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Life is beautiful - conditions need not apply.
“True, it often feels like there's pain and strife everywhere. But as writer and philosopher Will Durant pointed out, we need to see “behind the strife, the friendly aid of neighbours, the rollicking joy of children and young men, the dances of vivacious girls, the willing sacrifices of parents and lovers, the patient bounty of the soil, and the renaissance of spring". In whatever form it takes, life sings because it has a song. The meaning is in the lyrics, and those we write make life beautiful.”
— Mickie Kent
They say our lives are nothing but a fleeting dream; the unstable nature of the universe could spontaneously end at any second. In cosmological terms a human lifetime begins, burns brightly and quietly smoulders to its conclusion in the blink of an eye.
The crushing loneliness of it all makes it feel longer, so we search for someone to experience things with, because we believe the best way to cure loneliness is to persuade another person to share your lifespan with you.
But most of us somehow struggle in our daily routine in the sure knowledge that we are fundamentally alone, only occasionally overpowered by the sheer pointlessness of it all. We are all of us alone; we enter this world alone, and we exit it alone.
This is what some believe. Yet everyone wants someone to love them, to attach a cute nickname to, even though no one knows what love is. Most of our romantic know-how seems to break any relationship before it even begins. Is love a cure for loneliness? Is it a need for sex? Is it just the will of life forcing us to procure a new generation of our species? Is it a deep connection between two or more people?
When you're trying to work out whether you're in love or not, it's only natural to compare how you feel with what you've been taught about how being in love feels. Misguided notions about romance can come from our parents, from classical literature, from the movies, and from the world wide web. When we want information about love, as untrained lovers, we seek advice from our friends, and from strangers, but rarely to we seek advice from ourselves.
Before we can do that, however, we need to strip away the layers of self-doubt that is wrapped around us like a thick baby swaddling, and discover our authentic self. When we take ourselves out of the equation, it sets a misleading framework, because we enter into love without a genuine love for self, but rather for the ego, and wildly unrealistic expectations.
Relationship experts say believing in unhelpful relationship myths raise expectations, and set us for a fall. Many say that chief among these myths is the notion that there is a singular "mate of the soul" out there in the world for you selected for you by some celestial department of destiny. Another part if this mythos is that your other half will somehow be automatically psychic, and finish your sentence for you.
Firstly, or possibly wholly, the issue is one of trust. We need to trust in something to believe in it. For example, the Centre for Social Justice says we are living in an age of the disappearing man from families, with very few male role models left in homes and schools. If you are a single woman it might feel like the world is suffering a man drought, but is it true? Rarely do the statistics back up the reality, sometimes even the science behind something won't do that. The unstable nature of the "God" particle known as the Higgs Boson means life could end the very next second, but here you are reading this.
And it can't always simply be a matter of believing, can it? I man you don't have to believe in a headache tablet for it to work. You just pop it in your mouth, and hey presto! The issue goes past the need for belief to wire the brain towards a great placebo effect to make something actualise in your life, the secret is that you need to trust in that belief. Building trust takes time. Building trust in anything - yourself, love, others, work - takes time.
Trust is something that's earned, not given. For example, over the past decade, we've come to trust tech companies with our data because they promised to keep it secure. That trust was called into question earlier this month. In early June, it was revealed through a number of leaks that the Unites States government was able to access detailed records of individual smartphone and internet activity, via a scheme called Prism.
As news reports come out that we are under constant surveillance from governments at home and abroad, the latter was most troubling as the leaked document alleged that the tech companies we have come to trust - Google, Facebook, Microsoft and more - were handing over data to the US government. Since then, these same companies have been trying to repair the trust between themselves and the consumer. The question now is whether or not it's working.
It doesn't matter how much we believe that the products these tech companies provide work, because obviously they do, because when we no longer trust them, it will no longer work for us. We have been trained for years to trust in pharmaceutical medicines, and even if we don't believe in using them, we subconsciously trust in them to cure us.
It may seem I'm drawing a very thin line here between "trust" and "belief", but without trust - like respect - we are missing a key component in achieving our life desires. We may believe that life is beautiful, but if we don't trust life to bring that beauty into our lives, it isn't going to happen.
The same goes for romantic love; we often misinterpret the belief that there is only one person that truly belongs with us - because we feel it must mean that we need to be lucky enough to select "the one" out of the millions of people in the world, which we have the opportunity to meet and grow and learn from with dignity and appreciation.
This can be problematic, because we rarely trust luck, especially in love. Subsequently, however much we may belief in there being "one" person out there for us, the twin to the flame that burns in us, we don't trust ourselves enough to find it. And every relationship we go through that doesn't work out we treat as evidence that "the one" doesn't exist, destroying our trust and chipping away at our innate belief that there is a perfect partner unique to us out in the world.
You would think it would be a fairly organic process that goes without much conscious effort on your part, where the first step to falling in love would be to find someone attractive to you, but the chances are we have had our notions of physical beauty warped by living in a society laden with unrealistic, ideal images that raise our expectations to unsustainable heights, while simultaneously making your feel inferior. Statistically it is safe to assume we are not going to look like the celebrities we drool after, hinting that somehow don't match up. No wonder many of us don't know what to do when we meet someone we fancy in real life.
Get down and dirty with love
We want that the first rush of romance, the notion of love at first sight; we don't want to spend time to invest in a relationship, to nurture it to full bloom, where a couple's psychic ability to read each other's thoughts comes from a genuine understanding that has grown over years of togetherness. We expect the grand gesture (which many stalkers seem great at) of doing crazy things to woo us, but it's hard to get away with this in real life, when we want to act on our desires to access someone else's heart or sexual organs.
We jump into bed with one another without building the requisite trust, and unknowingly damage ourselves, destroying our belief and trust in ourselves, and closing off our lines of communication to our heart, and its true desires. We can feel temporarily sensually alive, like taking an aspirin to dull a headache, but it doesn't cure the pain. Likewise, we have put our trust in sex, rather than love, in the misguided belief that sex equates with loving communication, when really loving communication should equate with sex.
Abusing sex in this way is an exploitation of human frailty; some believe we all need to satisfy what some see as just a biological urge to procreate, or use sexual attraction to put an end to the painful loneliness of existence by getting someone to lust after us. We want people to flock to us like plankton or wrestle us for a space in the bedroom, or for attraction to be immediate like in the movies, rather than the real life cautious counterparts we experience when we tentatively try to catch someone's attention.
Studies have shown that both men and women are attracted by physical beauty, although not for the same reasons, but it is true that for many of us sex is a primal drive. It feels impossible to see a man and woman together without internally speculating whether they are having sex or not, because we have been programmed to think everyone is either doing it, or wants to be doing it.
Although we are all unique, we all share mutations of genes and evolutionary instinct common to our species, and sex is only a chapter in a much bigger and more important story. But sex seems hard-wired into the brain. This has been highlighted by Amsterdam-based photographers Blommers and Niels Schumm, who started working together in 1998. They operate in a zone between fashion, art and photography, with shifting perspectives, where images move back and forth between different meanings. In a shoot for Baron Magazine, Blommers and Schumm made normal objects appear erotic (see left).
If we imagine our mental landscape as a map, somewhere down the line sex will be prominently marked on it. We think about sex all the time, but it's said that a man thinks about sex more than a woman; researchers from Ohio State University say the average man thinks about sex 20 times a day or less. Contrary to popular belief, the people who think about sex most of all tend to be people who are comfortable with the idea of sexuality itself.
Traditionally this is the domain of the male, because it is believed that they must make the first move; many now try to gauge a girl's interest via Facebook, noticing their relationship status, or trawling through the pictures for any signs of a male competing for her affections. If their advances are accepted, they will enter into another person's intimacy, but they are wired to believe theirs is a small window of opportunity. If they do nothing, they fear they might run the risk if being relegated into the friend zone.
And it is not just men that feel rushed, as though time is of the essence. We want love, and we want it NOW. But trust takes time. Often during the initial stages of romance, we are so desperate to be liked by the person opposite us as a three-dimensional human being, that we will sometimes tell ridiculous lies to pretend that you have something in common apart from your common addiction to oxygen and to sex. But the two key components of true love are honesty and respect; these are two absolutes.
The problem is you're both doing this lying game, and once the first rush of lust is over, you're left with two people who covertly pretended to be two slightly different people fused together - which may not be noticeable in the first stages of heightened passion. Mistrustful of any notions of true love, we start to care about people because they fulfil a role in our life - they may make us feel secure or comfortable. And if we don't have the same insane level of desire than we feel let down, because we've come to expect that sex needs to be a wild, untamed, passionate expression of primal lust.
Sexual imagery is everywhere; and not all of it is healthy. In my country, internet firms are to meet with the British government amid calls for more to be done to block images of child sex abuse and to stop children viewing pornography and getting caught up in the dark net. Children are the adults of the future, and fractured relationships create an ever fractured society of individuals who don't know how to treat each other in or out of the bed.
On the sex continuum we all have fantasies, and acting these out in a trusting relationship can add some spice to your sex life, but there are many fantasies that we should not act out, either. It is healthy for a brain to fantasise without limits, and porn can be an aid to that, and most of us are wired correctly not to act out on those fantasies. However, without the correct education, violent porn can corrupt and distort how we should treat our partner in real life.
The rapacity of sexual sadism that can arise does not mean minds are being trained to be devoid of emotion towards another human being. Sometimes it's the reverse; the sexual sadist feeds off the emotion sexual violence brings - blind panic, abject terror - and a sadist can feel their victim's pain acutely. It's just that the sadist gets pleasure from it. If this is a consensual agreement between responsible, well-educated adults, and both get pleasure from such a relationship, then some believe it can have its fair share of good qualities.
I don't judge anyone's lifestyle, and I am not so ignorant to believe that what is not right for me, will not be acceptable to someone else, but I am of the opinion that anything negative will eventually bring about an erosion of the respect necessary for a healthy relationship. Just because something might have a few benefits, doesn't make it beneficial in the long run. Even a multiple murderer can have his or her fair share of good qualities, be a loving family member, or hide behind a pretty face, but that doesn't excuse the destructive tendencies that have the potential to destroy lives.
Without the requisite education. much of what we view as entertainment has the potential to also educate our actions. The results are not always as severe as the news of a 13-year-old boy charged with second-degree murder over the death of his five-year-old half-sister after he repeatedly struck her with wrestling moves imitated from television, but some experts believe it does have a measurable influence on our behaviour.
Read how television affects young minds.
The way relationships are portrayed on screen might also have an effect. We love films that show love as the warmth of the relationships, but most fictional romances finish at the point of sexual consummation, while long term couples are usually portrayed as bickering comedic duos. Pretty soon, fed on such an unrealistic diet, love becomes like the flu - people think they are experiencing it but more often its just a cold. But they only realise it was just a cold years later when they finally catch the flu for real.
But despite this erotic bombardment, neither should we go too much the opposite way, where we think love must be completely "vanilla" - all roses and sweet wine - and that there will not be challenges along the way. A relationship doesn't end with the on screen kiss, nor is it perfected by any dress rehearsal. Previous relationships show us what we don't want, and spur us on to find "the one", but nothing can really prepare you it when it happens. And when twin flame experts talk about the abstract, mystical aspects, this doesn't mean twin flame lovers will not face their share of challenges.
The science of twin flame love is that its eternal energy is housed in the constraints of a physical relationship, like a mind inside a brain that lives within a body. Even though the physical aspect brings with it certain limitations, it is also the only way the energy can express itself in the unique coupling of two individuals. As individuals, however, we are programmed by our previous relationships and by society to mistrust and ignore the signals that would guide us to what we desire.
We are afraid to show our hearts, we use our appearance and clothes to express values and emotions rather than our actions, and we try to emulate the sex and relationships we see on screen. When relationships go wrong, or we instinctively feel unhappy in them, we often link it immediately to sex. We think the boredom stems from our sexual intercourse, so we try to break the monotony and have sex on Tuesday, or have extra-marital affairs, wondering what happened to the initial attraction that filled us with such lust?
Research suggests that the first blossoming of love is accompanied by an increase in levels of the protein known as nerve growth factor or NGF, which is thought to provoke butterflies in the stomach, sweaty palms, and euphoria. But NGF levels subside once a couple has been together for about a year, after which point you're lucky if that exhilarating rush of lust is transformed into a bond of loving companionship.
Time to get real with love
But misconceptions can also wrongly guide us in relationships. Finding the perfect partner for you does not mean being in love will be "perfect", and yet we imagine that searching for "the one" perpetuates the myth of the perfect relationship - when it does no such thing. True love doesn't mean grand gestures and rampant sex, or mistaking jealously for caring, or the false idea of the "perfect" soulmate which a flawed human partner simply can't match up to.
Fulfilling twin flame relationships.
True love is tolerance - it's the ability to share one fridge for a lifetime without resorting to violence. Affection is important, too. Unless you cultivate a meaningful, unshowy love for each other, the science suggests once the NGF goes, the dull tedium of life will wear your union down. It's also about continually cultivating the sexual energy that follows uniquely through twin flame unions, tied together by the ribbon of unique frequency of their twin flame energy.
Twin flame experts suggest by harnessing its energy we can vanquish the demons, chase away the "loneliness", we reach a higher plane where the spiritual, emotional and physical healing can begin, while others suggest that we need to achieve this by ourself before we can be open to receive love which is in effect the transcendence of the spirit. Some of us learn better "on the job", while others need prior training - so it will be unique to the individuals, but whatever the method, we need to be open to the possibility of true love.
Many things are possible, said the sage, but what is probable? Whether love is a symbiosis of souls, an amalgamation of destiny, or simply being able to live together in quiet harmony, placed in the wrong context, love can sound like being cell mates, when the emotional rocket fuel that launched you into this space is expended. You drown in your stagnant relationship, anaesthetised almost, having forgotten how to communicate or never having quite managed to stare into each other's souls. There is no momentum left, so what do you do?
If you're relationship is teetering on the brink of collapse, dignity may seem an unrealistic televised affair, but it can be done. Why should we try and end something with dignity? Because forgiveness offers us closure, doesn't add to the regret, and if we do come to an end of a destructive relationship, it is a process we can use to know what doesn't make us happy in our search for what will. These relationships that are destructive - which some call karmic and are believed to have the purpose of ultimately leading us to true love - need to be released on their own cognisance, and not adding to the blame which serves no one, least of all the innocent parties.
Generally, we need to treat all our relationships with respect, because - in time - it may help us ensure we have not lost a potentially good friend. Not every relationship will be destructive, and we could meet soul mates along the way. Much has been written about soul mates; it's believed you have a number of soul mates but there is only one twin flame for you in this lifetime.
What's the difference between soul mates and a twin flame?
Nevertheless, a real life break-up is a real personal tragedy, one of the worse things that can ever happen to you, overshadowing anything else. You may feel that you have to step back on the dating treadmill and go through the entire dispirited process all over again - trying to find someone attractive, going on dates, sharing your feelings, having sex, and all because of the desperation to find the one, which we have turned into a mythical impossibility. We begin to believe that "the one" is probably someone who never existed in the first place, which means, if you're very lucky, you'll wind up feeling as though you're just settling with someone.
