Sometimes i keep forgetting how “making the most of it” can be such a simple yet awesome recipe.
It’s like an incentive to look what’s eclipsed by the things that trouble us, some of these things are mostly punctual / temporary, some last in longer challenges and some maybe even more, but there’s almost always more there – and it’s too often eclipsed even by petty little things.
But I know, sometimes it’s not as easy as said.

I don’t have a google+ account… I haven’t googled myself for quite some time, there are more people with this name. Anywho.

sometimes things just need a kickstart

the night passes by
it’s so awesome outside
but you feel I’m keeping you in
and wonder why I still don’t say anything
then I reach for the door
you look at me upset as I leave
and you promise yourself you’ll never see me again
and then
i come back with a grin
and reach for your hand
and somehow you understand
and we go out in our fairy land
passing under the busy stars
incognito underneath the blinding streetlights
passing by the speeding cars
eclipsed by the sparkles in your eyes
passing by the people and the trees
distracting them with our smiles and the perks of our holding hands
they smile back & say hello & nudge their heads as they understand

Dear internet cohabitants,
Please watch this talk about how what we view on the web influences and forms it, and try to click / choose your daily consumption on the internet more responsibly.
Below I added, in my view, some alternatives for a smarter / more intelligent content that can also be entertaining – of course these are some of my personal pickings, the web is full of ignorance as it is of awareness and actual useful information / content.

Here are some alternatives, most also have Facebook pages, twitter accounts and some YouTube channels:

TED talks (and TEDx and other satellites)
Some TEDx videos are more local and thus sometimes difficult to appreciate the filtering of relevancy and degree of subjectiveness / specially in the life experience talks, but even those are perspectives worthy of consideration.
The mothership, the “TED talks” , are much as I’ve seen just brilliant people worthy of your attention and consideration. Really Ideas worth spreading.

“TED is a platform for ideas worth spreading. Started in 1984 as a conference where technology, entertainment and design converged, TED today shares ideas from a broad spectrum — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independent TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.“

ted.com

Big Think
They have a YouTube Chanel with many scientists and professors / “experts” invited, some subjective perspectives of philosophers too – but perspectives worth considering.

About page excerpt:

“In our digital age, we’re drowning in information. The web offers us infinite data points—news stories, tweets, wikis, status updates, etc—but very little to connect the dots or illuminate the larger patterns linking them together. Here at Big Think, we believe that success in the future is about knowing the ideas that allow you to manage and master this universe of information. Therefore, we aim to help you move above and beyond random information, toward real knowledge, offering big ideas from fields outside your own that you can apply toward the questions and challenges in your own life.

Every idea on Big Think comes from our ever-growing network of 2,000 Big Think fellows and guest speakers, who comprise the top thinkers and doers from around the globe.”

bigthink.com

The RSA

“The RSA’s mission is to enrich society through ideas and action.

We believe that all human beings have creative capacities that, when understood and supported, can be mobilised to deliver a 21st century enlightenment.”

You surely know at least one of their RSA animate videos, they have lots.

“The RSA Animate series is an innovative way of sharing world-changing ideas. All audio is taken from the RSA’s free events programme, and all animations are created by Cognitive Media.”

thersa.org
youtube.com/user/theRSAorg

New Scientist

New Scientist is a world leading science and technology brand, covering the big ideas and developments from all areas of science and technology through a respected and influential weekly magazine and widely read website. Offering the latest news, ideas and opinions, New Scientist is an authoritative voice on all matters related to science, technology and the ideas improving our knowledge of the universe and those shaping our world and lives.

www.newscientist.com

The School of Life
We don’t have to keep making the same mistakes.

The School of Life is a place that tries to answer the great questions of life with the help of culture. It’s based here online and in 10 physical hubs around the world, including London, Melbourne, Istanbul and Seoul.

Brain Pickings
See the About page for info. Briefly:

“[…] a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Mostly, it’s a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life.

Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012.”

brainpickings.org

Wait! but why?
Title says enough. See the wait but who page. Quite brilliant perspectives I’d say.
waitbutwhy.com

SciShow, Crash Course and others – YouTube channel

“SciShow discusses science news and history and concepts.

With equal parts skepticism and enthusiasm, we go a little deeper…without going off the deep end.

Most of the time, anyway.”

youtube.com/user/scishow/videos

They are also making the Crash Course YouTube channel and others, relevant education and just information has never been so accessible much as i see it.

