If I was a dreamer like everyone else

If I was a dreamer like everyone else, would the sun glitter as brightly? or would I be more attracted to the moon?

Do you think I'd say as much as other dreamers tend to do;
or would I keep my mouth shut tight, only smiling to kiss you,
to tell you that I loved you and that the night was black,
or that the stars were headlights and each planet a component of tarmac?

Do dreamers tell their worlds apart,
or is every dream the same,
identical in end and start
and common to the name?
Am I a dreamer like everyone else,
or is my world an apple tree -
one that grows and lives and dies in simple unity?
with what exactly I don't know,
to be sure, neither do you,
but apple trees grow rather well
when you let them do as they will do.
If I was a dreamer like everyone else,
I don't know who I'd be.
But I'm quite content if we exist
with you as you
and me as me.

One Day ~ May 6 2013

One day when the wind blows lonely over the golden grass
and the earth creaks around on its backward axis,
I shall say to you "I love you."
And one day when the silver spirit of the moon has glided away to far off galaxies,
you shall say to me "I love you."

When the sun is faded to a husky brown
and there is no difference between the day and the night.
When the ice won't freeze and the ice won't melt
and everything hangs in the balance of light.
When the sea is neither blue nor green
and eyes have neither watched nor seen,
and dreams have been and gone long ago,
and the world is coated in a dull white snow.
When the air is warm but carries hints of the cold
and no crops will grow for fear of growing old
and laughter and weeping have merged into one;

We shall say to each other,
"What have we done?"

 

What have we left behind?

Can we change what we're going to leave behind?

Love

it's eating away 

at my heart

big and dark and dangerous

it's chewing its way

into my heart

long long slow slow 

crunch

crunch

LOVE

Identical Smiles in my land

The winds of change are moving over the land

And the moon never rises on a similar scene,

Yet the eyes of the present are blind to the past

And the changes blur to a gentle acceleration

Where only separation can force the division

Between then and now,

And why and how.

Only gnarled ghosts remain of the colonialist hand

And the ancient tribes have been machined to dust

Which settles on people and on the land

Blanketing out all the sense and reason that supposedly comes hand in hand with time.

Instead a quiet has descended on rocks and mountains -

They shrink under the burden

Of a forgotten memory.

The braces of time have weighted down the corners of the smiles,

And forced them into a foreign alignment

That has sunk the quirks and gaps in the front,

Creating fragments of faces that dissolve in the sterile sand of the sea:

Never gone, but so far lost that they will never be found.

Only grimaces are left,

In the parting of the lips and in the eyes.

They depart from the clinical appointment, blank,

Colourless sheets blown by the changing wind:

They are all exactly the same, but in whose eyes?

Ignoring the wisdom of the past, they resist by shielding themselves

In the very armour that ghostly hand designed.

Safety in numbers, hiding from reality:

All identical faces.

For my young ones

Closely hold that dear heart near,

let not that sweet eye e'er drop one tear.

Dreams may come and dreams may go

but constant love will always be so.

Thus guard your heart, 'til it be ripe:

ripe to fall and ripe to fight -

wine, not grapes, your sweet heart be,

but wait, my child, be patient and wait.

Wait for true love's constancy. 

Success and Identity: which is which?

I was thinking, recently, about success, and it's relation to being human and existing. The past weeks have been a real "reality check", as the phrase goes, and I've actually learnt a lot about myself and humans in the process: we're kind of over-achievers. There is barely anything that a human being does that doesn't involve some sort of prize, reward, or benefit - I mean, it's not logical to just do something for the sake of doing it, with no guarantee of getting something out of it, is it? As a human being, that's just simply how I am. In order to survive, I try not to waste my time doing irrelevant tasks that don't have any foreseeable benefits; we all do. 

But really, if you think about it, how can we actually know whether something will benefit us or not? We can only see so far into the future, and after that, the void of possibilities stretches out like a long, tired yawn. Unfortunately, you don't realise that there is something other than "immediate success" until you've failed and had to face the mirror knowing that the face you see looking back at you is not a success, and that in actual fact, you have wasted your time. And you can't realise that you are more than just that one small failure until you've grown higher and bigger and stronger, and can look back on who you used to be and compare it with who you are now.

Disappointment is a killer. It can send you into depression, scar you with trust issues and betrayal issues for the rest of your life, and leave you leading a sour, solitary existence. But it can also grow you, and mould you into a better version of yourself. Basically, the only way to think of failure is as a step towards Version 2.0 and beyond of YOU. If you let the thoughts of uselessness and waste and general self-worthlessness take over your mind, they begin to control your every move, and suddenly life becomes just that: useless, a waste of time, and worthless. You don't want that, do you? 

