Note To Women: Date A Boy Who Travels

For the longest time, reading has redefined the words leisure and solace in my word bank; it has been an alternative for all the trips I missed to take for the lack of resources and the like, It has saved me from a number of mishaps and breakouts that I might have gone through had I not been mollified by the temporal, yet undeviating thrill that goes along every page that I leaf.  A few months ago, I have re-blogged a stirring essay, Note To Men: You Should Date A Girl Who Reads, that speaks for the many bookish women all over the word, today, let me share another entry that is equally thoughtful as the latter.

Date a boy who travels. Date a boy who treasures experience over toys, a hand-woven bracelet over a Rolex. Date the boy who scoffs when he hears the words, “vacation,” “all-inclusive” or “resort.” Date a boy who travels because he’s not blinded by a single goal but enlivened by many.

You might find him in an airport or at a book store browsing the travel guides – although he “only uses them for reference.”

You’ll know it’s him because when you peek at his computer screen his background will be a scenic splendor of rolling hills, mountains, or prayer flags. His Facebook friend count will be over-the-roof and his wall will be plastered with the broken English ‘miss-you’ of friends he met along the way. When he travels he makes lifelong friends in an hour. And although contact with these friends is sporadic and may be far-between his bonds are unmessable and if he wanted he could couch surf the world… again.

Buy him a beer. Maybe the same brand that he wears on the singlet under his plaid shirt, unable to truly let go. Once a traveller gets home people rarely listen to their stories. So listen to him. Allow him to paint a picture that brings you into his world. He might talk fast and miss small details because he’s so excited to be heard. Bask in his enthusiasm. Want it for yourself.

He’ll squeak like an excited toddler when his latest issue of National Geographic arrives in the mail. Then he’ll grow quiet, engrossed, until he finishes his analysis of every photo, every adventure. In his mind he’ll insert himself in these pictures. He’ll pass the issue on to you and grill you about your dreams and competitively ask about the craziest thing you’ve ever done. Tell him. And know that he’ll probably win. And if by chance you win, know that his next lot in life will be to out do you. But then he’ll say, “Maybe we can do it together.”

Date the boy who talks of distant places and whose hands have explored the stone relics of ancient civilizations and whose mind has imagined those hands carving, chiseling, painting the wonders of the world. And when he talks it’s as if he’s reliving it with you. You can almost hear his heart racing. You can almost feel the adrenaline ramped up by the moment. You feel it passing through his synapsis, a feast to his eyes entering through those tiny oracles of experience that we call pupils, digesting rapidly through his veins, manifesting into his nervous system, transforming and altering his worldview like a reverse trauma and finally passing but forever changing the colors of his sight. (Unless he’s Karl Pilkington.) You will want this too.

Date a boy who’s lived out of a backpack because he lives happily with less. A boy who’s travelled has seen poverty and dined with those who live in small shanties with no running water, and yet welcome strangers with greater hospitality than the rich. And because he’s seen this he’s seen how a life without luxury can mean a life fueled by relationships and family rather than a life that fuels fancy cars and ego. He’s experienced different ways of being, respects alternative religions and he looks at the world with the eyes of a five-year-old, curious and hungry. Your dad will be happy too because he’s good with money and knows how to budget.

This boy relishes home; the comfort of a duvet, the safety stirred in a mom-cooked meal, the easy conversation of childhood friends and the immaculate glory of the flush-toilet. Although fiercely independent, he has had time to reflect on himself and his relationships. Despite his wanderlust he knows and appreciates his ties to home. He has had a chance to miss and be missed. Because of this he also knows a thing or two about goodbyes. He knows the overwhelming uncertainty of leaving the comforts of home, the indefinite see-you-laters at the departure gates and yet he fearlessly goes into the unknown because he knows the feeling of return. And that the I’ve-missed-you-hug is the best type of hug in the whole world. He also knows that goodbyes are just prolonged see-you-laters and that ‘hello’ is only as far away as the nearest internet cafe.

Don’t hold onto this boy. Let this boy go and go with him. If you haven’t travelled, he will open your eyes to a world beyond the news and popular perception. He will open your dreams to possibility and reality. He will calm your nerves when you’re about to miss a flight or when your rental blows a flat, because he knows the journey is the adventure. He will make light of the unsavory noises you make when you – and you will – get food poisoning. He will make you laugh through the discomfort all while dabbing your forehead with a cold cloth and nursing you with bottled water. He will make you feel like you’re home.

When you see something beautiful he will hold your hand in silence, in awe the history of where his feet stand and the fact that you’re with him.

He will live in every moment with you because this is how he lives his life. He understands that happiness is no more than a string of moments that displace neutrality and he is determined to tie as many of these strings together as he can. He also understands your need to live for yourself and that you have a bucketlist of your own. Understand his. Understand that your goals may at some points differ but that independence is the cornerstone of a healthy relationship when it’s mutually respected. You may lose him for a bit but he will always come home bearing a new story and a souvenir he picked up because it reminded him of you, like it was made for you and because he missed you. You might be compelled to do the same. Make sure that independence is on your bucketlist and make sure it’s checked. Independence will keep your relationship fresh and exciting and when you’re together again it will forge a bond of unbreakable trust.