Quora – virtual Agora

“Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.” (wikipedia descriotion)

This is awesome, you can find answers to any questions from people who had direct experience with what ever you want to know, the most relevant answers are voted up so you’ll know which ones are really worth reading. Want to know what is it like to survive, to fail, to face any kind of challenge, how something works, or validate an hypothesis, or anything really – among the users are scientists, journalists, writers, philosophers, doctors, government folks, experts from any domain really – from all over the world; it’s a virtual Agora and you can set your interest and get an e-mail with what interesting questions had been asked / answered previous week, you can ask your own questions, follow any question, it’s simply brilliant and an unlimited source of insightfulness from the consciousness of the world : )
Sometimes i find more very intriguing perspectives at the time, it’s the world as it should be.

quora.com

The Brain Scoop – YouTube channel

“I’m Emily, the Chief Curiosity Correspondent of The Field Museum in Chicago, former volunteer of the University of Montana Zoological Museum, and I’d like to share some of the amazing things we have in the collection with the Internet!”

youtube.com/user/thebrainscoop/featured

[Ve]ritasium – YouTube channel

“Veritasium is a science video blog featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science.”

youtube.com/user/1veritasium/featured

Shots of Awe – YouTube chanel
A more experimental and subjective perspective but mostly inspiring and enthusiastic views:

“Ever ponder the miracle of life? Or perhaps wonder about the evolution of intelligence? In Shots of Awe, “Performance Philosopher” Jason Silva chases his inspiration addiction as he explores these topics and more.”

youtube.com/channel/UClYb9NpXnRemxYoWbcYANsA

Of-course, there are more, but these are most frequent for me it seems.

Also, in romanian, there’s Iv Cel Naiv, bringing you romanticised / serene views of life in verse. And the even more brilliant part is that the replies are also in verse as it becomes a place for thinking and seeing the world trough a serene – verses-build lens. I’m sure there are such places in English and other languages too, if not – then it means that there’s room for new beginnings.

“un om căra în spate / un dram de seninătate //”

ivcelnaiv.ro

Initially, when I wrote it, I titled it “We the haunted”, but then after a month realised it sets a stigmata where it doesn’t really belong. And I chose to title it instead for the positive incentive that it deserves.

I’ll leave this shipwreck and join the others,
tiredly as they swim for the shore
to this distant island which we’re pretty sure that is not a mirage.
but we know
that once we get there,
if we make it,
we’ll have to build a new ship and find a new home.

so i jump, off this wreck that, although it keeps me afloat,
will not move anywhere,
and I’m tired already and weak – without nourish,
and have no esteem left as a paddle to push all that wight around.

as I leave the cold wood and hit the freezing water
my chest instantly feels like a stone of ice.
i try to adapt and struggle to keep breathing…

a-last, distracted from everything else all-round,
i start to push the water away from the island.
gradually, i get the hang of it.
i see it, it’s there, i can do this!

finally, confident enough that the island will not disappear,
i turn my head around.
others from other shipwrecks are swimming near by in the same direction.
the warm feeling of a hello makes all the cold feel like a tinkle,
“it’s not just me anymore” i tell myself
and continue pushing the water beneath me away from the island.

we look back at our separate shipwrecks as we swim…
all the familiarity that we had there, that we projected…
the lingering time spend customising reality or illusions…

how did we not see the rocks?

the coin had tail on all three sides
but that one tail is beautiful

…what rubbish

there are no heads, nor tails, nor coins for that matter – but the ones we project

pretty as they might be – as we project them, they turn in the air of our expectations and fall on the surface of our fears while we only see the reflecting light of our assumptions…

I’ve disabled my Facebook account a few times by now. And each time I came back, eventually, I got back to re-posting some things that I thought/think that are perspectives worth sharing. This brought me to the realisation of how important it is to realise who influenced you, who’ve been your so to say role-models. And out of a wide list here’s the ones that are world wide accessible and with the lesser subjectivity embedment.

