Am an aspiring ecologist with the passion for environmental conservation. My free time is dedicated to uplift souls to Christ and give people a reason to smile. I live with the the simple philosophy of life: 'Do unto others what you ought them to do to you.' I love writing as it keeps me busy too. Feel free to share all my articles and keep your comments coming to make me move on. Be Blessed. EVANGELIZARE PAUPERIBUS MISIT ME
LIFE AFTER GRADUATION.
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| It's all smiles after graduation.....next? |
Here's What Happens to You Immediately After You Graduate University
: "Getting a good job" is rarely in the mix.
Not really working out, is it, the old graduate life? Because look at you: you're sat at work reading this on the down-low, alt-tabbing to a spreadsheet your boss asked you to do four days ago whenever he walks by. It doesn't take four days to do a spreadsheet. You know this. Your boss knows this. Nobody even wants the spreadsheet you are pretending to make. Your life is a punchline in a panto adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It wasn't supposed to go like this. You were supposed to visit the Guardian Jobs website exactly once – tapping your CV out with arms still sore from hurling your mortarboard into the air – before someone from Apple or Microsoft or some digital ad agency got in touch to be like, "Am I reading this correctly? You're the one who got the 2:2 in Film Studies? If you haven't already been snapped up as the editor of Empire, we want you on board. Can we start you off on £50,000, or is £75,000 more appropriate?"
Thing is, that's usually not the case, is it? Instead, there are three basic, traditional paths out of university:
1) Great success, where you waft into a graduate position and rapidly scale the ranks, wearing suits and having business cards and saying "incentivise" a lot, before spending the equivalent of your uni peers' yearly rent on a series of watches.
2) Going back to the exact life you led pre-university, flopping into it like a comfy sofa, because you've seen the world, haven't you? You've seen the campus at Northampton. You've seen enough of that world they're always banging on about.
3) A life of sort of wriggling mediocrity, striving out of a swamp of entitlement that soon turns into an inner monologue of: 'Please, fucking please. Please let me do an evening shift at this bar, even if it's just a test-shift. Please! I was supposed to be a lawyer!'
Anyway, that last one is how I assume you're currently living, or what you can expect in a couple of months, once you've picked up your degree and lost your entire deposit on your student flat. Here's everything else you can look forward to.
YOU WILL GO AND LIVE BACK AT HOME
Whether it's a six-week stint over the summer holidays or a more floating, free-form situation that basically offers a fixed address for you to sign on from, you will end up back at your parents' house for a bit, and everything will be back-to-front fucked up.
For example: your bedroom is now called the "spare room" and you have to wedge your stuff around an elliptical trainer from that one week your dad tried to fend off a heart attack with exercise. When you wake up with a hangover your mum doesn't preach to you any more, she just makes breakfast by dropping every single pan she owns really loudly on the floor. Everything has changed.
And that's because your parents are tired of you; they're meant to be semi-retired and on a cruise, tying themselves in tanned old sexual knots and entering fun little limbo competitions. You moping around on their sofa and insisting the big shop includes a load of Pot Noodles puts the stoppers on that. Just by existing, you are destroying someone else's dream.
SOMEONE IN YOUR FAMILY WILL TELL YOU WHAT A BIG WASTE OF TIME UNIVERSITY WAS
It's normally an uncle, this one. "You did what?" he's saying. "Theatre Design? What's that?" His favourite film is "any Bond film". His life revolves around smoking, being mad at inflation affecting how much a pint of mild costs and getting into a car so clumsily the whole vehicle shakes.
"Waste of fucking time, that," he's saying. "Should've learnt a trade. Your cousin's a plumber." Your cousin is his son, the one who started those fires when you were six. "Doing well for himself, now," your uncle is saying. "Just bought a van." You do not have a van. "Can't drive to Swansea in a philosophy degree, can you?" He has a point. "CAN YOU? EH?" He's holding your chin now. Six people are holding him back. "CAN'T THINK YOURSELF OUT OF A HEADLOCK, CAN YOU?"
For some reason, there is something about the concept of spending three years completing a degree that really rubs people up the wrong way, and they will kick you with boots made of hindsight for having the temerity – the nerve – for trying to better yourself with knowledge. Much like helicopter parents only want their kids to be lawyers, doctors or doctor-lawyers, so the kind of men who can smoke an entire cigarette in one suck without disturbing the ash want every human alive to plumb or do electrics. "Or drive trucks," your uncle is saying, now he's calmed down outside.
There's not any real way you can deal with this, by the way. Everyone has their journey, and yours just happens to include a three year detour where you got really into at least one daytime TV programme and developed a habit for extremely shitty coke. If you are wondering why satellite outposts of your family don't respect you, just remember: you once wore a toga on a night out.
A FRIEND OF YOUR MUM'S KID WILL GET INTO CAMBRIDGE
"You know Linda," your mum is saying on the phone. "You do know Linda. She used to come over and cut your hair when you were a kid. She fell off that chair at mine and your stepfather's wedding, and you started crying because she wasn't wearing underwear and you were staring right into the eye of the storm."