Love can be a refuge but we shouldn't treat it as a refuge, else you'll find yourself locked in a chain of ongoing frequent sexual meetings that's never going to develop into true love, because there isn't enough respect in the union. You can be as close as close with someone as two mammals could ever be, but just see one another as sharing the same sexual market value embarking on this unrewarding cycle. The requisite levels of mutual trust are not there to concede our bodies to one another, and yet we do it to escape our respective states of loneliness for a while.
Heal your loneliness with love.
However, loneliness is a state of soul and mind; it's hype that single people have to be lonely. Indeed even if we see being single as a negative, every negative episode in our lives is really a step towards wisdom. During such times we can be productive, heal everything that is in the way of attracting our twin flame. If we are so inclined, we can seek out ways to use energy work to heal our karma and release ancient contracts and agreements that are in the way of us going forward in a relationship in a healthy way.
Everyone has experienced traumatic endings in relationships. Healing those will make life easier and the soul more amenable to attracting the one for you. Releasing doesn't necessarily mean reliving traumas. It can just be about acceptance and letting go; the most important thing to understand is that taking responsibility for your life doesn't mean apportioning blame - to you or anyone else.
Some believe a major part of this stems from the evidence that our family's history with relationships are engrained in our DNA and our energy field. Look at other relationships within your family; do you see any patterns emerging? Thus, when we can start to rewrite our outlook - when we are healed from within - great relationships are available. It is time to let go of everything that is in your energy field and DNA that is in the way of both attracting your twin flame and your ability to have a healthy, loving relationship with him or her.
Science shows us we are not doomed by our genes; we are marvels of adaptability. We are not hard-wired to be a certain way for the rest of our lives. However, there is a caveat. If you think the same thoughts, make the same choices that creates the same behaviours that produce the same experiences that create the same emotions, and those emotions drive the same thoughts, you will hard-wire your brain and emotionally condition your body, which signals the same genes in the same way.
This is how you're headed for your genetic destiny, but these conditions need not apply for a beautiful life. Life is inherently beautiful; we just need to know how to grab a piece of it for ourselves, by realising we already have it in our own hands.
Time to glow with life
Tips for a beautiful life: 1. Use humour 2. Live fully 3. Express yourself
Your biology is a reflection of your mind and your consciousness. In this way, the process of evolution requires us to see that new thoughts should lead to new choices, which should lead to new behaviours which should create new experiences that create new emotions. This will help, for example, for us to change negative childhood experiences that have had a particular emotional charge for us into something more empowering in adulthood rather than those thoughts self-sabotaging our success in life.
The experts tell us that feelings and emotions are the end product of past experience; we remember experiences better because we can remember how we feel. All your senses plug you into your environment, and as your brain is gathering all the vital sensory data the moment it hits your brain, it organises into networks, and the brain makes a chemical we call a feeling or emotion.
Thus, the theory goes if you can't think greater than how you feel or feelings become your thinking, then you are literally thinking in your past, and you will continue to observe your life from the same level of mind, and you will continuously create your past. When children have experiences in their life that brand them emotionally, they lay the foundation for who they will be, burying their authentic self under the layers thrown over them by a society of their peers and "betters".
In the United Kingdom, 75% of mental health disorders originate in adolescence. Depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts are now common place among young people. Too many schools appear to prioritise academic results above the emotional well-being of their pupils, without seeming to appreciate that the former rely on the latter. We are rarely open enough to talk about our feelings in British society, we are told to "just get on with it".
The stiff upper lip was arguably indispensable in the 20th Century. Talking about our emotions may not have helped in times of world war and widespread carnage. But the world has changed. The stiff upper lip is a deformity and it's causing so much damage. Today, however, not just children, but as adults we can plug ourselves into the external world to distract us from how we feel, and by ignoring our feelings we are ignoring our authentic self.
Experts tell us that the experiences in our life that are very highly charged have an amplitude of energy. This causes circuitry in the brain to be patterned, and emotions to be conditioned in the body. In order to change some belief or perception about yourself and your life, you have to make a decision with such firm intention, that the amplitude of that decision, is greater than the hard-wired programming in your brain and the emotional addiction in your body.