My favourite: Carl Sagan bringing about our context in Cosmos, how we’re all made of star-stuff – “a way of the cosmos to know itself”. Then the bunch of them: Steve Jobs about how life is not a set of walls which imposes us what to do and try not to bump into them and that we can change / improve it because there are some pretty messed-up things in the world; there’s Don Tapscott highlighting the incentive of collaboration – sharing and transparency in this current era of communication which he so wonderfully encourages us to work together like the birds do in their murmuration phenomenon – calling it the murmuration era; there’s Gandhi setting himself as example for non-violence and encouraging us to be the change we want to see in the world, there’s Einstein that forever enhances the disinfecting light in our views reminding us how everything is relative – advising the regard to truth above all no matter if it concerns big or small issues – making it further more easy to realise the more perspectives not just conceptually – imaginary – philosophically but physically – scientifically; there’s also Socrates and Plato which, spite of some deprecated points of view which held us back for quite some time – they also helped us advance until one point – the story of the cave still helps us understand ignorance and ignorant behaviour which unfortunately will always be around; there’s Albert Ellis bringing about how we should realise that things are not necessarily bad but it’s often us that interpret it that way – suggesting, besides that it just might be us that over-blow the interpretation of a situation, to also regard how we react and affect the situation – to become aware of our own cognitive behaviour and of potential irrationality it may be field by; there’s Brené Brown which reminds us of empathy and tells of the importance of embracing vulnerability and of the trials that shame can bring and the armour that we tend to build because of it and how that can make us resort to sympathy rather then empathy and how different these two notions can be; there’s the Buddha which we find in a sutta describing “the middle way as a path of moderation, between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification, this, according to him, was the path of wisdom” suggesting to use this mindset onwards in the eightfold-path towards equanimity and an unbiassed – up-straight and mindful appreciation and relation with everything; there’s David Attenborough that made me feel like I visited and discovered the wondrous and divers nature around the world by strolling alongside him trough the jungles and the lands and trough the deeps of the waters – seeing how it all exists, some of it stopped existing, how it became and evolved and also how we affect it; there’s Charles Darwin who so patiently brought us the evidence of our evolution and the foundation to which science added so many of the puzzles of how we came to be; there’s also Richard Feynman who reminds us of the beauty that science enhances about the world and not subtracts it and that it’s ok that we don’t know everything yet – that we’ll learn the truth by being opened in discovering nature and the universe as it is and not by expecting it to be in a certain way or another – that there’s no reason to be afraid of not having a purpose given in the universe; and so many more in different fields like Ellen Lupton reminding of the importance of typography and realising the rules and braking them in need “from a perspective of knowledge and not ignorance”, John Lennon who reminds me I’m not the only dreamer and it stops being a dream once it’s a shared purpose – “so I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one”; and the list goes on: Charlie Chaplin, Michio Kaku, Ann Druyan, James Randy, Alan Watts, Sebastião Salgado and more subjective influences like writers / artists and such. Obviously all these people did / said / wrote more then I so briefly mentioned above, I just tried to set a sample of the awesome perspectives they borough and the magic i found in them.

These are people that had done, said or written things that had an influence upon me, that made me consider new points of view or changed existing points of view from the foundation of my belief system.
I’ll try to add a sample in video for most of them:

we assume about others then ourselves so much… we assume context, we assume motivations, intentions, personalities, potential / limitations, perspectives, experience, beliefs, importance of a thing or another, self esteem, taste or interest in a thing or another… often due to impressions of a moment or impressions in exceptional situations that were probably not obvious.

One of the things that really stuck to me after the Mary Poppins 1964 movie was “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” , as I’m often socially anxious or better put quite awkward, and the existence of a word that could help me in such situations, with the serene attitude that this word brings – being so “atrocious” as it is : ) seems like a dreamy redemption for me and this incapacity of mine. Truth be told, the one time I should remember to say this word in that kind of circumstance I forget it too, I forget everything, what time it is, what I wanted to say, what happened a minute ago or why I was doing what ever I was doing… teenage dirt-bag crushes can be that way I suppose. You just seem to freeze and not be able so say anything, still can’t quite explain how, why that goes that way. And it seams to me that what creates this kind of reactions is quite rare… and just might be a such a pity that such things are lost quite because you could not say anything… it almost seems unfair… but I suppose it makes sense… i guess…
It’s a moment like that I’d like to turn back the time to and have remembered and said: “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” … perhaps as a gesture that reminds me and makes me now realise and understand even better a verse in one of my own poem attempts:

[…]”Black comes tending to take over
Above all white it starts to make a shadow
That scares my little angel at this hour
Feeling so alone and whit out power
To stab the evil in his heart he’s sent an arrow
With his last breath to save me from upon my shoulder.”

But I hadn’t read the book. So, like with many things in life I imagine, there was a bigger perspective to know and to understand. There’s no supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in the book. Here’s  the author P.L. Travers in an interview talking briefly about Mary Poppins, the Hollywood – Walt Disney movie:

-“It’s still being shown all over the world.”
P.L.Travers
“Yes,  So they tell me. I’ve seen it once or twice and I’ve learned to live with it. It’s glamorous and it’s a good film on it’s own, but I don’t think it’s very like my books.”

P.L.Travers about the character Mary Poppins:

“She comes out of a world that is timeless I think and… perhaps that’s all one can say about her.”

The presenter of “The secret Life of Mary Poppins” – BBC documentary, at the end of the documentary, apparently filmed right after she had supposedly seen Walt Disney’s “Saving Mr. Banks” movie:

“Well, they’ve done it again, they’ve done it to her again. They’ve tied it all up, they’ve smoothed off the rough edges, they’ve given it a happy ending, they’ve given it structure and redemption… they’ve completely cleaned-up the messy story of Camillus, he simply doesn’t appear.

But here’s the thing, it really um… it really gets you, that’s what’s ridiculous, that it’s incredibly moving, the way that they sorted everything out and they give everything redemption… is very powerful… and it knows it’s doing it, that’s what’s infuriating, it knows it’s doing it, there’s a moment just near the end where Walt Disney says: “That’s what story-tellers do, they restore order with imagination”.