"Oh yeah," you say. "Linda."
"Well, anyway, that daughter of hers who was always too young for you to really have anything in common with, but who I made you hang out with all the time anyway, just got into Cambridge. She's going to be a doctor, she says – although she could probably be anything she wants. We're going to a party for her, later. Your dad's got his suit on."
"HE'S NOT MY DAD," you scream, slamming the phone down and turning apologetically to your employment advisor.
You didn't get a party for getting into Bangor University, did you? Nobody has ever got a party for getting into Bangor University. Most people don't even know Bangor has a university.
These two quietly unfriended on Facebook today (Photo by Jake Lewis)
YOU WILL READ A NEWS REPORT ABOUT AVERAGE GRADUATE SALARIES AND THE AVERAGE WILL BE £7,000 MORE THAN YOU CURRENTLY GET PAID
"And bad news for graduates," says Fiona Bruce on the BBC News at Six. "A new study today found the average graduate starting salary is a mere £24,000, which – reminder – is about £7,000 more than you are currently earning."
Seems a little niche, this news, a little targeted. But you can't really stay to argue because you have to catch the bus to that desolate out-of-town shopping complex, where you have to clean out all the puppy shit at a Pets-R-Us. The kind of job that makes you hate puppies. That's your job.
YOU REALISE LITERALLY NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR GAP YEAR ANY MORE
Nobody really did at university either, but it was something to talk about during Freshers Week, wasn't it?
Back then, for exactly one week in your first term, your gap year was interesting. You made those mud huts, didn't you? You held those children's hands and just felt so... it was just such a real experience, you know? Like, you go through life and it's all so meaningless, but when you're telling a little boy in pidgin English that he needs to take his diarrhea pills, it's, like, so real? Like, you feel, like, alive?
Nobody cares. Nobody ever cares, but they really don't care now. Take that braid out.
SOMEONE WILL ASK YOU A TRIVIA QUESTION UNRELATED TO YOUR DEGREE AND CLAIM SOME SORT OF VICTORY WHEN YOU CAN'T ANSWER IT
"English Literature, was it? Alright then, smart arse: what's a cantilever? You don't know, do you? Oi, Mel. Mel! Come through here and look at this – he doesn't know what a cantilever is! Three years, pissed up the fucking wall, that!"
Your dad can be a real prick sometimes.
SOMEONE YOU HATED ON YOUR COURSE WILL BREEZE INTO A GRADUATE PROGRAMME
You know the one. Always used to turn up in comedy T-shirts. "KEEP CALM AND MAKE ME A SANDWICH" – that sort of thing. A Breaking Bad/Sonic the Hedgehog crossover T-shirt where Jesse calls Knuckles a "bitch". He sat in front of you that time and just scrolled through doge memes, snickering so hard saliva got all over his iPad. An engineering firm just offered him £45,000-a-year and paid his relocation costs so he could do "something oil" up in Aberdeen.
YOU WILL LOSE TOUCH WITH YOUR UNI BUDDIES
"Friends forever!" you say, posing for one last selfie with the lads before going home for a month to try and make some scratch for your group Magaluf holiday. But sorry, hold on – Darren's dropped out? He's managing a bank in Leicester? And what, Jamie's not coming either? Australia?
And then, like the torn pieces of the terrible dissertation you should have shredded and scattered instead of ever submitting, they fade away. And then you remember: actually, they were terrible anyway. Jamie kept using your house's one good plate as an ashtray. Darren once glued your duvet to the sofa. That big silent one called Gareth kept talking about doing the university café's Big Breakfast Challenge but never actually did it. Fuck them off forever.
BUT YOU'LL FIND PEOPLE YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT WELL REALLY WANT TO GO OUT FOR REMINISCENT PINTS WITH YOU
He's in town for a thing, he says. Cheeky Nando's? Varsity for the rugby? Few jars? And you are thinking: 'Where do I know this guy from, again?' You're like: 'Is this that guy who tossed off at a party? Is this Tossy Dan?' Because all the friends you thought you made at university have abandoned you, and all that's left now is Tossy Dan, asking to sleep on your sofa.
YOU FINALLY OUTGROW THE IDEA OF TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH CLIQUES
Whatever way you spin it, university was a constant chase after the vapours of coolness in whatever way you could manage it – it's all about grasping onto anyone who vaguely shares a common interest with you and building your fort around them. Remember how you told that guy you DJ'd "a bit" and he actually booked you to play a Thursday night slot and it was so bad security escorted you home? Same.
Every skipped seminar, every River Island T-shirt, every time you read a meaty-looking philosophy book in public, every time you sincerely said "BANTA-MANIA!" – they were all your attempts at being in.
And then you're sent out into the world and you realise: hold on, cliques don't really exist out here in the wastelands of real life. Nobody really cares how good you are at roller derby. Take off your festival wristbands and your "ARCHERY TEAM – LADS ON TOUR '12" top and start being normal.
