Time isn't demanding, although we all act as if the clock rules our existence. Time is meant to unfold according to your needs and wants. It will start to do that only if you give up the opposite belief-that time is in charge. ( Deepak Chopra)

There is no passion to be found playing small- in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. ( Nelson Mandela)

All of us have access to a higher form of intelligence, one that can allow us to see more of the world, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy to any circumstance.This intelligence is cultivated by deeply immersing ourselves in a field of study and staying true to our inclination, no matter how unconventional our approach might seem to others. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel for the complicated components of our field. When we fuse this intuitive feel with rational process, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself. We then come to have powers that approximate the instinctive force and speed of animals, but with the added reach that our human consciousness brings us. This power iswhat our brains were designed to attain, and we will be naturally led to this type of intelligence if we follow our inclinations to their ultimate ends.  

(Robert Greene)

Living in constant fear can kill you

I know many wealthy men who constantly live in fear of losing their profits. Even their blood pressure seems to rise and fall with the rise and fall of shares in the stock market. They fear taxes; they fear raids; they fear falling interest rates. It is not just money that makes a man rich. He who gives is richer than he who hoards his wealth, for the hoarder is under psychological pressure- constantly worried about losing what he has. Such a man is impoverished-regardless of how much he has.

When you give, you are alive. You experience an overflowing sense of abundance and joy.

( By J P Vaswani)

Sad Music evokes positive emotions

People like listening to sad music because it actually evokes positive emotions, according to a new study. Japanese researchers asked 44 volunteers, including both musicians and non-specialists, to listen to two pieces of sad music and one piece of happy music.

Each participant was required to use a set of keywords to rate both their perception of the music and their own emotional state. 

The sad pieces of music included Glinka's " La Separation" in F minor and Blumenfeld's Etude "Sur Mer" in G minor. The happy music piece was Granados's Allegro de Concierto in G major. To control for the "happy" effect of major key, they also played the minor-key pieces in major key, and vice versa.

The researchers said that sad music evoked contradictory emotions as participants felt sad music to be more tragic, less romantic, and less blithe than they felt.

( Source Times of India)

Along the way, I became a happier person.

Vahishta Mistry, a 29-year old marketing professional, had a car, a house, a well paying job and a close circle of friends. Yet, last month, he did something most of us have only dreamed of doing. He upped and left. After selling his possessions, he set out to explore the world. He talks about the the places he visits and the dreams he fulfills.

As I type out these words out, I feel as if I am at the centre of a storm; around me swirl a million loose ends that need to be tied up before I put my life into long term storage, and become a nomad for the next two years. In order to properly understand my story, you need to meet me as I was about a year ago.

Everything about my life could have been summed up in a terse biography much like the ones I read in my marketing job. I was in the words of research analysts everywhere, 29 years old, an SEC A+ urban male. I was single,but not unattached.

I owned my own house, albeit in Navi Mumbai (I counted this as a positive) and I commuted by my small car to work everyday.

I had a mortgage, credit card payments and two cats that made demands on my time, apart from a hectice social life.

Today, the cats are still around, but everything else is gone.

Change crept into my life when I first started hosting couch surfers. David Simon was a young Hungarian ex-banker with a crazy smile and a crazier story. He'd walked from Hungary to Dubai, and then, because he couldn't walk through Afghanistan and Pakistan because of a pesaky war, he was forced to fly to Mumbai. He's now somewhere between China and Japan, still walking.

Stephen ( I never learnt his surname) was an MIT professor. His too, was an interesting story- he is an expert on very large databases, and is routinely called to various companies and technical institutes, to lecture. By intelligently planning his routes ( he is a database nerd, after all) he has visited almost every historically, culturally and otherwise significant place on earth.

I began to see the start contrast between our lives. Mine was empty. I had tried to fill it with a house, car, a 42" television and other gadgets. All my pursuits were driven by an aspiration to fit in. I wasn't discovering anything. Nothing was new. I realized that I wanted, more than anything, to go out and see what was beyond the next block of buildings. I couldn't be satisfied with sitting at a desk any more. Within six months, I sold my house, quit my job and bought some tools- a Canon 60D camera, some lenses and a MacBook Pro. I also bought a back-pack and flight tickets. Along the way, I became a happier person.

Here's what I plan to do over the next 24 months. I will spend some days in England,from where I will head to New York. I will visit San Francisco, camping at national parks along the way. Then I will make my way to Mexico and the famed Copper Canyon Railroad, via Los Angeles. I will travel along the west coast of South America, from Colombia to Argentina and end the year in Brazil in time for the 2014 football world cup. I will camp, hunt and fish in the Rockies and Andes, visit the salt flats of the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia and see the Milky Way rising above my tent in the deserts of Utah.

So basically, my initial budget is 10 lakh. I have spent Rs 4.83 lakh buying flight tickets ( Mumbai to Newark, 10-day stop over in the UK was Rs 48,000; LA to Mexico was Rs 20,000; Brazil to Mumbai was Rs 1 lakh), a Canon 60D Camera, a Macbook Pro and back pack and camping gear Rs 80,000). To save money, i will couchsurf, not drink alcohol, eat cheap, camp and travel by bus when possible.

(Source:- Mumbai Mirror- By Vahishta Mistry)

Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it's the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.

(Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe)