The unexpected good bye, comes at you like you never expected. When it’s time to say it, you’re in disbelief. Is this really the end? What happened to all the times you thought you will have. Nothing remains. All you are left with, is dreams, thoughts and what ifs. It’s when you say good bye, you know what things were.

Like the chilling cold of the winter, telling you that the warmer weather is over and a long winter is ahead of you. But this winter feels different.

Sunsets are beautiful. They are that grand, captivating golden hour of the day that brings with it a strange sense of peace. But they are also the declaration of the end. They remind you that what started with the promise of sunshine and roses must now come to an end. What did you achieve all day? You think to yourself. The answer isn’t always the most optimal. Maybe there is something you wanted to do but couldn’t get to. And here is the sun, casually saying goodbye telling you times up, pencils down. What you were not able to get to today, is a lost cause. Maybe you will get to it tomorrow, when the sun comes back. Tomorrow, however, is never a guarantee.

Fear, since time immemorial has been a key driver to human behavior. As kids, humans learn to take their first steps in spaces where they know they have the least chance of falling. Everything from fear of darkness, loud noises, physical pain tend to drive human behavior. Sometimes they don’t even know that fear is driving their decision making. It’s like muscle memory that was first built by some adverse reaction to an event. And that forever planted a fear in the mind. That fear results in a degree of determinism in behavior.

Perhaps this is something that mankind has learned to game. Product advertised on tv, are sometimes designed to implant a fear of not having something. Making the muscle memory of fear driving a product buy! And folks at Amazon thought they could do this with a mathematical algorithm. All they had to do was plant enough fear of not having something, and Mr. Bezos would have had mansion in mars today!

one of the few mean things that a programmer will encounter is an infinite loop. techies get a kick out of it so much so that some big tech companies name their street addresses after them. so what’s the obsessions with them? for the untrained reader, infinite loops are when program sequences get stuck between two points. they repetitively go from a to z and then back to a. many say that a few lines of code represent a sequence of events. each event is followed by another. so what happens when these loops are coded in? they are never intentional, but they still keep resurfacing, making programers lives hell.

perhaps life in some ways is also a badly written piece of code. from time to time an infinite loop is coded in. these loops are hard to detect. they slowly eat away at all resources till there is a complete system crash. can you find a loop you’re stuck in? how would you even know you’re in one?

Your time in the world is wealth you are spending constantly. It’s an asset no one really understands. Some people will claim to have optimized it. But have they really? It is like the bank account that has a constant management fee. It’s a deteriorating asset with or without you having to do anything. Every morning marks another dollar reduced in time currency for every one. Yet everyone will tell you that time is the most valuable asset you will have. Every successful person will ask you to ‘manage’ time well. At a high level, that’s great advice. In reality though, this gets challenging. Do they mean that since time continuously deteriorates, people should stop sleeping? They could be using that time for useful things. Perhaps that may be possible for some of us. Most succesful peopel allegedly sleep very few hours. But is that really how to make use of the asset called ‘time’? After all, every one has limited amount of it. It cannot be bought. The nature of this asset is grossly misunderstood.

Time is an asset that you should spend to the fullest, while you have it. It’s the roller coaster ride, that you can close you eyes on and not remember a thing of what happened, or go hands free, eyes wide open and live it to the fullest. The quantity of time for both ways is exactly the same, but the experience, wildly different. Unlike other assets, you are granted a limited amount but like most other assets, how you choose to spend it, is up to you.

Sometimes life’s decisions bring you to a point where you feel completely stuck. All decisions are losing decisions. Your best evaluation reveals that all outcomes are against you. Where to from here? Is this where you give up the struggle? Is this the point where you stop trying? Or perhaps this is life testing your limits. Perhaps.

Instinctively you keep trying. To make things work. To make lemonade with these lemons. Perhaps there is a break that you will get, or perhaps this is what life will be forever. Giving up is not an option, moving ahead is hard. It eventually becomes about learning to take a beating and looking past it. How long can you take the beating? Where is your break? You will never know. Because your decisions, lead you here. And your decisions will take you through it. Choose wisely!