SOME JEB YOU HATED WILL HAVE A FEATURE WRITTEN ABOUT HIS NEW FOOD VAN
"Cory Davison, 22, graduated from the same university you did, but is doing way better. 'I sort of realised around my second year,' Corey mused. 'Like, people were partying loads, living it up, and I was like: I just want to stay home and make chicken enchiladas as good as I can possibly make them.'"
It was there, at the university you went to – at a graduate investment fair you didn't even know was happening, even though it was held in the quad of your own halls – that Davison secured a £40,000 on-the-spot investment for his food van, enchiLADas.
You read about this the day after you get rejected for the Morrison's nightshift job you used to do in sixth form because you are "overqualified".
YOU'RE GOING TO REALISE WHAT A STATE YOU LOOKED AT YOUR STUDENT BALL, AND AT UNIVERSITY IN GENERAL
Wore Converse with your suit, did you? Fat-knotted black tie borrowed off your dad, was it? Bare shoulders, have we? Curled your hair even though you don't normally curl it, did we? Eyebrow piercing, that was? You looked a state, mate. You looked an absolute fucking state.
Mind you, in a way, this is good: if you can look back at your graduation photo and say, "Yes, I look good and cool," then you are still a child and an idiot. As soon as you can't look back at your university self without flinching, you have officially grown and improved as a person. You are on the journey towards being An Adult. An Adult who doesn't think eyebrow piercings with strange grey-green residue on them are an especially acceptable look.
YOU'LL THINK ABOUT DOING A MASTERS
Don't do a masters unless you have plans to become a corduroy-patch-on-a-musky-fart-smelling-jacket professor. And even then, a masters is just a perfunctory stepping stone towards a PhD. The world will not be any less scary and you will not be any more employable in two years time. You've done all the learning you can possibly do. Put those career development loan applications in the bin.
YOU WILL WALK INTO A STUDENT NIGHT AND IMMEDIATELY FEEL HARROWINGLY OLD
Even if you only finished university yesterday, at least seven new drugs and 100 new trends will have been invented by the time your dad's driven you home. Come September, that amount will have tripled. All of them, the young people, saying things like, "Snapchat!" and, "I'm bringing glue-sniffing back – it's so 90s!"
You'll go to the same nightclub you always used to go to and Steve on the door won't even recognise you. "Steve!" you'll plead. "Steve, come on, mate! You remember me! I helped you when those boys trapped your head in a lift!" And Steve will say, "It's £8 if you haven't got a valid student card," before stamping your hand without any tenderness.
Inside, there are different second-years behind the bar, and the graffiti you did in the toilets has been scrubbed away by time. Did you ever really exist? Were you ever really here? If you die, right now, in this £1-a-pint, girls-get-in-free nightclub, will you have ever have made your mark on this world? And Jesus, is that what 18-year-olds look like now? Because – and you're thinking this from your vantage point as a collapsed old person on the ground, while a lad in a vest dribbles strawpedo residue over your craggy dying face – because fucking hell. Fucking hell.
YOU WILL GET A CLUNK OF DREAD ON A-LEVEL RESULTS DAY, SAFE IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU WILL NEVER BE THAT YOUNG AND VIVACIOUS AGAIN
God, remember when you were hot stuff? Remember when that seedy local newspaper photographer put one hand in a worn-looking pocket on his body warmer and asked you to hold on to your results paper and leap into the air in delight for him? He's moved on now, to a newer, younger batch. And they all have better grades than you, and they're all going to the number one pick university that turned you down, and they're all doing the degree you secretly always wanted to do, and theyare all going to get jobs before you do.
"Student essentials!" screams every newspaper in September. "Top Ten Kitchen Buys as Your Youngling Flees the Nest!" And you remember those trips to IKEA, and the fact that you bought a fucking ironing board with you in your first year; and you remember being given a student cookbook and a leaflet about safe drug use; and you remember all those blueberry-flavoured condoms they used to hand out, and you weep. You weep for your lost youth. You weep for the rubbery taste of blueberry on your lips.
Get used to this feeling of overwhelming and youth-inspired dread, because it won't wear off for a good six years. In fact, for some of you, it might not wear off ever at all.
YOU'LL SEE SOMEONE ON A LONG TRAIN JOURNEY WEARING A UNIVERSITY HOODIE WITH THEIR UNIVERSITY-ONLY NICKNAME ON THE BACK AND YOU WILL BECOME REPULSED TO THE POINT OF NAUSEA
Nobody calls you "Shebs", Melanie. I don't know why you paid £7.50 extra to have it printed on your hoodie.
YOU WILL NOT READ A BOOK FOR FIVE YEARS
Unless you're paying £27,000 over the course of three years for the privilege of being told to read a book, you will not read a book.
