Noble Ways

Distress: When you get home, think of the things you enjoy doing and do more of them. If there are places you haven't seen in a while, take a walk here, have a drink there. Nowadays, I avoid drinking alcoholic beverages and reduced my amount of spirits by a whopping 70%. Instead of averaging twenty drinks per week (roughly three beers a day or, better yet, night), I drink less than one a day. 

Alcohol, in moderation, is perhaps the best preventive medicine to cardiovascular disease. It helps you relax, unwind, take the edge off. It induces drowsiness which facilitates falling asleep but maybe not so much staying so. It makes us social. It makes us a little less of the head, dumber if you will. It too can be the most evil substance, if abused, and in some instances, it can cause accidents at work or in the road, it impairs our ability to function properly, so best to leave it for times of leisure. 

Of course, it's not like alcoholism is something you happen to pick up on your way to work. It exhibits similarities to other conditions. The mind above all creates all of these ailments. If we deal with the mind first, the body has a fighting chance. It is known that people with multiple personality disorder tend to live out different characters in their lives and in some cases they suffer particular illnesses characteristic of the assumed personality. If a personality suffers from diabetes, it shows only when the disorder summons that particular personality. It'd be unfair to say that people chooses to be alcoholic any more than being diabetic. We often treat the disease, and forget the person. This is the conundrum that modern medicine is facing: do we profit from suffering or really find cures to afflictions? In my mind's eye, there's something amiss here. 

Eustress: Eustress is the good kind of stress, the type that not doing will probably mean more stress in the future. Eustress is stress that you must undergo. Take, for instance, exercise: no doubt it is a strenuous activity that many avoid in order to bypass the pain and suffering it entails. But not exercising, for instance, or sleeping too much or too little, or drinking too much, these are all easy habits to fall into. Not doing what you must can cause greater pain in the long run.  

Eustress is taking action in the right direction, it implies an effort that can be both mental and physical (you may need to go to the bank, do the laundry, go to the supermarket and get some groceries which means you have to move and get those chores underway. Other disciplines may exert a great deal of willpower initially, but once you form a habit of something, it belongs to you, it's part of you. The first weeks are crucial to stick to because you'll be making it a habit. Day by day, you'll grow stronger, but it'll require a great deal of commitment and effort. Then it'll become almost effortlessly; it's showing up and you'll know why, you rarely come out of a workout feeling miserable. You don't think people eat healthy to make themselves miserable; no, eating healthy comes with a dose of high self-esteem. Often that sense of one's worth translates into a more proactive and action-packed life, someone who eats right usually works out. Some may decide over one or the other to counter the effects of obesity, the result of a sedentary lifestyle.
And so, in our dealings with things of the utmost importance, a good deal of stress is to be expected. Knowing that not taking upon those essential tasks will mean greater misery in the not-so-distant future. Hell, you can feel the miserable aspect of inaction in very fabric of things around, how procrastination festers and poisons our energy, how a simple chore becomes so disproportionately magnified by our passivity.

Then there are those in the opposite side of the spectrum. Neurotics who never find solace and rest in their limitless endeavours; constant movement and noise can be just as bad. Again, that Middle Path, Buddhism speaks of, comes as godsend. 

Having the peace of mind of someone who takes care of business, it takes discipline to carry things through but also to know when there's a moment to reflect in silence, to gather our strength and revitalize ourselves. 

Midway: The Buddha is said to have found other things of just as much importance as that of the Middle Path. Having experienced the riches and pleasures of a kingdom in which he was a prince, but also deprivation and starvation typical of the highest order in spiritual quests, the Buddha concluded that happiness lied somewhere in between, he called it "the middle path" and it basically speaks of balance and moderation in things. Not too much and not too little, neither riches nor extreme poverty. Moderation, temperance, aplomb are qualities of character forged throughout a lifetime of experiences, if one is true to its nature in doing so, prudence is the name of the game. And then, from time to time, spice things up and be bolder than regularly, mix good deeds and vibes, and a worthy existence will manifest itself, surround you and merge into one. You can call upon the light you seek in your path, read the will of others in reverse, tie one thread of narrative, leave a rhetorical trace. You can enhance a moment, magnify it and it can be something that is in sync with your own nature. If you find yourself angry in many situations, you've looked forward to expressing that emotion all day long. You let them have it, if not a self-inflicted wound, hurting others never feels good. Not the ones we love, anyway. You ought to have a list of sacred cows, people whether these are friends or family, partners in crime or in love, our inner circle is taken care of. We don't let ego in here. We lock the doors, lick each other's wounds and see as senseless in-fighting. 

It really is about moderation this noble truth. It's also about balance. It's about enjoying things prudently. It's somewhere between starvation and gluttony. It's middle ground, safe ground.

Foreign Lands

We lay here and watch a movie, cook, eat ice cream, and my mind drifts towards more urgent matters. I need to go to court, fight the system to stay in this apartment. If it happens, try to hold on to it for a while longer. I think it shows consistency, my life has always been moving around from one place to the next, one relationship to another. All my life I lived like a nomad and loved like a madman. 

Anger has been a key player in the deterioration of these bonds. Other issues, too, played a role. But only anger paralyzed me, took me hostage, raided and looted the lands of decency, the boundaries of good relations; anger plays dirty and says hurtful things. It's not what people say, especially in a moment of anger. It's what they do and what they don't. 

What's meaningful in a relation is to give one another always the benefit of the doubt, peace of mind and space. Only this way can you truly aspire to become part of someone else's life, not their whole, not by a whole lot. In relation to one another, we all live in foreign islands, far away from one another. 

The world we see today emanated out of the past that we forged, stone on top of another stone, brick by brick. There's sorrow and sweat and tears and all distill their acidic properties. Laughter, serenity, quietude, aloofness, you need to learn to love spending time alone if you want to love someone else. We are only alive this moment, never bother with rigid rules, headstrong but flexible, willing to bow down and admit one's mistakes. 

Don't let ego get in the way. You're the man and as such, you're supposed to be the one who fights for something, anything, that you believe. Ambivalence is not a manly stance; neutrality, indifference, when it comes to nurture, do not reflect your core values. There will always be forces testing our resolve, challenging our minds, and women often tap into this dark force as if to see we, as men, can cope with what life often has in store for us. The challenge women represent is the intrinsically the challenge by and large life is full of. It is as if our women wanted to know if we are willing and ready to face the dark, if we have enough light to brighten the obscure passages that await us in the alleys of our destiny, in the turns of fate, in the face of adversity. We must know that women will never inflict nearly as much chaos and pain as life in this world of ours is capable of. We should see our women's nagging and complaints, her lack of empathy at times, her virulent moods and unsteadiness, her bitchiness, as a testing ground for our resolve. We can withstand the feminine blows because we were meant to overcome bigger things. 

But before we do, we must be willing to test our resolve in relatively smaller issues. When we're children, our first day of school, the first love, all these wondrous emotions seem at times too overwhelming, but in retrospect nothing that would have doomed our spirit in those days is able to bring us down nowadays. Perhaps that's the reason why, when it comes to indecisive behavior, self-doubt and timidity, as men we tend to euphemistically belittle one another with adjectives that stem off feminine prerogatives. We call each other "sissies", or tell one another "don't be a pussy", or "little girl", especially as young boys and, in many instances, as men.

We have grown older, we know we can manage, and in the same way, our troubles now are nothing more than challenges that, once conquered, will be part of our circle of influence, and we can adapt and manage, and move on to bigger things.