Key To My Life

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist affiliated with the University of Indiana. At the age of 37, one morning, she woke up with a throbbing headache due to an exploded blood vessel in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she realized that she is having a stroke attack, she found herself thinking "‘But I’m a very busy woman! I don’t have time for a stroke!’"  She took  the opportunity to observe and study the brain circuits during her own stroke while keeping herself busy calling for help. In the 4 hours that followed, she witnessed her different brain faculties shutting down one by one but became aware of certain other changes in her self. She desribes the feeling of knowing what a number looked like in her mind, although when she reached up to the phone for help, she could not identify the numbers on the keypad.  She remembered knowing what to say in her mind when she was  finally able to cont...

"My purpose here is to deeply enjoy my life and fulfill my potential by developing and deriving pleasure from my unique talents."

Its been years of discovering a lot of new things. A lot of those deep solemn moments of the past casting its light on the today. As I listen to these songs with a content heart, I recollect the hopes and dreams they carried, while I was listening to these songs far away long back in time. Its funny how you sometimes have a nice time going back to the past and some other times have a kickass time thinking of future , with hopes about future. Its almost like how people appreciate the natural beauty by comparing it to a painting and a painting is well appreciated by exclaiming how real it seems. We seem to always find the Other as the ideal. Most of those dreams from the past have come true. Guess it is the passion in which I dreamt. I remember the yearning, the optimism, the hope to be with people I love, wanting to travel and prove myself to myself. I remember how difficult I found it to put the excitement of those dreams away before going off to sleep. I realize that i...

The most interesting book I have ever read till date. The book is a beautiful journey of understanding how life might have originated and how life is the way we know it. You get to read and know about a variety of things like social behavior, game theory, psychology and of course biology, with a touch of philosophy if you will. It explains the chemistry and race between prey and predator, male and female, sexual selection, altruistic behavior among individuals and groups, replicators for cultural transmission as in fashion, music and other evolving trends. Considering the entire community of social insects as a single organism with the sterile workers as the support cells and the queen as the reproductive cells- that was a beautiful way of explaining the theory of altruism. The writing style is very elegant, interesting, witty just here and there. I would love him as my teacher because of the way in which he builds up my understanding from nothingness to the level of being able...

Every relationship has a reacher and a settler. Says Ted Mosby in "How I met your Mother". Interesting theory. Marshall and Lily start fighting about who among them is the settler and who, the reacher. Interestingly, both of them want to be the settler. At first, it looked understandable, natural. But on a deeper level of thought, I was deep in dilemma. Which one of them am I? Which one of them do I want to be? The reacher or the settler? You would want to be the settler which would mean you are more desirable than your spouse . On the other hand, you should not like to be the loser who had to settle for less. The very fact that someone decided to settle for less removes the superiority/desirability from that person and (s)he cannot be the settler anymore. Similarly, the very fact that the reacher had it in him to reach for his dreams makes him desirable.. The minute you decide that you are a settler, you are reduced to a less desirable person who may not have much ...

"The quality of your life can be measured by the number of things you do because you want to as opposed to the number of things you do because you have to."

As we zoom out into the universe, there unfolds a picture of planetary bodies revolving around a centre in fixed distant orbits. The picture is the same when we zoom in to see the structure of an atom. The electrons revolving around the nucleus in orbits. If I make a sketch of me and my relationships, I get a similar picture. I am the nucleus. The people in my life are the electrons in the different orbits. Every once in a while these electrons can shift orbits and be closer or farther away from me. The people closest to me are the ones in the first orbit. I have a comfort zone with them. The bond is strongest here and it is mutual. And I know they'll stand by me always. They do not jump out with their excess energy to go out of my system. If at all such a thing happens, that is something which will change the very constitution of my existence. The valence electrons could jump out any time. They may be the very interesting category, of people due to their high and unsta...