YOU WILL START YOUR FIRST JOB AND YOUR BOSS WILL BE YOUNGER THAN YOU
Doesn't matter what your job is – you could be making coffee or you could be 3D printing parts for F1 engines; you could be doing data entry work or you could be an actual astronaut going to the moon – at some point on your first day you will have to shake the hand of someone two rungs up the career ladder ahead of you who is, inexplicably, about ten years old.
You're like: hold on. You did everything right, didn't you? You graduated yesterday. You're 21 years old. You're as young as it is possible to be while working. But then here's some kid who's like, "Yeah, I just went into work straight after my A-levels, and I still live at home so I've saved loads on my rent. Reckon I'll have a deposit on a house in a year or so."
Their age still ends in "-teen" and they already have a pension. Do not worry about these people, though. They are freaks and their idea of a big weekend is buying a load of trousers from Next.
YOU WILL TRY TO TRADE A TEXTBOOK YOU ONCE PAID £89 FOR SO YOU CAN ATTEMPT TO BUY SOME DINNER
Apparently that Norton Anthology of English Literature you've been using as a doorstop is worth about £3 now, because there's a new edition with exactly one new poem in it.
University text books are kind of like new cars in that drive-them-off-the-lot-and-they-immediately-lose-value way. Only, imagine you drove the car off the lot and straight into a tree, at speed, and both the tree and the car then caught fire, and then the entire car lot caught fire, and the guy who just sold you your car is like, "There is so much damage happening right now! There is so much money on fire right now!" and you're slightly closer to an analogy that aptly explains the market economy of used textbooks.
YOU'LL INSTANTLY REALISE THAT ALL THE FREE TIME YOU WILL EVER HAVE TO TRULY ACHIEVE A CREATIVE ENDEAVOUR IS FOREVER BEHIND YOU
How's your zine going? The one you talked about starting in first year when a shadowy cabal of amateur editors said your stream-of-consciousness film reviews were "extremely unsuitable" for the student paper? Did you ever call that guy about holding a soca night at his club, or did you just lose his number? Did the photography ever happen, or did you just pester your parents for that DSLR for Christmas ("Think of it as an investment in my career!") and then take a load of black-and-white macro images of your own hands and sack it all off for a thousand consecutive nights of FIFA and weed?
Well, the glory days of having the spare time to commit yourself fully to a creative endeavour are pretty much over now. So, you know, enjoy that.
YOU HAVE TO START REGULARLY CHECKING YOUR BANK ACCOUNT BECAUSE YOU DON'T JUST GET LARGE STUDENT LOAN DEPOSITS ANY MORE
"I'll be fine; some mysterious, omnipotent force will almost certainly plunk £3,000 in my account in September and then I can stop eating rice again." – you, in July, right before eating a big bowl of rice.
YOU'LL LEARN THAT HUNGOVER AT WORK <<<<<<<<< HUNGOVER IN A LECTURE
Being hungover in a lecture is fine: you drift in and out of the conversation while being huddled in a massive jumper and occasionally sneaking yourself some Monster Munch, and then you fuck off home and lie on the sofa watching Big Bang Theory repeats until you are fully recuperated. You're such a Sheldon!
Working on a hangover is different: an eight-hour slog, with a commute each way and a burrito in between. And people expect you to do stuff. And they don't have any sympathy for you. And the phone keeps ringing really loudly. There is no greater agony on earth.
"Hello, mum? No, I fucking hate it. Get dad to come pick me up." (Photo by Jake Lewis)
YOU REALISE HOW POINTLESS YOUR DEGREE WAS
Unless you're a doctor (and if you are a doctor, what are you doing reading this? Shouldn't you be massaging someone's heart or something?) then your degree was pointless. It was pointless. This is the first thing you realise as soon as you graduate: your degree is a meaningless waste of time.
Want to work in a creative industry? Roll up your art degree and burn it for fuel, because you're going to have to do at least six months of interning anyway. Want to work doing something STEM-y? Enjoy on-the-job graduate training, science nerd. Foreign language expert? The only people who want to hire multi-linguists seem to be banks, and even then they want you to have a complex maths degree and just happen to be good at French.
YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE A GOOD YEAR TO A SHITTY JOB THAT YOU HATE
You're almost certainly going to lose a year of your life to a terrible dead-end job. You're going to assistant manage a Sainsbury's or update the contact details on an old charity database or watch Netflix on the DL while you do some reception work. If you are me, you will lose both your youth and your enthusiasm to a two-hole paper punch/three-prong binder filing system that you have to work with for two-and-a-half years. The final gasps of your salad days will be spent learning how to send a fax.
This is the reality of entry-level administration, a career into which you, a perky young graduate, are doomed. The danger, of course, is falling deeper into the endless admin sea: one half-promotion is like a manacle around your foot, tying you to a lifetime of anodyne paper sorting when you really wanted to be an illustrator. And there's no quick-fix, either, beyond applying for those actual jobs you want and trying not to get stare-into-a-canal-by-yourself sad about it.
You will lose a year to a shitty job. Think of it as a sort of national service for people who know the names of more than one Roman emperor.
