faith in something that will come to pass. "
Actual hope is a confident expectation of something you desire, an eager anticipation of something you rely on and long for, an intelligent faith in something that
will come to pass.
Something real, not fake.
Something true, not false.
Something that makes life worth living for.
Something that doesn’t exhaust and isn’t finite.
Something once and for all.
But is hope for such hope merely a wish itself, or is there a reason – a purpose, to why my whole being cannot find real peace and satisfaction in life without
it? Why can’t I just dismiss this vulnerable emptiness out of my life instead of having to cover it up constantly?
Hope is the fuel of life, and my shortage of it forces me get out and strenuously push myself to make the smallest advances in my life. People are not meant to
live like this!
Death is certain, and it is therefore the easiest to hope for. But hoping for death does not change my drowning state, on the contrary, it highlights it. I cannot live my life for the purpose of dying, because that puts me right back in the same hopeless position of still having to deal with life. Skipping life to get to death sounded like an even more desperate and self-deceiving action than lying to myself.
Death is a given, that’s why a dying person would not hope for death. And all the presumable beauty in life that is supposed to make it worth living for, that was present too, only without its promised effect.
This was starting to sound like a riddle: A desire for something that I don’t have, something that isn’t fictive, something I can actually gain or achieve, but will also last…
“It's so easy for me to fall back into depression. I think it comes with having money. I don't have to work. I could
be sitting bored and depressed at home with a bag on my head.”
- Kelly Osbourne -
Hope ceases to exist once it is attained, but to hope for something unattainable wouldn’t be hope anymore. And hope for something attainable but beyond my reach would just be a cheap trick to confuse my own mind. It can work as a positive motivation, sure, but my conscience follows truth, and a feel-good patch on my
gaping wound would eventually fall off. Covering up depression with mundane tasks and forced-on feelings would still be avoiding my dependent and empty existence.
"Hope ceases to exist once it is attained, but to hope for something unattainable
wouldn’t be hope anymore."
“Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who
hopes for what he sees?”
- Paul of Tarsus -
I should be careful not to let my emotions interfere in my mind. It’s always tempting to just drop your trail of thoughts and pick up something that just feels good instead, intentionally ignoring the fact that none of those things will matter once I die. Trying to enjoy life by pursuing pleasure, power, riches, knowledge, or fame, whether achieving any of them or none at all, they are still all temporary means of escape and denial.
“I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy
business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind”
- King Salomon -
Some time ago it was considered abnormal to excessively indulge in immoral practices, self-worship, or any other harmful acts, and everyone understood it
as an effect caused by depression or spiritual deprivation. Today, the people of honesty that still speak this truth to those in need, have become the
minority, and their help-intended words have become “boring and old-fashioned” or “religious nonsense” worthy only of mockery. All that once was a sign of
mental instability is now almost an mandatory lifestyle. Now you are considered weird if you don’t numb yourself with drugs or alcohol or even any other
consumable, or drown yourself in sexual desires and infatuations, or hurt and hide your true self to feel superior to others in any way.
"All that once was a sign of mental instability is now almost an mandatory lifestyle. Now you are considered weird if you don’t numb yourself ..."
Using and abusing practically anything to subdue your inner self that screams for fulfillment, to not have to deal with the hard questions of life, until your inner self has had enough, breaks down, and pulls you into
reality to face the truth of your human vulnerability, forcing you to address the issue, or hopelessly continue to suffer on.
Overdosing on good feelings and pleasure will eventually cause you to either lose interest in them, or grow out to become perversions and addictions
resulting from a mental disorder.
“When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.”
- Fiona Apple -
I needed hope.
Even though suppressing our pain and suffering is considered a norm, and expressing our grief and agony is considered a weakness, the eyes of other people don’t lie. I see it; they need it too.
Apparently the solid hope to look for that could reanimate my deceased soul that was trapped in my still operating body, would be a realization, an opening of my eyes to something I just wasn’t seeing. Some knowledge that would make me understand life, to stop relying on temporary pleasures of life to be my main and only joy, and instead place my hope on something eternal, with a bold and solid confidence that my hope is not in vain.
I’m not supposed to add imaginary colors to my life, the colors are already there, but they are just colors. To take that what is beautiful, pleasurable, and good in life, and squeeze it out to get more satisfaction from
it than what it is meant for, will only leave me empty handed and more frustrated.
We are all purpose driven –hope driven, and do not function correct without it. After millennia, mankind has not been able to evolve or adapt to function
without hope, we just can’t. With this knowledge, everyone alive seems to be irrefutably forced to accept that plain and earthly things do not provide a
satisfying and lasting hope. We need to search for it elsewhere.
"... the eyes of other people don’t lie. I see it; they need it too. I am not alone."
As I seek this hope as part of my obligation of being alive, I stop and stare at one little drop of shining color that suddenly appears on my boring lifeless black and white still. It is a thought, a realization, that the obligatory task of finding this ultimate hope is planted in me, because finding such hope will result in triggering the highest pleasure, enjoyment, worth, meaning, and understanding about me, and a real reason for this hope we all depend on.
"Some knowledge that would make me understand life, to stop relying on temporary
pleasures of life to be my main and only joy,"
I was meant to feel empty and lost without it. It was all part of a bigger plan for me to find the missing part of my life.
“For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected
it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”
- (Romans 8: 20-21) -
©WaarheidInActie | Terms | Privacy | Registration