sleep

being dead to be alive

my verse for 2010

I used to have a mentor that i met with for one hour a week for 3 years. My life is different because of him. He got me reading books - he opened my eyes to the wisdom that could be found nestled in the pages of them. I have much to thank him for.

Another thing he did was to encourage me to find a verse for the year. To pray for a vision and to latch onto it. To provide a theme to my spiritual development for the year ahead.

I have settled on mine and would like to share it:
"For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light." Colossians 1:9-12

Ok, it's not a verse... choose yourself a passage then :)

Book Review: What They Teach You at Harvard Business School

It is not often that I have felt compelled to email the author of a book after reading it, but that was the case today: a compulsion to connect with someone who spoke tons of truth and wisdom into an environment that contains so much folly.

Philip Delves Broughton worked as a journalist for most of his life, before deciding to uproot with his wife and child to study his MBA at Harvard full time. Reading a business book written by a writer was like lifting the cup to my lips expecting water and getting Grapetizer. How refreshing to have someone skilled with the pen using well crafed words to keep you excited and interested in what the numbers were saying.

In addition to this, I loved Philip's very balanced view on what it means to be weathly. Graduating as a 2% minority in his final year as graduates not going to pre-placed jobs, you get wrapped up in the turmoil that became his own: Do you get sucked into the Capitalist system, though you know better than most it's inner workings and the strain you will put on all other factors of your life, or do you place your faith in your ability to carve the future you design for yourself?

Along Philip's journey, the reader gets exposed to so much economic and financial insight and wisdom, but these lessons are so perfectly wrapped into a meta-narative that you hardly feel like you are learning much. For this reason I read the book slowly, and used a pen to underline the juice that I will re-read many times in the next few years.

If business and enreprenurship is your thing too, then don't hesitate to give this one a read. I found it quite novel.

dead dragonflies

Have you ever seen a dragonfly hovering over a pool of water, relentlessly dipping its bum onto the surface? I watched a bright orange one doing so this morning. Being the curious person that I am, I looked into why they do this: they are dropping eggs on the water surface. It's a necessary activity for the survival of their species, I guess.

Yesterday there was a dead dragonfly floating on the pool's surface. And I figured that it is dangerous business having translucent wings flapping millimetres from liquid. One misjudgement and they drown.

And I wondered how dangerous my life is.

That's all I wondered.

by my side

in the turmoil of heart i bring to You pieces
creases in me that straight
when my soul reaches for You
you find me here

‘i never left’, He says

ashamedly i realise
though i knew already

crystal ball

man's fascination with the future is amplified by the fact that he can't change his past

stanger

there's something sensational about talking to a stranger
when you know nothing you have to assume the best

new relationships are forests of leaves that turn as new winds blow