EVENTUALLY THINGS WILL COME GOOD AND YOU WILL SUCCEED OVER AT LEAST ONE PERSON YOU HAD A SEMINAR WITH
Bulletproof theory: everyone had a nemesis at university. If you didn't, that means you were someone else's. A crying girl in halls; that guy from your class who ran for Student Union president; the Spanish girl who had ridiculously loud, shrieking orgasms in the room next to you at all hours of the night; anyone who ever, even once, wore a gilet.
Eventually something will come good for you, and when it does the absolute best thing you can do is go on Facebook or LinkedIn and see how shitty your nemesis's life is compared to yours, then flick two clean Vs at the laptop and declare yourself the victor. TAKE THAT, JOHN. PAY THE DEBT OFF ON THAT.
OH, AND YOU'LL BREAK UP WITH YOUR UNIVERSITY BOYFRIEND OR GIRLFRIEND
"Meet my friends," they'll say, joyfully, after you've paid £76 and didn't even get to sit down once just to go to fucking Doncaster, or wherever they lived before you met them. "Meet my hokey hometown friends!" And you'll be met with a vista of rictus smiles and eyes looking in other directions and some girl who always gets fighty on Kopparberg, and you will hear a whisper, faint, on the air, that only you can hear: "This could be your life."
The parents joke about the two of you getting married and the dad is like, "I know some really good jobs around here – office jobs. Then you could get yourself a little starter house, maybe. Grandkids, is it?"
And then that ghostly voice is back again, this time going: "You only fancied them because they were one of six people on the same course as you." You will break up with your university boyfriend or girlfriend. If you haven't already, phone them and do it now.
CHANGE IS INEVITABLE.
Overcoming A Heartbreak. (Journey to Healing)
Overcoming a heart break............steps to recovery.
We love or rather fall in love with people. We expect a lot to happen all in bliss not expecting a dissapoiintment.
S o what will help you to bounce back to reality when such heart breaks occur? read on.....
A heartbreak hurts so deeply because it pulls at that raw abandonment nerve we all share. It rips us open to the core, overwhelming us with powerful emotions — loss, despair, panic, shame, hopelessness — that seem all out of proportion to the actual event. Here are 12 facts to help you rediscover your true loving self.
1. The intense emotional crisis of abandonment is real; it is normal, part of being human. And it is temporary. The painful feelings hearken all the way back to our lost childhoods. The regression into primal fear does not mean we’re weak; it’s an involuntary reaction to feeling left behind by someone we love.
2. Overcoming heartbreak begins with understanding the primal nature of the wound so that we can prepare for battle — a battle to quash self hatred and undertake a determined campaign of self nurture- treating ourselves kindly and gently with exquisite self acceptance and care. Physician, heal thy wound.
3. The abandonment wound is cumulative, encompassing the losses, anxieties, hurts, disappointments, rejections, and self doubts we’ve been experiencing since childhood. The breakup reopens the primal pit, sending old unwelcome feelings into our current emotional crisis. We suddenly feel small, weak, and helpless all over again.
4. The incision of heartbreak causes us to experience a symbiotic regression where we feel we cannot possibly survive without this person’s love. This is an illusion. We can survive the breakup and stand more firmly on our own two feet than before. Ultimately, we are strongest where the breaks are.
5. Abandonment’s painful sore brings us in touch with intense neediness and fear to be sure, but there-in lies its cure. We now have an opportunity to cleanse the primal wound. Ripped open, we administer to unresolved needs and doubts we’ve been neglecting since childhood.
6. We’re always hearing that we should ‘love ourselves’ but this platitude rings empty, like another easier-said than done nebulous prescription. We can’t just will self-love into existence, or snap our fingers to make it happen. Even reciting affirmations in the mirror falls short. Self love - healing abandonment - involves doing.
7. Abandonment recovery means taking action - taking behavioral steps that administer to our most deeply felt needs. The actions work incrementally like physical therapy for the brain to reprogram old unwanted patterns and institute healthy new ones.
8. When we were children we didn’t know how to give ourselves what we needed, but now as adults we learn how to be our own loving parent. We use specialized recovery tools to strengthen the Adult Self - a higher self that administers directly to our deepest and most important needs.
9. We become emotionally self-reliant, a task long overdue for most of us. But it doesn’t happen by osmosis. It involves hands-on exercises that guide us step by step to perform loving actions that heal abandonment, overcome self sabotage, and achieve our ultimate goals. We grab abandonment by the tail and flip it, healing from the inside out.
10. The exercises strengthen the higher self and help us achieve our higher goals, finally able to act in our own best interests. At first we won’t feel like taking positive actions, because our heart is momentarily broken and only beats for our lost love. But as a stronger Adult we take ourselves in hand and guide ourselves toward greater love and connection with self and others.
11. At the very time you feel your life is over, a new you is just beginning. The key is to use our times of emotional turmoil and uncertainty to treat ourselves with radical and unconditional self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, and self-compassion. Thus we inculcate a healthy new relationship with the Self and commence positive change.
