Mind Platter

by Najwa Zebian

  Dreams Unfinished

  The nature of life makes it inevitable for people's paths and journeys to cross. So, unless you're willing to be the source of disappointment for someone, don't rush to start a plan and then leave it for time to complete. It will become a burden more than a goal. Yes, time helps but only if you use it. Waiting and passing time is a waste. Instead of starting, waiting, and then completing, you should wait for the right time, then start and complete. Don't open a door you know you can't close, and don't open a door without walking through it. Don't let the fear of the unknown stop you from taking a step towards it. If you're not up for the challenges that may come your way in reaching that goal of yours, then simply don't pursue it. If you're not willing to put forward whatever it takes to reach your goal, then don't aim for it. I am not saying that ends justify means. All I'm saying is, if you don't have the willpower to take the steps that you need to reach that end, don't put your means to use and don't waste your time and others'. If you ignite a fire that you're not willing to contain, the amount of harm it can cause can't be measured, and most times it can't be reversed.

  No One’s Watching

  Would you do all of the things that you normally do if you knew that no one was watching? When was the last time you did something good, without anyone knowing about it, and felt like you’d accomplished something? We tend to wait for people to praise us for the things that we do so we can feel that there was a value for what we did. We add meaning to what we do through the way that we know people will perceive it, and this is relative. It is relative to who we are trying to impress, at which time, and for what purpose. It is an innate drive that makes us want to be perceived in the most positive way by those who appeal most to us, or those who have the power to have an impact in our lives. It is not wrong to want to be perceived in a good way. We all want to be good people. But, this becomes problematic when that praise that we receive becomes the purpose of what we do. Instead of wanting to do good things because of the goodness in our hearts, we want to do good things because we want to impress others, to seem better than others, or even to compete with others. When we have sincere intentions, nothing can stand in the way of us feeling happy and content with what we do. The beautiful part is that the rays of a shining light will eventually penetrate through the darkest of nights, and people will see how truly good you are without you going out of your way to prove it. Some of the most beautiful plants have their beginnings unnoticed under rocks, but that only makes them stronger. If the goal of the sun was to impress us with its light, it would rise when we wake up and set after we sleep.

  An Enigmatic Feeling

  Once you feel any kind of feeling once, it lives forever somewhere in your heart. It can come and go and become stronger or weaker. Whether it be a feeling of love, hatred, dislike, contentment, disappointment, gratefulness, anger, etc., one truth holds: the more you contain a feeling, the more power it has within you. This is where you have a choice; you either master that feeling or make it become your master. If you master it, your response will most likely be logical, and your actions will be planned. If you let it master you, you may end up doing spontaneous things that may seem to be heart-driven. We sometimes have feelings that are so powerful that they can stop us from saying what's right or encourage us to say what's wrong. People choose to deal with their feelings in different ways: talking, art, music, writing, etc. A very common way that we think we can express our feelings is talking. What we miss though, is that once a word is said, it dies. That's it; it's out of your control now. Whether it be good or bad, once verbalized, part of your feeling becomes placed in the hands of others. For those with a conscious mind, expressing feelings is a red line because it grants others power into our hearts. Because of that, how often do we hold back from saying the way we really feel to those around us? At these points, we should reflect on the reason for holding back. Is it because of the uncertainty attached to those feelings, or is it just that we refuse to sentence our feelings to words that will not do these feelings any justice?

  Be the Master

  Are you brave enough to be honest with yourself? Are you brave enough to break that wall between your heart and your mind? Your reason and your logic? Your strengths and your weaknesses? Your confidence and your uncertainty? Your beliefs and the way you act upon them? Are you brave enough to admit to yourself that all of those seemingly contradictory parts of you are actually connected? And that their existence depends on you? One does not exist without the other. No one is perfect; we all have a problem striking a balance between these forces within us. Some of us deal with them by surrendering to one over the other. Some of us blame others for strengthening the negatives and weakening the positives within us. Some of us blame ourselves for that. People deal differently with the interaction of these pulling forces within them. At the end of the day, if we are unable to realize that we have control over our feelings and thoughts, and not the opposite, we cannot master them. Mastery gives us confidence, and confidence gives us motivation to move on to pursue our dreams. When you are aware of your strengths and can admit to yourself that you have them because of the hard work that you've done, you can put them to good use. When you are aware of your weaknesses and can admit that you cannot be perfect, you can work on mastering them by avoiding situations in which they are in jeopardy of intervening. Be the master of your thoughts and your feelings and notice the ease with which you can make your decisions, big or small, knowing that you are the one in control of yourself. Don't linger in uncertainty somewhere in the middle.

  Know Yourself

  Have that wise instinct of knowing how you would react in certain situations before they happen so that you can be well-prepared to react wisely. Notice patterns in your behavior, and the way you react in unexpected situations, so that you may prepare yourself to react better the next time. Once you master yourself, impossible will no longer stand in the way of your dreams.

