Unsung

I have a great opportunity to help my ten year old autistic son, who speaks little but understands a lot more, when asked for something or a command like bringing the remote or where is the iPod? If he had it, he´d jump and go look for it. He listens to us and rarely misbehaves whether I´m around or not; he is centered, and it is no magic. It's that he has a very clever dad that challenges him every step of the way, we get along fine and he respects me. 

You can only respect the team that can beat you. No, there's never a need to hit your child but any parent can lose his or her head and be louder, more vulgar. Just rude.  Treat your children with integrity and respect but they got to follow your every command. Not like a robot that learns a new program, implementing it without a period of assimilation. Instead of an austere tone, making the bed can be fun; this way, the child doesn't associate discipline with a negative experience. We want to lead by example, and if we are to make civil individuals, we ought to civilize our ways. Thing is, we can and should and must be better than our parents. For some, that's a difficult task coming from great parents, in which case just aspiring to be even close should be plenty. For others, it's easier, since the bar is so low to start off with that you can only go up. Of course, that's not to minimize my parents' experience, but had they chosen a more functional approach than that of an erratic couple settling long enough to have another baby and then another, and another, totaling three. That's just not right, but there are worse cases. My parents weren't bad people; they just made the wrong choices. It's bad enough that mom had to stay back home with the responsibility of three kids, and that he would send money to his mother, not his wife, and that we all lived under his mom's roof. She made sure that's what that was. Living under her roof. 
Mom had to escape, of course. If she wanted a place of her own and eventually she did get that and brought me and my sisters together. I pushed for that agenda. For a long while before that ship took off, I wandered through my grandparents' home, and there was a lot of anger and resentment as to the state of affairs: mom and dad gone their separate ways, and we were living it at my grandma's house. It wasn't just us but some other ten cousins who would've driven the sanest person on earth insane.

I thought that the best thing for us was to stay a family and remain so. Childhood may be remembered as a period of struggle, but the experience of it wasn't as bad. The same cannot be said of adolescence. It is inexplicably uneventful in most cases, but when a new life in a foreign land opened up for me, I saw it as the beginning of a lifelong adventure. We weren't all tragic teenagers. I remember having a blast in high school, despite the fact I was among the poorest.
The advent of adolescence and the raging hormones that morph your boyish frame into that of a elongated teenager was uneventful. We were always home. I remember having a girlfriend whom I kissed shyly on the lips once.
Memory is not a reliable source, in essence everything is fiction. Stories we tell ourselves as we go along in order to better navigate ourselves through the sobering bewilderment of consciousness. Life, it's just what happens in our heads, or is it not? 

Our children respond to how we feel and if we're anxious or frustrated, expecting little out of them as our best resources are invested elsewhere, they may take advantage of that weakness in your character. Children know how to bargain for attention and oftentimes we can see ourselves in them, if we play close attention. Not just my autistic son responds to me favorably; so does my three year old. And they both behave much better when I'm around. It is not austerity; or harsh discipline. It's quite the opposite: a relaxed mind and a kind and curious attitude towards them. Their world, especially that of an autistic child, is mesmerizing. It exposes biases you never thought you had. How dare you feel sad at such a prognosis? Little did we know that it would change us in ways I am still marveling at. It goes to show the futility of language in most cases. The least, the better; and we can be both doing our thing feet away from each other than we are each in our very own world and sometimes I come down and check up on him. Or he comes, and shares what he is drawing. Isn't that something? And then you make up plans of moving to an even colder state to make this reunion even stronger and be closer to his brother. So that I can watch them play. That would be more than just a dream come true.
The best of us remains unsung. Like all the conversations we did not have that taught me a great lesson in silence, the treasure of quietude, a threshold you push to stillness. Anxiety melts in the absence of thought, absorbed deep into a mindful state; nothing hurts like being conscious of pain. It's a state of mind you get to way of meditation but also when the mind isn't too fixed on something or someone, when you truly lay back. In those moments, when you're least aware of it, you become intensely alive. And the realization may spoil it to an extent, but it is a sign that we can see ourselves being the ones we are all the time and realize that there is in each one of us (or should be anyway) an observer, often objective and wise. And that the world would change if only we could summon that better version of ourselves at times. Here's a tip: relay the reactive mind.
If we were all to adopt this simple step: Inhale deep and hold your breath for a few seconds, then slowly exhale. If everyone were to follow this simple step before taking any major decision, the world would change overnight.

Mind yours

It is how you treat those under your rule that tell real character. And the best way to treat them is by not treating them as underneath you. We deal with others the way in which we were dealt with. We may have forgotten the helplessness of childhood, the madness of adolescence: being under someone else's roof other than your parents, close family members with kids and needs of their own, in a different language, far removed from the place you called home. In time, you find that you will always be a stranger... to those you left behind and to the ones you've come assimilate. 