12. It takes a leap of faith, but there are effective tools and people to connect with to help us transform emotional crisis into growth. We learn how to gain by abandonment rather than be diminished by it.
all the best.
When Teen Love Comes Calling.
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| Every teen has that dream of loving someone |
When Teen Love Comes Calling.
Every person is looking for this special love. but the question remains, Is it already here with us or we are gambling with feelings and in the end we lose it all....... What of the young love? did you see it coming?
Read on............
Friends from our childhood or adolescence are special, no matter how much time has elapsed between visits. These compelling connections are the result of shared roots during the formative years. Our childhood friends and teenage sweethearts experienced with us all the wonderful, horrible, boring, and embarrassing moments that helped to make us who we are today.
Yet, when children are young, parents may regard these relationships as insignificant. If the family must move to a new community and the children's close friends must be left behind, so what? They will make new friends, the parents assure them. But, is a friend as interchangeable as a new toy for an old one, or is there more to friendship than that? Why are we so elated to rediscover long lost friends in our adult years if, as some parents believe, they were so dispensable to us as children?
Even more belittled by many parents is a teenager's (or preteen's) love for a boyfriend or girlfriend. Adults refer to these relationships with demeaning language, calling them "just puppy love," and these romantic bonds are not taken seriously. Parents question the ability of teenagers to know what love is, yet they accept their teenagers' statements, "I love you, Mom & Dad," with full appreciation and at face value. If adults accept that teenagers can love parents truly, then shouldn't they also accept that teen romances are "real" love?
Recreational dating is relatively new. Teenagers many years ago married their first sweethearts right out of high school. These men and women of the World War II Generation married at younger ages than their Baby Boomer children or their Generation X or Millennial grandchildren. But education has become prolonged, so marriage is later.
The age of puberty, however, has dropped. Whatever the reasons for this, reaching puberty influences the age of first love and first sexual experience. It is rare now to marry a first love. Today's teenagers date not for mate selection but for fun. However, the first love experience is no less powerful than it was in the 1940's.
Adults who underestimate the strength of the bond-- or the impact of the loss -- of a first love may have forgotten what a blow it was when they lost their own first loves. They may even try to comfort teenagers with lighthearted lessons: a surprising number of men and women wrote to me to bitterly complain about parents who joked years ago, "Don't worry! Boyfriends/girlfriends are like buses... a new one comes along every ten minutes!" This was not helpful, and it was not funny. The loss of a first love can be so crushing to some teenagers that they become suicidal.
The pain of the breakup will subside with time, but the love may stay buried and dormant for decades. While most men and women find satisfying partners after first love breakups, there are adults who spend their married years aware that "something is missing." They continue to think about their lost first loves. Perhaps if they had married their first loves when they were younger, they tell me, they could have formed lasting and fulfilling marriages, but they will never know. These romances were interrupted - often by their parents' interference.
In a recent survey of 1600 people (who had never tried a reunion with a lost love), ages 18 to 92, 56% of the participants said they would not want to go back to their first loves, 19% were not sure -- but 25% said they would!
Even the adults who had no current interest in their first loves, including those who had only bitter memories, revealed that these early romances influenced their life-long attitudes about love, and even about themselves.
The longer I study lost loves and lost love reunions, the clearer it becomes to me how important young love really is. First love, young love, is indeed real love. This intense love does not come along every ten minutes. For some people, it may come only once in a lifetime.
So wherever love comes treat it like a new guest who needs an accommodation. no one knows when it will come haunting.
Man’s interference with Mother Nature
Man’s interference with Mother Nature
When man himself is the creation of the creator how could he ever challenge the almighty and win against him? I am not talking about God here, I am referring to the ultimate power which is behind existence of everything known and unknown. Human being is a wonder in itself. Instead of enjoying what he is endowed with, today he is bringing on destruction on himself.
When Charles Darwin spoke of survival of the fittest he predominantly referred to various different species which came to life on this planet and since it was nature’s decision to let those species battle it out within themselves it made sense for good. As the time went by and man became the undefeated master of this planet he started formulating his own rules thinking he has become so powerful that he could command the place of what had created him and this same rule of “survival of fittest” started within the human race!
Science is known to have placed man on to the paramount of existing species but the same has been misleading man for so long that he doesn’t realize how futile his attempts are to beat the supreme Nature. With every new discovery by man, nature takes its course at its own sweet pace to make sure it is counteracted. Let us take a simple example: When man started farming he had nothing but his hands and brain. As he began to understand how plants and trees are grown for food, he started using appropriate tools he could think of for better farming. To begin with he started farming for himself and his family later extending it to his community, then came a stage when this extended to a group of communities and ultimately came the time when he started doing it for money which was back to fill only his own stomach. Can you see the cycle here?