Well I know I don't, I didn't. Every seeming failure can be turned into a success, if you just wait long enough. It might not be the success you had planned for yourself, or the success everyone else seemed to have planned for you. It might even be really really hard to actually see where the success is at all! But trust me, it's there. Sometimes the success is just getting up and moving on. Sometimes it's realising where you went wrong, and fixing it. Sometimes it's learning from your failure, as all the cliche phrases say, and learning to see "failure" in a different light. 

Success is learning to value yourself for who you are before evaluating yourself on what your successes are. If you have this mental image of you as a collage of all your successes in life (past, present, and future dreams,) you're going down the path to self destruction. Your successes can be annihilated in the blink of an eye. Yes, they have shaped you, but they have not made you. You were God's child before you had won anything, before you had become anything. And the moment you forget that the real you is gold and doesn't need any paper to make it pretty, you have failed yourself. You can't build a house if you haven't laid foundations - "the wise man built his house upon the rock" - remember that? 

Don't you want to be that cake that people will eat regardless of whether it has icing on it or not? Don't you want to be seen as you, before you are seen as a reputation or a certificate? Don't you want to be loved for you, not for your achievements? How can you expect people to see you, want you and love you, if they don't know who you really are? I'm not saying that success is bad - no, success is what drives you to look higher and bigger and wider, and become the best you, you can be. But I am saying that if success is all you want, you might reach the top, eventually, but who will be there with you, loving you even when you're not at the top anymore? The people who know the real you. 

Moral of the story: be yourself!

Am I those trophies?

Or am I his sister?

 

 Maybe I can be both?

Understand?

I understand.

I stand under the stars, 
watch aliens in a cartoon that are stars,
see cells in a brain that are brains -
and I understand.

But then, I stand under those same stars 
and see aliens
watch a baby grow, 
and see life
walk on the sand, 
(and realise that commas are not yet comatose)
and realise that where I stand is neither
where I stood a second ago, nor 
where I'll ever stand again.

Standing there;
a planet in a universe,
a universe of planets,
I sometimes think I understand.

But then I stand up,
or did I just stand down?
Put my hand up,
drop my hand down.
Reach for the stars,
or are they just straws?
(maybe they're imaginary alien's jaws)

I took a step, 
I took a stand,
But funny, somehow, I don't understand.

Do you understand?

The Philosophy of Exams

I overheard someone saying that exams were the worst thing ever invented, and although on the spur of the moment, my mind strongly agreed with her comment, in retrospect I’ve decided that they are not. There is a whole other world which opens up when one writes exams – a world of work, seriousness, stress and nerves, but also a world of excitement, opportunity and a future. It’s ironic that during the hardest periods of our lives we seem to find even more reasons to hope and believe, and a multitude of inspirational reasons for not giving up. But when life’s going fine and dandy, we tend to get bored and that is the moment when depression and indecision strike!

It is easier to choose the worst of three unappetising options than the best of three exciting ones. When faced with a choice between Bad 1 and Bad 2, I think the brain realises that either way something Bad is going to happen, and makes its decision efficiently and accordingly. Contrast Amazing 1 and Spectacular 2 and the brain goes into an excitable hyper-drive, making a frenzied choice that always leaves the decision-maker wondering if the other option would have been better. So when exams come around, it can be concluded that it is easy to decide to get on with exams (Bad 1) instead of failing exams (Bad 2), but once they finish it is painstakingly difficult to decide whether to have a manicure (Relaxing 1) or a pedicure (Happiness 2).

The time spent in total solitude, when studying, can be considered a time of introspection, a time to learn about oneself and to meditate, and one will often find that it is during the period of the build up to exams, and the time during exams, when one feels most philosophical and has more profound thoughts than usual. With all these deep musings flying around there is bound to be friction, because they will collide at some point, and these collisions can, I believe, be held responsible for the majority of the tensions and emotional outbursts that occur during the exam period. Imagine if every person was digging far deeper into themselves than they had ever done before, and possibly discovering things they didn’t necessarily want to – this would lead to a few minor personal complexes, mild schizophrenia and a touch of confused tension.

But none of this self-discovery and personal solipsism of the soul would happen if exams didn’t exist. To be fair, some people think deeply like that most of the time, and that’s why the world is as it is, but envisage every person studying for and writing even just one exam brooding about existence all day every day. It’s a kaleidoscopic thought!

