When we are stressed, our window to the world can be full of bricks, in the worst case, all we see is a plain wall. The good news is, you don’t have to be Jackie Chan (or Guy Kawasaki) to fight back your clear vision. Omar Al Rashid Bey wrote in the year 1912(!):
“You enter the room – and out of nothing evolves appearance, movement and design, body, character, strength, effectiveness, development, life in endless abundance and endless changes; from your feelings – the world.
Soon this room will appear to you large or small, high or low, light or dark, hot or cold, beautiful or ugly, or in any aspects desirable or undesirable to your senses, and every gradation between these opposites of your feelings. The ground on which you stand is under you, the ceiling you see above you, the portal through which you have entered is behind you, before you, giving wide views, the open bow, the closed wall here is to your left and that’s the right side of the room.
These are descriptions, judgments that seem indisputable – but when someone stands in front of you, he claims, the side that you refer to as the right one, is suddenly the left one for him and he says, the wall that you call the left , is now his right one. Judgments can not both be true: they are contradictory, are opposites that exclude each other, they cancel each other out.
Here happens the miracle that something with a specific attribute is used simultaneously with the opposite of the term. Who of the judges is right at the end? No one – or, if you want both. The wall is both right and left, also none of the two, neither left nor right.”
(from the German book “Das hohe Ziel der Erkenntnis”)
Deutsche Ãœbersetzung Continue reading “The Stress Window”
A poem I found at a wall, author (to me so far) unknown:
