Finally...

Alright, so I've been meaning to enter the blogging world for quite some time now. Rather than try and account for reasons why it took so long I won't. Let's just say I'm here now and I'm excited about sharing my thoughts with you. Why did I choose to? Well, first off I like to write. I think that's something that sort of blossomed in university for me while taking philosophy courses. Reading mindless papers produced a pretty decent writer in me. Sometimes I'll dust off an old philosophy paper I wrote in university and wonder how the hell I ever sounded so clever.

Another important reason why I chose blogging is to simply vent. I conjecture it can be an extremely useful and interesting medium for letting stem off on to you, my Internet audience, versus the extremely important people in my life such as my family. Not that I'm targeting you, it's just that you're impartial to my life. As such, you can play the role of quasi-therapist! Which brings me to another important reason for this blog; my life growing up.

In this blog, here and there, you'll eventually read about my life and the experiences that have brought me to the place I am today. I hope some of these experiences will enlighten you and maybe provide some instances in which you can easily relate to. Amongst some of these experiences, but experiences I'm not too sure I'll write about in any great length, is my childhood and teenage years. Just like a lot of you out there, nothing was easy growing up. Sometimes it was difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is called adversity; and I owe my life and everything I am to it.

Sometimes my friends would ask me, "do you wish you didn't have it so hard growing up", to which I answer, "honestly, no". It's pretty hard to trade past experiences when you (a) can't, so why talk about it and (b) they make you who you are. Would I have rather been spoon fed versus fending for myself a lot of times? Would getting everything I wished for given me stronger values than which I possess today? These are interesting questions which will have strong arguments in favor of either side. But you are who you are, and there are no take-backs in life. There was an old wise philosopher, Sarvepalli Radakrishnan http://www.iep.utm.edu/r/radhakri.htm, who once wrote about freedom and determinism. He drew an analogy between choice and a game of bridge.

“Life is like a game of bridge. The cards in the game are given to us. We do not select them. They are traced to past karma but we are free to make any call as we think fit and lead any suit. Only we are limited by the rules of the game. We are more free when we start the game than later on when the game has developed and our choices become restricted. But till the very end there is always a choice. A good player will see possibilities which a bad one does not. The more skilled a player the more alternatives does he perceive.”
Karma & Freedom by Sarvepalli Radakrishnan

I really like this passage and it really draws a distinction between a complacent person and a determined person. Complacent people tend to attribute past experiences as some sort of handicap on their current life. I fell prey to that thinking early on in my adolescence. What I didn't understand was the power of being able to control your destiny. I didn't understand how powerful choice is. Lucky for me I have a pretty cool sister who was such a great mentor for me growing up. She helped me to understand these sorts of things. It seems so trivial when you first talk about it, but really it's difficult for people to comprehend. It's almost like when we're children we're the most rational beings. We think so straight without any complications. We know what we want and we try and get it. But as we grow older our minds become so convoluted by societal pressures and what not, that thinking rationally becomes a far-fetched idea. It's almost like we need to reverse ourselves and think like children again when we're adults to follow our hearts. I don't know, that's kind of how I think about it sometimes. But that's the whole point of blogging isn't it? To have no inhibitions of the mind and to create your own opinion on anything and everything!