All we need is...

As corny as it sounds, I won't put "love" on top of the list. Why? Because I've just realized that in order to be able to give and receive love, one needs to feel a certain kind of PEACE. ☼ An inner serenity. That feeling of freedom in being oneself. When you can finally be at peace with yourself. That's when you can give and receive love with all your heart.

I lost a friend today. Not literally lost, thank God. He's alive and well, but his heart is aching. Someone whom he thought of as his friend betrayed him, lied to him and hurt him in the most horrifying way possible. How? By being obsessed with him, by stalking him and harassing him and his friends, lying about them, to the point where he decided to withdraw from anyone and anything just to find some peace of mind. 

Which leads me to what you thought I was going to talk about [and now I will talk about]: LOVE. ♥

You know...I'm not too old as to think I'm entitled to give advice, share opinions and thoughts from my own experience, but not too young not to. I had my share of pain, just like any other human being on the face of the earth. But what I took from every experience was each time, a simple lesson, which later proved to be of utmost importance in my life and extremely helpful at times. It would take me hundreds if not thousands of pages to describe each one of my experiences and the lessons I've learned from them. I might not even remember them all. I mean I'm sure I forgot a lot of the experiences I've been through so far. But the lessons have stayed with me throughout time. And I guess, that's what's important. If you neglect the fact that there's a lesson after each one of your experiences, be they pleasant or sad, and you don't care to learn it, then you're as good as dead. Dead inside, that is. What's the use of a walking robot, then?  I ask you. Isn't the purpose of this life to be as alive as possible, as present in your own life as you can be  and not become a  walking robot, eventually dying inside? At least that's what motivational speakers tell us. And so far, I haven't heard one "follower" complain.

I do wanna share a simple lesson I've learned. I might feel ashamed to share it [and actually I am] but I will share it nonetheless. Because if there's even a single human being who can use my experience and the lesson I've learned to help himself have a better life [and not hurt other people in reaching this goal], then I've reached my purpose.

I wanna tell you about the time when LOVE to me meant none other than walking hand-in-hand with my boyfriend. A kiss on the cheek, or even one on the mouth, but not even a French one. [Ok, maybe a French one once in a while.] An innocent teenage love, you might say. Only that there was something which turned it into something else called selfish love. Which isn't really love. Actually, that's no love at all. Its name is rather Jealousy or Possessiveness. The feeling that you OWN a person, that he belongs to you and only you,  therefore that person is at your disposal. 

I did that... To my shame, I did that to someone and I am still not able to forgive myself to this very day. It wasn't what you'd call jealousy: I wasn't stalking him to see who he meets, where and when and most importantly why. Nope. It was worse: I felt I had the right to know what he did, when, where and why, like the poor guy had to explain every second of his life to me. And the worse part? He was telling me everything and I didn't believe him. That, my friends, is the breef portrayal of a creepy, awful, possessive person. I got better throughout our time together, he made me understand I was wrong, but it took him such a long time to convince me I had been hurting his feelings, that by the time I understood what was the root of all this problem, we had already broken up.

I knew I messed everything up with my crazy behavior. I knew it and it broke my heart that I've broken his heart more than the idea of us having just broken up did. I was a mess, but at least I figured out, piece by piece, what made me act like such a lunatic. It was lying within me. It was my low self -esteem. I'd always felt I wasn't good enough for anyone, so why would this relationship make it any better? So I was taking it out on him: I needed something to make me feel like I have my own rights, you know? Like I can be good at something, too. And I chose it in the worse and most rude way possible: thinking I'm the boss of someone. That he owns me explanations all the time. That he needs to tell me why the heck he can't see me today, which doesn't normally sound necessarily bad, unless asking your loved one to give you all the details of why he can't see you today, including what he'll do later if he still won't see you anyway [No wonder the poor guy tried to protect himself from me]. Until one day he poured his heart out to me and I got to see so much anger, confusion, madness and even hate there, that I was left speechless. I was shocked! He was breaking up with me, possibly finding another girl, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was at the point of no return. 

So, bruised and battered, I gathered my broken pieces together and I tried to draw a conclusion from all this. That took a while, but I ended up having learned... a life lesson. And that, my friends, is that I hadn't known how to love up to that point and it was high time I opened my heart, soul and mind to fully understanding and experiencing the most wonderful feeling in the world. Understand that loving is not owning. To love is to trust. And feel free and have a happy heart, safe in the knowledge that your loved one knows that "feeling free" doesn't mean you're in search of other hearts, and that you know he feels the same way too. That everything is out there, spoken and when it's like that, there's no need for thousands of explanations and finding excuses. 

I've learned that, even if he finds another girl, I don't have to take it out on her or him [and thankfully, I didn't]. 

And there were so many more lessons I've been given to learn...

Life suddenly becomes so beautiful when you let your mind accept the possibility that someone may not like you as much as you like them, and it's ok to hurt, but you have to move on. I mean, after all, aren't you curious to see what life has in store for you? You never know, in your quest to learning all lessons life has to offer, you might even meet your soulmate. Yep, when you least expect it. Wouldn't it be horrifying to get old and die without having at least tried to open your mind to this possibility? 

Every experience brings a lesson along. A lesson given by God/Universe/Nature to make us grow spiritually and find our inner light. Discover who we are and what is our role here. When we'll no longer frown at the idea that we're here to learn and evolve spiritually, we'll live a better life, where our hearts will always sing a joyful song. 

