Of Monsters and Other Fears

Most people are afraid of darkness at some point in their life, other people are afraid of darkness most of their life… and other people are just afraid of the light!

When we’re kids being afraid of the darkness usually just means we don’t want to turn the lights off at night. In the face of the uncertainty darkness represents, since we don’t know what we might run into when it’s dark, we start imagining the worst, making up stories in our minds about monsters or ghosts. Then, eventually, some day, as we grow older, we start realizing our fear is just a product of our imagination, and reality is the worst we might run into in the dark is a piece of furniture, which to be fair can be rather painful when we run into it with our pinky toe or our knee at just the right angle, yikes!

Regardless, once we’ve grown out of our fear of literal darkness, this fear doesn’t just disappear, it evolves. Continue reading

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

Today I just wanted to share a quote of the day courtesy of moi, and it goes something like this:

When trying to find answers, the most important things are the questions. Me

I have always possessed a child-like curiosity, since I was, well, a child; and luckily, I have never grown out of such trait. I might go as far as saying that both my curiosity and thirst for knowledge are insatiable. Which is why a lot of people have gotten frustrated with me in the past for asking either ‘too many’ questions or ‘obvious’ questions. Maybe they are right, maybe I do ask too many questions and maybe I do ask questions which answers are seemingly obvious, but so far it’s the only way I’ve found to get to the great questions, and therefore the great answers. Even the obvious questions sometimes can be very powerful because they force us to rethink the so-called ‘obvious’ answers, and more importantly to state them out loud, opening them up for discussion and even further questioning.

When you question even the answers, you start digging deeper and uncovering even more important information. I recently found myself asking a close friend “the why behind the why”, trying to make the process a little faster, because I needed to get to that deeper place but it was impossible to do it without asking the ‘obvious’ question first, so to cut to the chase I went straight to asking “the why behind the why”. Asking the why behind the why behind the why is a common thing for kids to do, and it’s unfortunate that most people stop asking the subsequent why’s once they get older. Of course, asking questions to other people is the most basic and possibly most important way of gaining knowledge about any topic or person, but I think the most important questions of all are the ones we ask ourselves. In any case, I can’t help but ask you, are you asking the right questions?

 

 

Words: Powerful… Or Are They?

One of the comments left on the previous post inspired me to write a kind of follow up post on words, but this time to discuss their power. Coincidentally, I had just started to ponder on this when I heard on the news about an appalling event that has had everyone talking for the last couple of days, and that relates to this topic.  What happened is, somewhere in upstate New York, a bunch of middle school kids ganged up on a 68 year old woman who worked as a bus monitor, and while riding the school bus,  verbally (and may I add quite brutally!) attacked her. Or to use the term du jour for this, they mercilessly bullied her, bringing her to tears. You can watch the video of such regrettable situation here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l93wAqnPQwk&w=360&h=280&rel=0]

Bullying has become a major topic over the last few years, gaining national attention and media exposure since reaching the unfortunate height of causing children and teen suicides.  Bullying refers to unwanted aggressive behavior than can be either physical or verbal, or often both, and usually refers to interactions between school aged kids. The term bullying is not commonly apply to interactions between adults, or even young adults, because at this point aggressive behavior, specially physical or repeatedly  verbal abuse, can be considered a crime, either assault or harassment. Nevertheless, such bully behavior can and often happens also between adults. In this case, the issue that concerns me here is the verbal abuse side of it, no matter how old the involved parties are, and the power that words can have to be able to reach the status of abuse.

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