Simply put, you have to feel more about wanting to change, than the fear you can't change. As already mentioned, this isn't necessarily about belief - although in the first instance it helps, but to maintain successful change, you need to build trust. Trust is a choice, and that choice has to be an experience you never forget, one that reshapes the brain and reconditions the body. Bad habits, feelings and negative thought patterns can sometimes be so difficult to break, but any step-by-step process of transforming from your "old self" to your "new self" needs to build up trust in yourself, and in the beauty of life.
Click here to change 6 negative habits.
Your personality creates your personal reality. Your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel. So your present personality has created a present personal reality called your life, which means if you want to create a new personal reality, then on a fundamental level you have to examine the thoughts you've been thinking to see if you want to bring them into your future. And then you need to choose the thoughts you do want to put into your mind, what behaviours or habits keep you in your past and decide what behaviours you want to demonstrate in your present life.
In effect when something becomes a habit, the body becomes your mind. So 95% of us, when we reach adulthood are a set of memorised behaviours, beliefs, perceptions, emotional reactions, attitudes, which function like an automatic computer programme. You can think positively all you like with the 5% of your conscious mind, but if you've been feeling negatively for the past 25 years, then your mind and body will act in opposition to one another, rather than in tandem, and thus unconsciously sabotaging your future.
It is believed that as the body goes through a cycle of thinking-feeling, feeling-thinking the body becomes the mind, you work like an automaton. So experts suggest that, although you must start from as positive stance, you must also address the thoughts, behaviours and emotions that went before. When we become sufficiently and consciously aware of these so as not to allow ourselves to act on them to sabotage our new behaviours, our old ways will eventually die out. Nerve processes that no longer fire together, no longer wire together, and those old pathways in the brain become dormant.
Click here to rewire your mindset for success!
Thoughts are the language of the brain, feelings are the language of the body - how you think and feel creates your state of being - a happy thought produces the requisite level of mind to produce a chemical for a feeling of happiness, the mind has to be in constant communication with the body. Thus to change we need to combine clear intention with elevated emotion and - like our sexual tastes - most human emotions exist on a kind of continuum.
For example, people talk about a lack of empathy, but we all have limits to our empathy. Some people are profoundly moved by children starving on the other side of the world and some people it barely touches. For them, things need to be literally closer to home. We all react differently to the same circumstances, but the trick is to react authentically and honestly.
Subsequently, we need to question ourselves as the body goes through the cycle of thinking-feeling, feeling-thinking refusing to allow the body to replace the mind. Experts suggest that, although you must start from as positive stance, you must also address the thoughts, behaviours and emotions that went before. When we become sufficiently and consciously aware of these so as not to allow ourselves to act on them to sabotage our new behaviours, our old ways will eventually die out. Nerve processes that no longer fire together in the brain, no longer wire together, and those old pathways in our heads become dormant.
Click here to rewire your mindset for success!
When your breaking the chemical continuity of how you're thinking and feeling, the body signals back to the brain to sabotage you to turn back to the old habits. This happens not only because the unknown is uncomfortable, but because we trust what has gone before. Trusting in the unknown is hard. Moreover, the body as the mind will want to revert back to what it is used to doing to get back in control, because it has been trained that way. We are not really fighting against our self, as we fight the training we had no control over as a child, we are becoming familiar with our authentic self.
It's about breaking the chain of acting in an unthinking, unfeeling way, and getting to know your emotions and the thoughts that give rise to them. When we become conscious of our unconscious thoughts, we are no longer reflections of our past experiences or those emotions or habits that keep us connected to the past. Meditation is used as a way to connect and communicate with self, and indeed the origin of the word is about becoming familiar with self.
Read about the power of meditation.