Which brings me to my last subject for today: MUSIC. ♫ No matter how much I'd write about that, I would never feel that's enough. To sum it up, I just feel my life would make no sense without this infinity of tonalities, sounds, rhythms, beats and notes. Am I wrong to think that even you, my friend, feel the same way? :) I guess I'm not. Everyone loves music. Of course, someone loves a certain kind of tonality and rhythm, some other loves a totally different one. But that's just question of taste, as they say. To me, it's more like a question of how much you identify with a certain kind of tonality, beat, sound. If it "strikes a chord" in you, to put it musically. If it touches your heart in such an unexplainable way, that you wish you'd invented that combination of sounds and beats. If it speaks to your soul in magical ways. 

To me, Music and Love are directly connected. Real music is made out of love. Whether out of love for a specific human being, or out of love for the entire humanity and the nature. Anything outside of that is not music to my ears, for it disturbs the heart, it annoys the mind and it destroys the soul. Why? Because it doesn't bring peace to any of them. [But that's just me.]

You see...in the end, it all boils down to LOVE, PEACE AND MUSIC.


If you're not at peace with yourself and the human beings around you, if you're always mad, constantly seeking revenge and enjoying hurting others, then you don't let love install into your heart, soul and mind. If you don't have love, you can't hear the music of your heart, and most certainly can't feel the music of other people's hearts, so you cannot enjoy the beauty and the magic of life.

Yeah, the magic of life. Don't miss it.






*DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the pictures above. All the rights belong to their respectful owners.

That little voice inside

She knew she didn't know how to handle the language that well... so, she made a habit of observing what her friends tweeted to one another, and chose not to write anything back, for fear of not making a complete fool out of herself. Often there were jokes told, and God! how she wanted to reply with a joke which she was sure would have made her friends burst into laughter! Or at least she hoped so. Yet she was sitting there numb, eyes fixed on the desktop computer, wishing so badly she had been born in an English-speaking country! It didn't even matter to her that just a few months ago, she was in a neighbor-country translating for the FDA, and they didn't complain. Nope... she was staring at her Twitter page, as if she was frozen in time, convinced that her English knowledge equals ZERO and that nothing she'd say would make sense anyway. 

The thing is she's always had a problem when it came to self-esteem. And that problem dated from way back when she was a teenager. All the success she's had in her extra-curricular activities -whether singing at the Children's Club and the Church choir or participating at some school competition seemed to annoy her classmates, which never hesitated in making her feel unwanted and uncool, and never missed a chance to humiliate her for the most childish reasons. When in fact she was hardly the nerd type. She would only have greater marks at her favorite subjects.  She was just an ordinary student. But today, she was still feeling the same pain inside like it was 1996, on that warm day of spring when she was in her 7th grade, just after having won that 1st prize at the National Human Rights Competition, held in the southern part of the country. She'd made her school (located on the opposite part of the country)  famous, yet she had no expectations, and absolutely no idea of what she'd had done for the school. Of course, teachers congratulated her and someone wrote some article in the local newspaper, but it wasn't until later on, sometime in 2003, that she found out there was a photo of herself in the school's hallway, just as you enter the school. To her, none of this attention really mattered. She was just a child with a dream. And winning that prize changed nothing in her heart, she was still as sociable and friendly as she'd been before the whole contest thing. Only this time, everyone around her changed. And not for the better. Whether the change took the form of friends who would smile in her face, but tell lies to others behind her back, or children seeking to befriend her so that she could help them with the homework and then forget she ever existed, the change happened nonetheless. And it made her wish she hadn't participated in that freaking contest in the first place. :( She would've helped them with the homework anyway, as she had done so many times before. But her heart could not take in all that rancour. 

[...]

 So she took this pain and had some more added on top of it in high school, then in college, up to later on at work, and she carried all this amount of pain throughout the years, thinking she's never good enough for this world, that nothing she will say or do will ever even be necessary to this Planet. That all the love she has to spread is unimportant and definitely not welcome. Hence, a great amount of low self-esteem. The ever present need to apologize for every minor thing she feels might bother or upset people. The need to feel accepted before making a decision and embarking on a journey towards whatever it is that she has in mind to do with her life.

Fortunately, experience along with some wonderful people, life, fate and even herself came up with answers, and as time went by, things took a favourable turn. But she's still not completely healed. She needs to learn more. She needs to take action. She needs to stop taking every silly little thing to heart. She needs to stop waiting for the fairytale life, the fairytale love, the fairytale friends. And she definitely needs to stop staring incontrollably at this Twitter page. She needs to stop worrying and let the tiny voice inside her head do the talking for her, at least this one time. [...]

'So go on girl, write whatever joke's coming through your mind. As long as it's not obscene. LOL. Just write like the wind, as Stephanie would say. :) Don't worry about the consequences. The worst kind of loss is losing your true self. Which you know you don't want to do. And stop asking yourself what they would say. You're not in 7th grade anymore. This is different. In the best way kind of different. You might not have the best English out there, but they got it so far, so I guess it's ok. This is Bean's family, no reason to worry.'

Guess it wouldn't hurt if she listened to the tiny lil' voice in her head from time to time.

Confusion

An unexpected feeling 

Growing in my heart...

But I need to stop dreaming

Before I fall apart.

Causing pain to my friends

Has never been my fun...

So this is where it all ends,

Before it has begun.