Picture every person as a unique shade of a unique colour. Each of these people is surrounded by an aura of their colour that imprints itself on the atmosphere around it, in the air, in the wind, in the minds of the people around it; and this fog of colour darkens and becomes more opaque as the person gives off more thoughts, or thinks more deeply. So now each aura of each person is glowing darker and darker than it did before, and this means that whereas before all the aura fogs could exist in harmony, merging into one another and blending to perfection as they morphed under other auras’ influences, now they refuse to be confined and redefined, and they jab against each-other, their solidifying and condensing fogs unable to be changed by another different foreign fog. This is exam mode.

So you see, exams can be both good and bad: they can bring introspective tendencies to the shallow soul, deepening its waters, but they can also cause consternation and conflict as people realise that they are not who they think they are, and that other people might not be who they once believed the other people were.

Why is it so cold inside?

No-one can answer the questions that you ask, because the essential point of a question is to discover, and the mind does not accept any discovery that has not been proved to the mind’s standard. Hence, no answer is accepted by your mind in response to your question because actually, unless you and the responder are in a metaphysical ‘sync’, they cannot know exactly what you are asking. So then that would, by a domino effect, mean that only you can answer your question.

Now what happens when the question you ask has no answer? Why do we say that the sun ‘rises’ when actually the sun doesn’t move? We’ve asked a question about something that has been proven in order to try and disprove what someone else has discovered!

Humans try to disprove what others have proven because they don’t believe something unless they themselves have seen the proof.

This contrary attitude is what made mankind evolve. Evolution, as Charles Darwin studied it, is merely the cancelling out of all the wrongs, and the formatting and re-booting of all the rights. He didn’t use that new-techno language, of course, but that’s the gist of what he meant.

Basically, the world would have not got anywhere without some deleting. If we hadn’t lost our curved spine and tail, we wouldn’t be tall and upright. If we hadn’t got rid of scaly skin when we reptiles (which we weren’t ever really, but then it’s possible to say that we were because we evolved from something that evolved from reptiles,) we would still be slithering and sliming today.

So thanks to man’s contrary physique, contrary thoughts, and contrary nature, we are who we are today!

Though sometimes I feel like the contradictoralists of this world are actually sending it backwards, not forwards. Those people who put up an argument to everything seem to be holding up procedures, and preventing progress: and yet that very same annoying trait is what built Man. It’s probable that back in BC nine thousand hundred and seventy seven, one caveman said, or rather, grunted, to another caveman, telling, or grunting, him to stop. That pause in Caveman A’s life might have stopped him from attacking a monkey, which in turn stopped the monkey from dying, which then led to more monkeys being born, which eventually resulted in more food for Caveman A. Caveman B’s annoying pause, meant that there was more food for mankind.

So us Humans try to stop each other, for maybe not so generous and useful motives as caveman B’s, but yet we still cause our race to improve. We’re pretty cool, aren’t we? (This is where you say you don’t believe me, and start some annoying little disagreement that will eventually better mankind.)

O Level Guidelines

Form Fours. O levels are here and they are real. They are terrifying and they are important. Some people might be telling you that they’re “over-rated”, they they’re “no-where near as tough as A level”; in fact, I was told that they were “easy!” Liars. O levels are not easy. 8 subjects, 9 subjects, 10 subjects, 11 subjects is NOT an EASY task no matter which subjects you’re doing or how many or what set you’re in. Round about this time last year I was going through a bit of a heart attack. Maths, Stats, Lit, Language, History, Geo, Enviro, French, Chem, Bio, Physics. That’s not much fun! You feel as if you’ve been, to quote Chido R, thrown into the Mariana Trench with 50 kg lead weights tied to your feet.

So I decided to write a little thing to make you feel better. Everyone does survive their O level year, somehow, and so will you. The year before you did, and the year after you will; and even if you’re not top in the subject, you will pass (with a certain amount of hard work and dedication!) Arundel didn’t get its reputation for nothing! Arundel makes you pass – it prepares you for the worst, and Cambridge does the opposite (Cambridge wants to give you marks and make you pass, teachers, on the other hand, want you to be so terrified of failing that you make yourself pass.) Have faith in yourself and in the system – if you put in the wise, dedicated hours, the system will do the rest. The most important thing is not to get overwhelmed.

They will be over eventually.

