Today let’s add a chapter to our moving images archive. Hope you’ve read Story de’ aquatics, where we talked about, amateurish aquascaping. In the signature style of the Border of a Mind, we’re gazing at those beautiful little moments of aqua fauna embellishing the tank with their grace.
“A layout that is crafted with overly great finesse is tiring to look at, and it is also difficult to maintain over a long period of time…It is important to provide an unpretentious, casual atmosphere of water and greenery. The very atmosphere creates harmony between the surrounding space and the aquarium.“ – Takashi Amano
“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]
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.
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.
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
” 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
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.
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“.
” 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.”
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.
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.