He’ll propose when you’ve breached your comfort-zone, whether it be a fear like skydiving or swimming with sharks or sitting next to the smelly person on an overcrowded bus. It won’t be with a diamond ring but with a token from a native culture or inspired by nature, like the penguin and the pebble.

You will get married somewhere unassumed, surrounded by a select few in a moment constructed to celebrate venturing into the unknown together again. Marry the boy who’s travelled and together you will make the whole world your home. Your honeymoon will not be forgotten to a buffet dinner and all-you-can-drink beach bars, but will be remembered in the triumphant photographs at the top of Kilimanjaro and memorialized in the rewarding ache of muscles at the end of a long days hike.

When you’re ready you will have children that have the names of the characters you met on your journeys, the foreign names of people who dug a special place in your heart if only for a few days. Perhaps you will live in another country and your children will learn of language and customs that open their minds from the very start, leaving no room for prejudice. He will introduce them to the life of Hemingway, the journey of Santiago, and empower them to live even bigger than both of you.

Marry a boy who travels and he’ll teach your children the beauty of a single stone, the history of the Incas and he will instill in them the bravery of possibility. He will explain to them that masking opportunity there is fear. He will teach them to concur it.

And when you’re old you’ll sit with your grandchildren pouring over your photo albums and chest of worldly treasures while they too insert themselves into your photographs, sparked by the beauty of the world and inspired by your life in it.

Find a boy who travels because you deserve a life of adventure and possibility. You deserve to live light and embrace simplicity. You deserve to look at life through the eyes of youth and with your arms wide open. Because this is where you will find joy. And better, you will find joy together. And if you can’t find him, travel. Go. Embrace it. Explore the world for yourself because dreams are the stuff reality is made from.

Source: http://wherearemyheels.com/2012/05/12/date-a-boy-whos-travelled/

The Great Vegetarians

These great vegetarians, such as Pythagoras, Plato, Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Nikola Tesla, Shopenhauer, Thoreau, Leonardo Da Vinci, Voltaire etc. knew there could be no spiritual advancement while attaining ones nourishment from cruelty and the exploitation of others. 


Albert Einstein:
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

Leonardo DaVinci:
"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men." DaVinci claimed that flesh eaters were using their bodies as "grave yards."

Charles Darwin:
"The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man."

Thomas Edison:
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."

George Bernard Shaw:
"We pray on Sundays that we may have light to guide our footsteps on the path we tread; We are sick of war we don't want to fight. And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead."

Percy Bysshe Shelley:
"Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth and, plunging his head into its vitals slake his thirst with the steaming blood."

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden, "Economy" (1854):
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Henry David Thoreau:
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Mark Twain:
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

Benjamin Franklin:
Flesh eating is "unprovoked murder." On the subject of vegetarianism, Franklin noted that one will achieve "greater progress, from the greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension."

Thomas A Edison, 1847-1931:
"The Doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease."

Francis of Assisi:
"Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission-to be of service to them wherever they require it."

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi:
"To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."

Abraham Lincoln:
"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."

Thomas Paine:
"Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty."

Henry Salt:
"The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone."

Albert Schweitzer:
"...the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life."

George Bernard Shaw:
"Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."

Leo Tolstoy:
"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."

Alice Walker:
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men."

President Abraham Lincoln:
I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

Pythagoras:
Animals share with us the privilege of having a soul.

Pythagoras:
The earth affords a lavish supply of richess of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass.

George Bernard Shaw:
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

George Bernard Shaw:
All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw:
Animals are my friends; I don't eat my friends.

John Robbins (p. 49 Diet for a New America):
Our understanding of what constitutes intelligence is utterly relative. If an aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, for example, all of Western civilization would probably flunk. We have a very convenient and self-serving way of defining intelligence. If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi:
"To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."

"I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian." ~ George Bernard Shaw

In addition to his writings on non-violence, Leo Tolstoy's advocacy of vegetarianism led to his friendship with Mohandas Gandhi. He wrote several essays about vegetarianism, but perhaps never more compellingly than when he said:
"flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act, which is contrary to moral feeling: killing." 

Nikola Tesla was a humanitarian who loved animals. He argued that animal slaughter was “wanton and cruel” and eventually became a vegetarian. 

Voltaire was an advocate of civil rights and freedom. He also believed in the virtues of vegetarianism. He once wrote that "men fed upon carnage, and drinking strong drinks, have all an impoisoned and arid blood which drives them mad in a hundred different ways." This sounds like an early precursor of the phrase "you are what you eat." 

Source: Dawning Golden Crystal Age

Some lame tactics...

      When you attend certain functions, meant to enrich your emotional maturity and heighten your spirituality, you get to question whether you’re there for compliance or for its sheer purpose to deem on your personality. 

     The topics are usually irrelevant and boring...  I'm not being diabolical…  So help me, god!

     A facilitator-- talking about abortion and their sect’s endorsement towards politicians who support their claims (for more votes-I’m sure!) on a teachers’ spiritual retreat?!

I have nothing against your argument, mister but please… there is a proper venue for such. Try the public plaza or your own domains … but not here… not today.

-thoughts during a professional spiritual retreat 

(May 23, 2013. morning session)

On Education, History, and Poetry

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

So take heed!