I’m going to divide the tips into four categories:           

Miscellaneous Tips

Timetables

Holiday Homework 

Past Papers

MISCELLANEOUS

• Get organised
• Plan Plan Plan
• Make sure you have all the notes you need
• Keep everything together - in neat piles, on a shelf (preferably not cluttering up your desk)
• Have a countdown to the end of exams
• Know your exam timetable like you know your phone
• Do things gradually – you won’t finish Geo in one night
• Reward yourself with breaks in between studying sessions

USE HOMEWORK TO STUDY

TIMETABLES

• Timetable your day from good morning to good night
• Divide your time up into workable time slots – not 2 hours for one subtopic, because you will lose concentration and waste time if you sit there for too long
• Be prepared to sit down and JUST DO IT
• Give yourself enough time to complete a task
• Dedicate as long as you think you will reasonably need to finish each subtopic – don’t sell yourself dreams!
• Make sure you can finish the task you’ve set for yourself in the allocated time slot (the worst is not finishing something in the time it’s supposed to be done in and wondering if it’ll ever get done)
• Make summaries of subjects and their topics and the topics’ subtopics
• Eg. Physics          - Magnetism, Waves, Movement, Electricity
• Make sure your subtopics are manageable, so you can handle the whole subtopic as one
•  Eg. Not just Electricity - engines, circuits etc
• Factor in your usual feelings on a certain day/at a certain time - sports etc
• Dedicate downtime where you can let your mind rest
• Give yourself time to sleep
• Give yourself time to exercise

Make lists of your subjects

Make lists of the topics of each subject

Make subtopics of each subject

HOLIDAY HOMEWORK

• Make lists of your subjects and their respective homework items
• Timetable your days – not every day needs to be exactly the same, but make sure you have something allocated to every hour of every day, even downtime and bathing and eating and sleeping (this will help with exam time routine)
• Fit Homework items into the timetable
• DO THEM!

Note: If the homework item is a past paper (or many past papers!) don’t be foolish and try and do past papers and studying separately, because it won’t work unless you’re some sort of robot. For specific essays and geo notes and that type of stuff, you can’t really study from them, so give them their own time slot. But for things like past papers, use them to study with. So when you’re studying the Digestive System in Bio, make your notes or read or do whatever you do to study, but also page through your booklet and look at the questions on the Digestive System and answer the questions you don’t understand straight away as a way of studying. Kill two birds with one stone. It’ll look like you’ve answered all the questions in the booklet - nobody notices the gaps.

PASTPAPER BOOKLETS

• No teacher is going to mark a past paper booklet, even if they said they would. They are lying to you to scare you. However, that doesn’t mean don’t do them, because if you don’t, you’re the one who will lose out.
• There is no point in doing the same question again and again, if you know the answer inside out: do the questions you DON’T understand and see how you can get them right.
• It is not realistic to say that you’re going to do 50 Maths Papers, 30 Chem Papers and 30 Bio Papers. Like I said, it is not humanly possible, and you will kill yourself. So do what you can in the time that you have.
• Be wise.
• People will lie to you and say they’ve finished their past paper booklets and are getting everything right and are doing it all. Trust me, they are not. If you actually asked them certain questions, you would discover that they, maybe, did the paper with the mark scheme in front of them, or actually only did the first few and the last few papers. Maybe they only did the questions that they could answer quickly and easily.

• Mocks are much harder, and by the time you get to exams, you will have had so much practice that the exam is just the same as every other paper, if not a bit easier.
• Please, please, please get some sleep. Your brain can’t function on 3 hour snatches of slumber – unless you’re a zombie, in which case you wouldn’t be writing exams anyway. You’re supposed to have 5 hours at least of solid sleep, in order to achieve a certain level of rest (only comes after 4 hours.)
• Remember, at the end of the day, it’s you sitting in that exam room.
• Remember too to keep God by your side all the way. Exams can be the make it or break it in any relationship, and your relationship with God is the most important.
• On the topic of relationships: there is nothing wrong with having a boyfriend now. As long as he doesn’t distract you or cause you undue emotional stress. Exams are bad enough without break ups. I know, though, that you can’t predict a break up, so just be wise and trust your judgement. And don’t you distract him! Sometimes a boyfriend can be a welcome stress reliever and a comforting shoulder to cry on – literally, you will cry.
• Don’t forget your family! They’re just as worried about you as you are about exams.

Lots of love and God bless,

Concerned Lower Six

The Stars

And in my dreams I visited

A vintage land of the finest art:

An empty space made majesty

By that introspect eye within mine heart.

As the fiery mural muted itself

To a haze of omniscient red,

Old Man Moon shook out his master plan

And laid it on his bed.

Black with lack of light it shone,

Brighter than day had e’er seen,

Enrobing all that stood alive

With speckles of that mystic sheen.

Blinking down, the twinkling lights

Were stars in the dark, it seemed to me.

But that night sky was deeper still,

Intricate more than e’er I’ll be.