How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

" It is the road to God  that matters now, the ragged road, the wood...W ould   that first world, bared now to the word  God,  wade  with you, through wood, into the weald and weather   of the stars?" The Road Home - Gillian Allnutt Tall, sweeping trees line the sidewalk, leaving me to duck under their branches laden with red and yellow and brown Autumn leaves as I make my way down the street. It's a quiet, sunny afternoon and a slight breeze is in the air. For once, I am whole and unbroken. For once, everything around me is startlingly clear, and detailed, and I can see each groove carved in the aged tree trunk beside me and the patterned veins in the dead leaves that lie at my feet and I can hear the silence of this street and the sound of my blood pounding through my ears and the buildings have never seemed so square and the cars so glaringly bright with the sunlight bouncing off their roofs and the people never so solid. The world around m...

I was thinking about the effects of globalization thanks to technology, and what it has managed to do to our world. There's a lot of positive, of course. Distances have been shortened, hell, thanks to video-calling, they're virtually non-existent, we're more aware of what goes on outside our own domain in the wider world, and information of all kinds is readily available for free. You would think that all this socializing and  online sharing would make our world more united, but apparently not. I know this planet has always been teetering on the edge of doom, barely hanging on by a thread and all that, but just take a look around you and you find yourself wondering if things have ever been worse. The downside to globalization is impossible to ignore. It's so easy to commit fraud online, and cheat people out of their money, to hate on others and be downright rude to them on public forums only because their opinion is different from yours, accessing 'illicit sexual...

The sun is relentless on this side of the world. I  wake up to blinding sunlight and crows cawing and when I check the time, it's only 7am. There isn't much to do here, say the more fortunate of my friends, home for the holidays, visiting from Canada or Australia or America, conveniently forgetting where they were born, where they started out from. Yes, I admit there isn't much to do in our city. We go to school, or we go to university, maybe get a job if we're lucky. We eat. We sleep. We blame the government for the target killings, the sectarian violence, our houses, our selves getting robbed, the power outages, the cars that stubbornly drive the wrong way on a one-way street, and the cricket matches we lose to India. We parade our faith on the streets when its threatened two continents away, and we will fight to the death to prove a point. We will bathe our city in blood to show our enemies what we can do, and we will bathe it in green for the same reason....

So I was going through my old journals and I remembered this. I wrote this ages ago. It seemed incomplete at the time, and I thought I'd get back to it later. I never did, and now I kinda like it this way. all I associate with you Formula 1 pit stops and tattered Marvel comics stained with last night's anchovy pizza the rising and setting of the sun every day  flowing and ebbing around you and the sound of your voice Malaysian supermodels and Eminem rapping about Haylie to this indifferent world. Waking up alone and wondering if it'll ever be different someday

"Take any emotion-love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions-if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them-you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.  But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.'  I know you think this is just about dying," he said, "but it's like I keep telling you. When you learn how to die, you learn how to live." -Tuesdays With Morrie

It's so easy to get hurt on this planet. Human beings are imperfect, and they're rarely able to get from each other what they truly want. Relationships are messy. No matter how close two people might be, in reality I feel they're still alone, because it's impossible to truly stand in the other person's shoes and actually know what they're thinking and what they expect from life, what they expect from you...and isn't that how people get hurt? Because of this unbridgeable communication gap that can never really be overcome? What are the chances of having someone in your life who can give you exactly what you want? If you have someone like that, I'd say you're pretty darn lucky. I sometimes wonder why things seems to work out so easily for some people-they don't even have to try-while for others, no matter how much they give, it's never enough. But then I think everyone must have their fair share of problems in life, we probably just don't ...

What does it mean to grow up? I'm 22 years old, and yes, I have matured in many ways over the past couple of years but I still don't behave like an adult, let alone feel like one. These years in NED have flown by so quickly...maybe this is what it means when people say life is short and slips by so quietly you don't even notice it's gone until the end. By the time our minds catch up with all the physical growth our bodies are doing, it is late enough and we're well into our thirties, finally coming to grip with the cold hard reality of adulthood. We spend the rest of our lives footing bills and working hard to make ends meet, preparing our kids to do the same mindless, inane tasks later on in their lives. What is this? This can't be what humans were created for. It's just depressing. And what's worse is that I REALIZE all this, or at least, I do most days, but I don't DO anything about it. I'll be 23 next year and seven years later, my twentie...