Selective acts of kindness will not leave you depleted. But the gesture won't go far, and it often goes unappreciated. To quiet your conscience, when hearing the shouting and turmoil desperate times call, do not answer your door, retrieve to that inner place where you're always a welcome guess. To come in your hour of need, or to go on unnoticed, unmoved, numb to all. Self-improvement has a dark side: it connotes the void we all carry within, it meddles, carved into our state of affairs like a fresh wound, a dizzy echo of a distant shock you feel like waves breaking against your body long after you left the ocean behind. A nagging entity, it stings like a mosquito bite. The mind, it reminisces over absurdities, the sense-making entity rushes in to pick up the pieces. In essence, when we look for help, we ignore the fact that the help we seek really lies within our reach and that a good therapist or voodoo man or witch or physician will not fix your mess. No roots, unless they spring from our core, will heal us now, no meds will cast th the illness away. any formative willing guide. Sleep will prove restorative, take advantage of it on a rainy day, take a nap, meditate to a higher state of being, cleanse the hurt with quietude and leisure. You can literally breath yourself back to sanity.

Self-improvement implies that we aren't enough somehow, that change is not only the order of the day but that it is a life commitment... basically, improving ourselves puts us face to face with the realization that something or someone in our life is lacking. And so, we go on searching for it. That someone/something is often revealed in the way we deal with ourselves. 
What is a void, if not the opportunity to fulfill that desire by denying yourself, self-reliance is the ability to withstand the passage of time without external stimuli? To grant the mind what it wants is to deny it; to be able to do without anything in our lives except the very essential, to not depend on any external substance or influence. Therefore, cutting off the proverbial umbilical cord to a meek dependency, or anything that seems either superfluous, unnecessary or simply ostentatious. It is how a character is built. 

It may be in the form of adventure, a love affair, a meeting of minds, taking on a path long forgotten or simply an unfulfilled task.  

It is harder to exercise compassion, even more, so temperance if you don't flex your muscle. Higher levels of testosterone will make us chase after all the things we fancy, or find worthy; in Tibet monks, acts of kindness. 
These are the qualities that come in short supply; in others, a lack of sorts is immediately recognized. Chairs should come with such warnings: Do not seat. Or sit a lot less and have a good reason for it: are you sitting after a long day of walking around? Are you writing while sitting? 
Meditating while you're sitting? And if so, maybe now it's a good time to, try closing your eyes, imagining your eyelids as heavy bricks that you can hardly lift. Focus on your breath as it enters and exits your body, the way it is held in, and exhale. Become your breath, as it travels within, imagine that it cleanses all inside, and exhale ever so slowly the waste. 
Pay attention to your cardiac rhythm as you slowly, deeply, gently breath in. Hold your breath in until discomfort sets in (everyone has their own limits: don't pass out holding your breath, hold it until it is comfortably to do so). Don't worry, we all have a built-in mechanism that prevents us from harming ourselves. Nature did not leave survival up to a meekly rational mechanism: you don't have to remember to breath; no one teaches an infant to reach out and suck on. You don't consciously choose to regulate your cardiac rhythm... but you can and should, perhaps as much as a must exercise, or even as essential as sleep... meditate. And I don't say that lightly.
Meditation, if done right, is the closest we'd ever get to witchcraft. It's mind-boggling that it isn't praised and taught everywhere, its praises sang at least as much as other less effective methods like religion, rivaling and surpassing those of medicine.
What if there were a drug with no side effects that simultaneously alleviated, even prevented, cases of cancer, depression, cardiovascular disease... to name a few of the big boys when it comes to humanity's most haunting predators. Heck, I've effectively used meditation for incurable ailments such as hangovers, heartache, constipation even.
It led me to blissful states, morphed right out of all the fears and stress of daily life. No matter how bad things get, out of all the funkiness life throws our way, we can make music. Finding the space between the notes is what differentiates melody from noise, and in time it is intuited that our personal shadows are nothing more than projections due to the light in our minds. Without light, there's no shadow, and brightness comes first. 

Sleeplessness, insomnia 

The reason why I have not spoken much in a while, is the same reason why I have not written much in a while: veneration of silence, not speaking more than you should. Of course, those around you may grow suspicious if you suddenly stop talking too much. Sure, you can talk and laugh and connect with others. But you never do so lively so as when you're mindful. People sense then that there's something going on. Have you lost weight? 

We're born with the same amount of fat cells we die with. You don't lose any fat cells.  They just shrink, go into remission, wait for a better time to make a comeback.

Now, a simple "Yeah, I have" will suffice. 

The less you say, the more you are. And so, it is not just about shutting up. It's not only about finding the strength to do so, but doing so because you already know the heights to which it soars. Nothing feels quite like disengaging from your inner voices and let turbulent waters settle. Nothing thrives on 

It's not such an easy task to untangle yourself from the world around and submerge into your own consciousness. 

Mind you: it is not that I spend an awful lot of time meditating, I always have; it's that now I am meditating, as I write, as I breathe... mindfully aware of the world around until it no longer revolves in its own egotistical axis and devolves into some backstage scenery that isn't [a part of]. 
We're adept at finding the way out of this thoroughfare and it lies within.