  Don’t Make Me Wait

  I breathe honesty, and although I love the feeling of anticipating things, I am too impatient to wait for the truth to be said. The truth can be seen, but it is not believed until it is openly said. I am impatient to wait for the truth because I am scared of losing it before I hear it. How can you be scared of losing something that you don't have? When you can see the truth with your heart, you feel that you already have it. Some moments are made for certain words to be said. We anticipate those moments and build hopes on them. Once we lose those moments, the meaning attached to the words is lost. The meaning attached to what we thought our hearts saw is lost. This is how we lose what we don't have. We believe the truth before hearing it, and we declare ownership over it before we are guaranteed it. Once the moment of truth passes, the readiness within us to hear the truth is lost. The readiness in our hearts and minds to speak back is lost. Now we have an ending in the middle of a story. Before you let a perfect moment pass you by, think whether it is worth your regret afterwards for not using it wisely.

  The Nature of Life

  Imagine sitting outside in the darkness and silence of a starry night, allowing the soft heavenly breeze of the night to peacefully awaken every cell inside of you. Imagine closing your eyes and just thinking. Imagine thinking and reflecting on where you really are in your life, the purpose of what you are doing, what you want to change, keep, or just stop. Imagine coming to a resolution, changing your intentions, looking at things from a new perspective. It really does make a difference to do that. Now back to reality. In the rush of life, we easily get preoccupied with and fixated on the ideal of where we, as individuals void of anyone or anything else, want to be. That becomes our priority. Everything and everyone else is blurred out and becomes a waste of time, as if we don't have duties and commitments towards anyone but ourselves. How do we differentiate between what is and what is not a waste of time? It is relative. The definition of time itself changes from one person to the next. If you're an artist, time spent not painting may seem like a waste of tim
e. If you're a writer, time spent not writing or wandering off into imagination may seem like a waste of time. If you're a mother, time spent away from your kids may seem like a waste of time, or the other way around. The problem is that we get so caught up in life, so caught up in moving towards that ideal that we had planned originally but forgot about, that we can lose track of what really is worth our time and what is not. Along this track, we may hurt those who have no fault in the way that we defined our time. We may even never realize it. If we don't reflect, we may lose those who are precious, only to realize their significance after they're gone, when it's too late. So, next time you perceive spending time with your family as a waste of time, think twice. Next time you perceive sitting alone and allowing your thoughts to wander through the walks of life, think twice. Next time you think that those who love you will always be understanding and will bear the countless hours you spend on others, think twice.

  Blurry Lines

  Don't confuse someone's niceness with a hidden agenda, and don't confuse someone's meanness with a deficiency in yourself. We were born with an innate love for goodness and seeing happiness around us. As we grow older, we learn that the more we make the happiness we are willing to offer hard to get, the more satisfied we will be. In my opinion, being sincere regardless of the consequences, is a billion times better than pretending to be someone you're not, regardless of the rewards. Don't take advantage of your abilities for the sake of achieving power. Don't confuse power with control. Don't confuse what you want with what you need. Don't let your inner voices alter the reality of what you see. Be confident, logical, and reasonable. Don't ever deny that you need to change the way you look at things before you change the way things are. In a desert, you can see an illusion of water partly because of your thirst, but that doesn't mean that it exists

  New Chances

  I don't believe in putting up walls built by those who hurt you, in the face of those who you don't even know yet. How can you expect someone to break down a wall they never built? Despite the seemingly painful importance of having a positive outlook towards new people, tainted by the hardships that others have forced you to go through, you have to always be open to the idea that people are not all the same. People can change for the better. If it weren't for hope, would we have the capacity to live? We all meet people who belittle us, but we often forget that it is not because we are not worthy of their respect but because part of them does not allow them to accept seeing goodness in others. When belittled for no reason, be confident that it is because you've done something right that others cannot allow themselves to admit to. They need help, not you. When you meet new people, you need to be able to ignore all the nagging whispers of your heart and mind that remind you of all of those who have hurt, used, and disappointed you. If you let those thoughts get to you, misleading you into expecting the worst in people, your reaction to them may make them think that you are belittling them. Does that make you think of all the people you thought had bad intentions towards you, but who really had only been hurt by someone before, who thus expected the worst in you, and who mistreated you based on that?