When we can achieve this way of living, we can do away with the necessity to ask whether it's the environment that controls how you think or feel, or how you think or feel that controls your environment. In the same way, we don't need to ask whether we can use twin flame love as a way to you find your authentic self, or whether finding your authentic self is the way to twin flame love - because in either instance, the point is we need to build up our trust in it. It also connects us with the universality of feelings, how human beings have across the centuries all succumbed to their ambitions, fears, passions, triumphs and tragedies.
Historians use the past lives of people because their stories take us to the heart of the times they inhabited, of the history they shaped, and the societies they left behind them. If we could go back to any time or place in history, and see what those people saw, and under and appreciate what they felt, we would discover these are recurring human themes that tell us a lot about the human race, and how we should feel about the world we live in today.
For many of us, it may seem a bit naive to say that life can be unconditionally beautiful. Almost every news report seems to reflect the opposite. They paint a picture of a world where meteorological experts warn us over the increase in unusual weather patterns, while governments are more interested in tax collection as every 10 seconds a child dies of hunger in a world where there is enough food for everyone, but not everyone has enough food. Where is the beauty in that? How does that fit into the colourful vision we, the positive minded, have of our universe?
How are we expected to glow with life, when we see mistrust all around us? As so-called professionals breach trust, our governments spy on one another, and oppress the people that vote them in, how are we meant to act any differently? When this is turning into a dark and nervous summer for peace, upsetting the delicate balance of power between different religious groups across the world, and air pollution is rising to record levels in city-states, how can we take the time to breathe easy?
Rather than providing solace, our virtual world has also become a place of danger and prejudice. A low-cost ideology has replaced high quality, we replicate errors, accept things too readily, give away our privacy at the click of a button. We bully through social networks, hack each other's webcams to spy on them, reminding us how important it is to be aware. But when we become a slave to the wrong desires, rather than trying to discover the true desires of the heart, how can we expect to see beauty in the life we live?
In our age, the desire to better our lives gives no guarantees, indeed happiness never gives us guarantees - it is the old life of unhappiness which we can trust - and which stories like the above reinforce, it holds a steadfast guarantee that we can definitely believe in. That is why we often revert back to our old ways, because we trust it - even when we are consciously aware it is to our own detriment.
Yet, life is not about hiding away and waiting for the storms to pass. It is about learning to dance in the rain - a lesson that when we manage to master will lead us to be a part of the beauty of the world with more determination that to hide away from it. Because life IS beautiful - each age had its own magnificent achievements and splendour, and its share of uncertainty and doubt, what matters is how we communicate with life.
In this respect, witnessing our age, and understanding it is something quite different. In my "Love is Communication" series, I touched upon the "golden age" of the Elizabethan era, but for the men and women of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it wasn't a golden age. It was simply the world they inhabited, with all its challenges. The majority of people outside of London wouldn't have heard of the playwright William Shakespeare, yet, or knew that England was on the cusp of becoming a global power.
The uncertainty of life, and the even greater uncertainty of the future, meant their lives were full of wonder and terror, pleasure and pain, tears and laughter - everything that we all experience, whatever age we live in. Back then, as now, we still struggle with disease, bellicosity, violence (including age-old misogyny and male violence against women) and superstition, but we still counter these with peace, wisdom, wit and beauty, too.
Money, appearance, security - there are many different realities of our own era, from the abject lives of the poor, to the sumptuous homes of the rich, and the exciting world of emerging innovation. Science and art helps to give the chaos of the world an order - even if it is one that doesn't exist - but they are methods of survival, too. The art to survival is to trust in the actuality that life is worth it; it dignifies what we do.
It also illustrates that we set our own conditions for our happiness. But at the same time it means that those conditions need not apply. We live in a world that previous centuries will have recognised in some ways, we still have sickness and suffering, and we still go after power and glory. However, the universal bonds of our humanity, our potential for empathy, our tears, feelings and laughter would be recognisable by all - with love the most important quality, the true evidence of the beauty of life.
Yours in love,
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