“The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.” (As once said by James Allen)
[Original illustration by The Border Of a Mind Studios]
Author: Ajmal
Success.
Happened to see this insightful message on Success. Couldn’t find the original author of this text, but have a glance. It’s thought-provoking and perspective-changing.
For 1 year old
Success is
Can walk without support
For 4 years old
Success is
Do not urinate in your pants
For 8 years old
Success is
To know the way back home
For 12 years old
Success is
To have friends
For 18 years old
Success is
To get a driving license
For 23 years old
Success is
To graduate from a university
For 25 years old
Success is
To get an earning
For 30 years old
Success is
To be a Family Man
For 35 years old
Success is
To make money
For 45 years old
Success is
To maintain the appearance of a young man
For 50 years old
Success is
To provide good education for your children.
For 55 years old
Success is
To still be able to perform your duties well
For 60 years old
Success is
To still be able to keep driving license
For 65 years old
Success is
To live without disease
For 70 years old
Success is
Not to be a burden on anyone
For 75 years old
Success is
To have old friends
For 81 years old
Success is
To know the way back home
For 86 years old
Success is
Not to urinate in your pants again
For 90 years old
Success is
That you can walk without support again
One of the best messages I have ever read.
Life is a cycle.!
Don’t expect too much from it.
Be simple, cool and happy always.
Six months to live | Notes
Almost two weeks went in a blink. I couldn’t pen anything for the past two weeks. My mind was overly occupied with other professional and personal stuff that didn’t yield the notes of composure and poise that I specifically need when I write at this place. It’s like a small personally curated garden of thoughts at the border of my mind. I put my heart and soul into every little word, graphic and theme that you find inscribed here.
While looking at some of the old files on the network, I stumbled across this old book I read at school. This came out somewhere in 2001. So we are talking about a book that I read circa 18 years old!
The publisher Plough summarizes the theme of the book as below:
“I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone else’s. If I could choose not to have cancer, and continue my life as it was, I wouldn’t do it.” – Matt Gauger.
You’re twenty-two, in love, and just starting a career. The last thing you’re worried about is the purpose of life (whatever that means) and when you’re going to die. If you think about such things, you certainly don’t talk about them.
With his sociable personality and love of music and basketball, Matt had plenty of friends but didn’t really stand out from the crowd. Then, a month before his wedding, he was diagnosed with cancer. Six months later he was dead. But Six Months to Live isn’t really about dying. It’s the story of how Matt and his family and friends struggled to accept his suffering, and how it changed each of them. It’s about facing (rather than avoiding) life’s most important questions, and – instead of going through the motions – living life to the full.”
Among the books of similar themes, I’ve come across, what rapted me is how positively death was faced by the young man and the pragmatic and inspiring support system of his family and community he had embraced. The 13-year-old me who read it 18 years ago still remembers this takeaway. True stories like this truly inspire me. If we think about it, this sort of support system is what makes our lives truly memorable. That’s some real wealth and fortune if we are blessed with it.
Parallel worlds | fine art
I’m really fond of layering multiple exposures in digital artworks. In my opinion, It’s a convenient way of blending stories and multiple scenes in a cohesive rendering. I’m titling this work “Parallel Worlds” in relation to the buzz of thoughts and schemes which come in everyone’s minds and the illustration connotes the perplexing moment in time to decide to go with a particular resolve, thereby channeling a unique pathway in our destinies.
“These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thin and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David.”
— John Connolly (The Book of Lost Things)
“Man’s striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of the simplest structure in physical systems.”
— Rudolf Arnheim
Explore original fine art from The Border of a Mind.
book of beautiful moments.
” You look in the mirror and
sometimes may see a
mess of a human being.
But you don’t see the lives
you’ve touched, or the
people you’ve saved.
You don’t see all the love
you’ve given freely,
or the extraordinary
memories you’ve made.
You are a book of beautiful
moments and feelings.
You are not weak because you cry.
You are not a simple being.
You make plants come back to life,
and you turn cold rain showers
into warm downpours.
You are a piece of art that
makes people feel things.
You don’t bring people to
their knees, you give them
a solid footing
And that is beautiful.”
[ source ] Khalil Gibran
“swayed in” | fine art.
a spontaneous piece that popped out of my head at this moment. Calling this “swayed in“
“Spontaneous Painting is painting intuitively without having an image or model to paint from, where the result comes from a spontaneous play with the paint, the colors, and texture. Most importantly, each brush or finger stroke comes from a direct response to an inner directive, not from an aesthetic standard.” [ source ]
The border of a mind studios is passionately excited in adopting it fervently on digital art frames. Exuberant vibe fuels the day amigos. Peace! God bless.
Kintsugi.
I had written on this page about Kintsugi. It’s a very interesting Japanese concept. It’s widely used in art and pottery but what’s even more enthralling is its philosophic extension that’s often found to cognate with healing and history. In this concept, broken and repaired things are often regarded as much more beautiful. It’s often read in the context of Wabi-Sabi, which is basically “to explore the beauty in broken things or old things.” I have read a little book explaining this concept and I felt it was wide implications.
” Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “golden joinery”), also known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. “
Barbara Bloom puts it this way: “When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful“.
Omid Safi writes in his piece “Illuminating the Beauty in Our Broken Places“,
” We value success, wholeness. Unlike this Japanese art form, we don’t yet have a way of looking for what was once broken and has been healed and illuminated. How lovely would it be to find that a cracked and illuminated cup can be even more beautiful than a whole cup. How wise to realize that the broken hearts, illuminated and made whole, can be even lovelier.”
Vehicle blocking your way in UAE parking spaces/roads? Don’t worry. Have it removed in less than 15 minutes!
I thought of sharing it here in case if this could help some of you in the UAE.
There can be situations when you’ve to go somewhere urgently and you find your car being blocked by some other vehicle parked in front of you. Normally in the UAE, people often have this practice of leaving their phone numbers on the car dashboard so that they can be called in case if we want the car to be removed. But yes, there can be instances when they have not left the phone number on the dashboard and you cannot take your vehicle out without the other person moving his / her car.
Although been in Dubai for a long time now, I was truly not aware of an awesome service that comes to our rescue in such circumstances. Dubai Police app, renowned for its smart features and ease of use has a very interesting feature that helps anyone in such a situation. It’s basically a service that can be used to alert vehicles obstructing traffic. It does great help to tackle motorists who block our way.
So this is the sequence. It’s very easy. It takes only 2 minutes to do this.
* Download Dubai Police application
* Authenticate. You can enter your phone number and they’ll send an OTP to verify.
* In the “traffic services” section, look for something like “obstructing traffic flow”
* Click on report obstructing traffic flow offense
* They’ll ask you to snap a picture & enter any information you’d like to.
When you take the snap, try your best to show the vehicle number and also demonstrate how it is clearly blocking your way.
* Send it to Dubai Police
Immediately Police will send an SMS to the car owner instructing to remove the car and they’ll give you a phone number to contact in case the vehicle is not removed in 15 minutes. I have tried this from Sharjah and can confirm that it works. For instance, the below message is that I got after completing a report.
I personally had to travel urgently for a medical-related matter and found a car blocking my way. I checked on the dash and there was no number left on the dashboard so that I could call and ask the person to move his car. In this situation, I looked online on a workaround and found this solution. I would recommend all of you staying in UAE to have Dubai Police app installed as they have a lot of amazing smart services that’ll save you a lot of time. If you’re traveling for an emergency, this app is truly a Godsend. They can handle minor violations online and can even help you file a report for smaller accidents. I truly believe that these small things matter a lot for citizens and residents and would be conducive to having a great experience and simply have them so happy interacting with government services and the UAE government’s smart services are truly remarkable & way ahead of time in these aspects.
traffic blur | recollecting ‘sonder’.
Last year, we talked about sonder.
sonder n. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
While returning from work, I recollected “sonder” when I gazed at the traffic blur. So, this would be sort of a moving image version of the earlier post. Traffic time-lapses are one of my favourite ones to capture. It figurately connotes the dynamism of life.
anamnesis.
/ˌanəmˈniːsɪs/. The title of this post is from the late 16th-century Greek word anamnēsis related to ‘remembrance’.
Clouds and sunset light playing a symphony of art in a winter evening at Sharjah, UAE. November 2019.
“A lot can happen in a year. People die. You outgrow old friends and get tired of mundane jobs. New careers come. New friends find your soul. But no matter what, you grow, you lose your mind a bit and most importantly you get a little wiser. Your circle gets smaller because you get stricter with your energy and time, If you are really lucky, you’ll find love inside yourself, inside of friends and family, and just maybe the universe will bless you with a lover that laughs at your really lame jokes.” .S. Mcnutt
Netta shared this recently and it resonates well. Regardless of where we belong and what we do, it’s worth to have a reminiscence of what changed in one year. Need not be always the specific things mentioned in the above quote. It can be anything and could be even related to how you respond to situations, your thought process, the way you plan things, the priorities you weight in on, people you engage and rely on, the general attitude towards events, etc. For me, personally, I believe it has been by and large about stepping back and striving to be more thoughtful in my responses, not to be too impulsive in general terms, making time for building this site by putting in more content and sharing writings, trying to be more positive, being diplomatic and to have a cohesive spirit of togetherness in responses, setting compassionate boundaries, and an earnest attempt to be more professional and objective in my professional assignments. This may be, also one of the years where some personalities whom I admire for their creative pursuit and passion had the biggest influence in me in terms of the time I spent and also the actions they actuate in all that I do. It was also the year when Genie’s cove was set up with Netta by my side, slowly building our little space and being truly grateful for the we-time. Let’s see what next year turns out to be, God willing.