The soaring eagle, flies alone. It doesn’t need companions around it. It needs no friends. It’s eyes are always on the prize! It spots targets a mile  away and when it does, it plunges to pick it up and fly right back to its solo flight. The eagle is a lonely operator. No one is allowed in its space.  When it chooses to leave that space, this is momentary and it will go back to its own space once the job is done.

The eagle is mighty and has no fear. It flies high, alone,  yet terrorizes everything on the ground. Does the fear it brings to every other species leave it without any friends ? Why doesn’t it have any companions? Is the eagles might and strength also what causes it to have no one around it? What causes it to live in places no one has seen and yet it is known to everyone at the same time?

The ambitious side of us always aims to achieve greatness and be feared. To be known to the world as someone unique and be identifiable. Just like the eagle, have people be weary of when we are around and command some degree of respect. What’s easier to forget though, is that the eagle always flies alone. Always has; always will.

Everything from a distance seems unreal. Like it’s so far away and by consequence so unlikely to happen, that you will never need to worry about that affecting you. Life’s journey will always bring you close to things that were so distant earlier on that you never thought about them ever coming this close. Now, you’re wondering what you could have done had you thought of making preparations for these things. It is of course, too late to plan.

No preparation in life will ever make you fully equipped to handle everything. This is why we see a lot of things happen around us, and know someone who has gone through something similar and yet never thought that it could happen to ourselves one day.

What is there to do now? What takes you through it? Life isn’t going to wait for you to answer all questions. Just like these things were distant earlier on, they will be distant again with as life goes on. The journey takes you to it, and then takes you through it. Like gliding on a river with the current. Only one direction to go. Immersing yourself in every sight on the way. Experience every rapid that current hits. Headed towards the end from where you can’t return from to warn the traveler behind you of everything you experienced. Unless they were close enough to see you and maneuver around the difficulties you experienced.

Who would such a person be ? Why do they get it easier than you did? It only looks easier from a distance. It looks easy only because you are far from experiencing what they are experiencing. If you get close, you will know. It wasn’t easy for them either. They may have appeared to outsmart the river from a distance, but on close inspection, they are as lost you were.

Every morning, the universe seems to be in motion before humanity is. Humans reluctantly walk out of bed, drag themselves to their day-to-day, but the universe is already in full swing. The fresh sun rising from the east reminds us of how new beginnings are a reality. the new sun hasn’t seen any of the past, and is eagerly on the rise to make today happen. The human that walked out of bed however, needs to keep finding motivation to make it through his day.

It’s nature way of saying, life will continue to go on, whether you like it or not. The sun will rise, and then it will set. You either become a part of it, or you don’t. It seems to know what it’s doing, all the time. Humans though, wake up every day and want this day to be nothing like the ones before. Everyday needs to be different. the inherent desire of humans to explore comes from their need to do different things. If they aren’t able to, they feel less and less accomplished. But the great and might sun; one of natures main reason for humans survival, seems to have it all figured out. Every morning, it sets a path from one end to the other. Like that commuter on the morning train, trying to make to work on time. But the sun, just never stops working, and for humanity’s sake, lets hope it never does!

An ant in a bed of grass, seems to always find its way. It doesn’t know what’s on the other side. It doesn’t know if it will find food, death or peace on the other side of it all and yet it keeps on going. It doesn’t know where its next meal comes from but it still keeps trying. The world may think its too minuscule of a creature to matter but the ant knows what its existence means. It understands what survival means.

Humans, or at least some of them spend a life time finding what life really means. What is the meaning of it all? Is merely surviving everything?What is the best way to get from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’? Some would spend life times figuring out if everything they ever did was right or wrong. And most, will never figure it out. Some will tell you that at a ‘ripe’ age of 65, that they still are ‘finding’ themselves. And that they are still figuring life out!

But look at the ant! The always busy ant. It doesn’t have time to ponder over such questions. Nature in possibly one of its smallest forms has it all figured out. The existence and survival of the ant,  the discipline which many humans will fail to achieve after a life time is instinct to the ant.

Humans see it. They observe it. They possibly come up with all sorts of scientific theories behind the ant’s every action. But they never learn from it. Very few will have their life on track and be content with it. The ant though, has it all!