Continuing with his advancements in farming he came up with many different ways of growing plants. Then came hybrids, in-vitriol fertilization, green houses, cross breeds, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides and what not? What used to be taken care of by nature before, man had begun causing irreparable damage to the entire system. The day is not far when the almighty nature loses its patience and brings man back to the prehistoric life phase. Challenging the unchallenged is no sanity! Does it not resemble that story of Adam and Eve? When God had asked them to enjoy their life appreciating what he had provided them with, Eve wanted to examine what was that forbidden fruit like. Everything in nature was provided in just the right quantities always, there was never any necessity for man to interfere but he did and now he can only pray that the consequences aren’t fatal to his race.
Can anyone think of why we need human cloning or nuclear bombs? Why do we need to drive out the entire energy entrapped for good reasons within the earth’s crust into the atmosphere, whose reason boils down to some self-made currencies man is trying to accumulate?? I cannot think of more insanity than that.
Choosing Forgiveness in Place of Vegeance.
Revenge or Forgiveness?
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| A person is considered still further advanced when he regards honest well-wishers, affectionate benefactors, the neutral, mediators, the envious, friends and enemies, the pious and the sinners all with an equal mind. |
For many, the first option might seem to be the most satisfying. After all, it provides immediate justice. It allows us a chance to see the other party suffer and that can bring us some level of pleasure. Seeing people suffer for the wrongs they have done makes us feel that justice was dealt. What would the world be without justice? Revenge, or “an eye for an eye” approach is becoming the predominating mood in society. We want things quickly, including our justice. We’re running out of patience for just about everything. When the signal turns green, we need the person in front of us to move immediately. We need our computers to boot up faster. During rush hour, I try to be the first one out of the subway car so I don’t have to wait behind all the people going up the stairs. In reality, I probably save myself only about 60 seconds. It’s a little scary to imagine the lack of patience our future generations will have.
It’s important for us to analyse the kind of impact a culture of revenge can have on our society. There is the risk of us becoming completely intolerant of each other. We are already becoming so intolerant that it’s scary to think about what it will lead to. We hear about it all the time in cases of road rage where people will tailgate, cut each other off and even run another person off the road because of a slight offense.
Revenge doesn’t always involve hurting others on a physical level. It can also lead us into actions where we want to bring harm to another reputation, career or family members. It can drive us into a sick mentality of wanting to cause pain to others. Ultimately, we run the risk of becoming the same kind of person that hurt us, or possibly even worse. We end up becoming that which we focus on most. Filling our mind with anger, hate and vengeance deteriorates our consciousness and brings us into a dark space. It’s important to understand that such emotions and feelings are very stressful and can deteriorate our physical health.
A story is told of a missionary priest who
had been living alone on a hill attacked by robbers on one evening; they beat
him up and took away with his possessions. As they were getting out, they saw a
bowl of food under the table and decided to devour it before they left. Seeing this,
the priest rose with difficulty and said ‘hey! That food is poisoned! I have a
problem with rats so I keep that poisoned food to kill them! U can have some in
the kitchen near the stove’. The Thieves were shocked and stood aghast looking
at the priest who was now bleeding profusely. Surprisingly, they left the
property they had looted and with one accord carried the priest to a nearby
hospital that was 2km away and left him at the gate where he was later picked
up by the security guards and treated till he got well.
This teaches us on the
virtue of forgiving our enemies by doing to them good deeds even at
loggerheads.
Forgiving is hard. We have such a hard time letting go of the hurt that others have caused us. In some cases, it can take years for the pain and bitterness to go away. In more extreme situations, it may stay with us our entire life. It’s not possible to forget the incident or person that caused us pain. Hinduism suggests that the highest platform to exist on is the platform of compassion. Compassion means trying to adjust our vision in the following manner:
- Trying to understand the pain and suffering of the offender that is causing them to behave in hurtful ways.
- Seeing what lessons we can learn from the situation and how we might have contributed to it.
- Understanding that the soul inhabiting all bodies is pure and good but is being forced to act in irrational ways while stuck in the material world.
Forgiveness takes incredible amounts of strength and character. In fact, it builds character. We have to decide, if we want to live a life filled with vengeful and angry thoughts or a life in which we are trying to forgive, even if not always successfully.
Do you have this virtue of forgiving?
How To Bounce Back After A Setback. (A Guide To Building Resilience)
Life getting you down? Learn to bounce back
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| There are opportunities beyond the winding road of life. |
“That which does not kill us makes
us stronger” – so the German philosopher Nietzsche famously said. Luckily, the
school of hard knocks isn’t the only way to build our resilience. There are a
number of tactics that can get us through tough times, help us to bounce back
and make us happier. Next time you are struggling, feeling stressed or stuck,
give one or more of these a try.
1.
Find something you can control (even if it’s small)
Often when we are struggling we can
feel overwhelmed or powerless. And it’s true: there are lots of things in life
that we can’t control, including big challenges such as redundancy or broken
relationships or bereavement. But taking small, positive steps in any area of
our life can have a ripple effect, increasing our sense of self-efficacy and
eventually enabling us to move forward in the problem area.
2.