  Silver Lining

  Have you ever been told not to show others your happiness or the good things that have come your way because they might envy you? Don't worry about those who cannot be happy for you, who cannot see the beauty within you. Beauty from within allows you to see goodness in others. It makes you see beauty in the simplest of things, to be content and to appreciate what you have before you ask for more, to value the moment you live in, and to hope for others in the same way that you hope for yourself. It allows you to forgive and forget at the same time that you learn. It allows you to be positive, to be optimistic, to see that silver lining even before you see the cloud. Everyone has this beauty, but it exists along with other characteristics, which may be in an imbalance at times: envy, hatred, pessimism, ungratefulness, discontent, jealousy, etc. Unfortunately, those characteristics will make others attribute your success and happiness to the things that you have, to the superficial things in your life, instead of looking and actually seeing the real you. People have a difficulty admitting that you are actually successful because of your hard work or because of your determination. They have a hard time admitting that you actually deserve the happiness that you have, so they are unable to be happy for you. You sometimes give those people a license to affect your feelings, and they use it against you, maybe not intentionally, but they do use it against you one way or another. You think that someone being rude, disappointing, or just plain weird around you is doing so because of something that you've done wrong. That right there is the beauty within you refusing to see that others may actually be responding to those negative characteristics within them. Hold on to that beauty within you and let it prevail over other characteristics because that is what keeps you moving forward while others are busy trying to figure out the things that make you happy

  The Quest for Reasons

  The answers to some questions in life lie in the absence of an answer. The reasons that we seek, the silver linings that we desperately want to see, the hidden messages that we try to figure out, may simply not exist. Or they may, but only if we change the angle from which we look at them. We rush from one stop to another in life, searching for reason, for meaning, for purpose, not realizing that there are certain stops where we must wait if we arrive before our time. We often rush and wait. Although we learn many lessons while waiting, because we have that time to think and reflect, we miss the beauty of the simple things along the way. We miss other opportunities that may have been better than the place where we stopped. We often question why the things that we didn't want to happen, happen, or why the things that we wanted to happen, have not happened yet. We fail to be thankful for, or appreciative of, the good things that we did not ask for but which happened anyway. We fail to be thankful for the bad things that we did not ask to be protected against, but which did not happen. Our nature is to think more about yesterday and tomorrow than today. We don't realize that today was yesterday's tomorrow and tomorrow's yesterday. We waste our time when we look too far back or too far forward and miss living yesterday's dream today. Then we wonder why our dreams do not come true.

  A Wish Come True

  Have you ever wished for something so badly, and when you got it, you had doubts about how much you wanted it? Have you thought about something constantly for a long period of time, swung hopelessly between the victorious triumph of achieving it and the desperate misery of being disappointed, while imagining all the things that would happen to your life if that wish were to come true? Why is it that we really start evaluating how much we need something the second we get it? Is it because we think we are not worth it? Is it because we have a change of heart? Is it because it comes a bit too late? Is it because our hope for it runs away, our desperate need for it fades, our wasted time put towards it exceeds the limit that we can bear? Is it because the feeling of gratification that we get from accomplishing what we want, regardless of what it is, is greater than what we want? Is it because the feeling of winning something over takes over the value of the thing itself? Everybody wants to be a winner, and that is not a problem, but what is it that you want to win? Is it just the feeling of winning? Everybody wants to feel that he or she is right, worth a wish coming true, worth the feeling of accomplishment. Once we learn to look deep into our hearts and deep into our minds, we will learn to want that which we appreciate before we have it. Why? Because our well-being is in need of it. If you cannot appreciate what you don't have before you have it, you will not appreciate it after you have it. Period. We thrive on the idea of being able to change our surroundings to suit our needs, and we promise ourselves to change so many things once we finally get that one wish. But what we ignore is the fact that our hearts and minds are in need of constant care so that they do not feel the need to change others for them to be content. I will not tell you to be careful before wishing for something and allowing yourself to di
ve into its beautiful sky of imagination. I will tell you to be careful to treat yourself well, and to be responsive to the needs of your heart and mind, so that you may be content with what you have and so that, if you wish for something, you already know its value because your heart and mind truly do need it.

  Life, Simplified

  Don't ever force yourself to live up to anyone's standards. Make your own standards based on your abilities, based on your potential, and based on your vision for your future. Take time to figure out what the big picture in your life is, what your end goal is. This is personal to you. The conviction in your heart of this vision will make it shadow you wherever you go. It will guide your every step, decision, and plan. No one is more knowledgeable of the real you more than you are knowledgeable of yourself. So, why let others dictate what works and does not work for you? Do not settle for the label average or think that you are no different than those around you. Be the phenomenal person that you know you can be. Define phenomenal yourself. Don't compare yourself to anyone else's phenomenal. At all. You don't live in people's hearts to know who they really are. Don't think that you deserve any less than what you have or that you don't deserve any better. Don't seek the acceptance of people who you think are a little better than you just because you want to feel that someone better than you accepted you into their life. What a miserable feeling that would be, to need someone's acceptance to accept yourself. Have your own big dreams and pursue them because you know you can. No one is stopping you from that except yourself. Don't live your whole life comparing yourself to people you think are better than you, trying to live up to them. Live your life working to make who you are today better than who you were yesterday and dreaming that who you will be tomorrow is better than who you are today. Do not give yourself any other option than becoming better. Don't be anything other than positive. Celebrate your little successes and improvements. Imagine how truly happy you will be.