Focus on what’s right
As a species, we tend to focus on
what’s wrong rather than what’s right. Psychologists suggest we developed this
“negativity bias” when we were hunter-gatherers, constantly surveying our
environment for dangers.
Of course looking out for risks is
still important, but we can benefit from paying more conscious attention to
what’s going right. In one experiment psychologists asked people to spend a few
minutes at the end of each day for a week, making a note of three things they
enjoyed, were pleased about or grateful for that day and the reason they found
these things good. At the end of the study, participants who did this were
happier than those who didn’t – and this effect lasted for as long as six
months.
This isn’t about putting on
rose-tinted glasses – it’s about a more balanced perspective. Good things
happen even on the worst days, even if these are as small as someone making us
a nice cup of tea, yet we often let them pass by without much attention.
Psychologists have shown that consciously focusing on these good things helps
to increase our experience of positive emotions. Over time this has a number of
benefits for our resilience and wellbeing as, for example, we become more open
to ideas, better at problem-solving and more trusting of others.
3.
Check your thinking
Albert Ellis, one of the
fathers of cognitive behavioral therapy, wrote that we are remarkably good at
disturbing ourselves – in other words, the way we think can undermine our own
resilience.
Let’s look at an example: the way we
think when things go wrong in our day-to-day lives. Leading psychologist Martin Seligman found that
the way we interpret the causes of everyday setbacks can have a significant
impact on our ability to cope, our physical health and our persistence in the
face of adversity. He also showed that we can learn more resilient thinking
styles.
Seligman looked at three key
dimensions to our interpretations:
Is it down to me? When bad things happen, resilient thinkers tend to focus on
causes outside themselves. For example, if they miss a deadline they will look
at the computer issues they had or the other pressing jobs they had to do,
rather than only beating themselves up for being late.
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How long will this problem last? When things go wrong, resilient thinkers see it as transitory,
perhaps thinking: “It didn’t work this time, but next time it will be better.”
Someone with a less resilient thinking style might believe it will always be
that way: “It didn’t work this time, and it’s never going to.”
What other aspects of my life will
this affect? When something goes wrong in one
area of a resilient thinker’s life, they put boundaries around the issue,
limiting it to that specific area – for example: “I went the wrong way; I find
following directions hard.” We can undermine our resilience if we see the
problem as spreading out to everything: “I went the wrong way. That’s typical
of me – I’m no good at anything.”
This isn’t about being unrealistic
or not taking responsibility when problems occur, but about being realistic and
flexible in our thoughts about why these issues happened. If we are stressed or
down, we can all too easily fall into the trap of thinking that everything is
our fault, can’t be changed and trouble will spread to all areas of our life.
This makes us feel hopeless and can start a downward spiral towards lower
resilience and even depression.
So the next time something goes
wrong for you, pause for a moment and think realistically: how did I, others or
the situation contribute to this? What can I do that will help now or stop the
problem occurring again?
4.
Ask others to help
When we have problems, it is very
easy to feel isolated. We are bombarded by images of people with perfect lives
or who have achieved great things, which can make us feel we’re not good enough
or even ashamed that we are struggling. Remember the saying “Be kind, for
everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle inside” and don’t be afraid to ask
for help. We all have ups and downs, strengths and weaknesses, and connecting
with other people is a source of resilience.
Human beings evolved to live in
social groups. Our relationships with those around us are really important for
our wellbeing and resilience (and that of our communities). By asking for help
we are showing that we value and respect other people. Scientists are also
finding that the act of helping actually boosts the helper’s own wellbeing.
Showing our vulnerability makes others see us as human, making them feel more
able to ask us for help when they need it, so building the relationship. This
helps to increase wellbeing and resilience for both of you.
Your request doesn’t have to place a
burden on the other person – it could be as simple as asking them to listen,
share their experience, knowledge or ideas to help you move forward, or perhaps
make a connection to someone they know. You could even offer to help them with
something in return (that could help you too).
5.
Distract yourself
It often helps to take time out from
the things you are worrying about – even if it’s just a few minutes.
When we are immersed in a problem it
is hard to think creatively about ways to deal with it. How many times have
your best ideas come when you’ve been in the shower or tidying up? Our brains
are amazing organs – they are still working on issues even when we aren’t
consciously focusing on them. In fact, allowing time off from the thing we’re
grappling with can work wonders.
An effective ways of taking time out
is exercise. Not only does this give us a break from what we’re doing and our
worries; it’s also great for our minds. Anything moderately aerobic, such as
jogging or simply a brisk walk, has a physical impact on our brain, helping us
to think more clearly.
Much has been written about mindfulness,
and this can be very effective way to boost our resilience. Even a few minutes
can give us a little space from our worries and help put things in perspective.
Take time to laugh. We have already
looked at the benefits of positive emotions.
And finally, if you can’t get to
sleep because your mind won’t switch off, find a way to distract it – for
example, counting back from 100 in threes or going through the alphabet trying
to think of as many animals/actors/footballers (you choose the topic) for each
letter as you can.
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