Here’s a funny story that made me laugh out loud. How to help your old man dig his potato garden if you are in prison?

The solution is simple, but most of us would never think of it.

An old man lived alone in the country. He wanted to dig his potato garden but it was very hard work as the ground was hard. His only son Fred, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.

Dear Fred,
I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my potato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here, all my troubles would be over I know you would dig the plot for me.
Love,
Dad

A few days later he received a letter from his son.

Dear Dad,
For heaven's sake, don't dig up that garden! That's where I buried the BODIES!
Love,
Fred

At 4am the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Dad,
Go ahead and plant the potatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love,
Fred

This story isn’t just fun, it also carries an important message: there is always a way!

If Fred managed to find a way to dig his dad’s garden from within the walls of his prison, then imagine what you can do, with so much freedom on your hands! It’s not impossible for you to become the next Bill Gates or to travel in space.

Whatever your dream is, there is always a way to achieve it. Just look around and you’ll find it. If a prisoner and a snail have achieved things that seemed impossible, then impossible is nothing!

Keep moving forward and start looking around!

I’ve seen a lot of people writing about what they wish they had known when they where younger. This type of post / question seems to be very popular these days. It is often used to emphasize the level of knowledge and wisdom that a person has reached.

While I find that to be informative and interesting, I think that there is a far more interesting issue to be covered. And that is the opposite of the “what do you wish you had learned at an earlier age” question.

What do you know in the present and wish to remember – and believe in – ten years from now?

While the past is an important learning tool, I don’t pay too much attention to it. What happened happened. I enjoy living in the present and staring at the future.

There are so many concepts, ideas, tips and philosophies that are so useful and I wish I could remember them my whole life.

For example, people tend to assume higher risks in their twenties and lower risks in their thirties and later on. This leads to smaller success rates (in everything they do) and less satisfactions. I don’t want to give up risk-taking.

Also, people have a much higher confidence in their powers and are better at living in the moment when young.

Getting old usually means getting weaker, in all aspects. Mainly because you abandon your belief in most of the things you believed in as a young person.

Here are some things that I wish to remember and believe in, as I grow older:

• Life is made to be wonderful. Even the problems are good! They represent challenges, and facing a difficult challenge should always be exciting! “In the middle of a difficulty lies opportunity”, said Albert Einstein. Only a weak personality give up in front of an important challenge; I don’t want to be weak, you don’t want to be weak, no one wants that. I want to be able to keep my current positive attitude!
• Smiling is a good habit. First impressions are very important, and a person’s smile is the window to that impression, with either a happy warm positive smile or a sad sheepish withdrawn one. In a recent study 92% of the people polled thought that a person’s smile can affect their careers. A beautiful positive smile makes people listen to you and respond in a positive way. It also influences your state of mind. Smiling doesn’t have to be abandoned as you grow older, on the contrary.
• Learning never stops and an open mind is crucial in the process. Science and knowledge are subject to changes and evolutions over time. A good example is the old theory the neurons cannot regenerate and that we are stuck with the number we were born with. That has been proven to be false. Princeton psychologist Elizabeth Gould has shown that neurons can regenerate. The reason this hadn’t been observed before is that the animals studied lived out their short lives in plain laboratory metal cages – this is like trying to get to a balanced understanding of human organisms by studying only the inmates of Auschwitz – . There is a large number of – mostly old – people that don’t want to accept this new theory, even if it’s obvious that it is true. I don’t want my thinking to become rigid as I grow older.
• One can live without (usual) job. I never considered having a boss, I never visualized myself as an employee. I’m 20 years old and until now I haven’t worked for a day in my life (for a stranger that is). I worked as a DJ for a while but together with some friends I rented the club in which I played, so I was my own boss. There are many ways to earn a living without sacrificing time and life for some corporation. I always stayed away from “normal” jobs.
• “The excitement of learning separates youth from old age. As long as you’re learning you’re not old.” – Rosalyn S. Yalow. This is somewhat connected with point number three. At this stage in my life the excitement of learning is at it’s peak, and I want to keep it close to this point for as long as possible.
• “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” – George Eliot. No comment on this one, the quote says it all too well.

These are some of the most important lessons that I’ve learned to this date, and I think that keeping them in my mind as I get older is very important.

I’m certain that each of you also have some things that you consider as being crucial to keep in mind for the future. Care to share them with other people? Please do, we might all learn something! The comments are all yours.

I’ve just been interviewed by John Allison from Technology for Living. The interview contained eight well-thought questions and it should come online on his site in a short while can be found here, be sure to check it.

These are the questions he asked me:

1. What led you to start your blog?
2. What do you hope to achieve?
3. What have you learned in your blogging experience?
4. It is obvious that you’re well-read in philosophy. What led you to that?
5. What is your current “quest”?
6. What do you wish you had learned earlier?
7. If you had one thing that you could get across to people, one thing that you could teach them, what would it be?
8. What do you see on the horizon?

If you’re interested in my answers to these questions, you should visit John’s blog, because I will post only one of my answers here. The answer to question number six. Here it is.

John: What do you wish you had learned earlier?

Titus-Armand: This is a bit funny, because people my age (19-20) aren’t usually asked this question too often.

But there are five main things that I wish I had learned earlier in life:

1. Fear is the biggest enemy of success;
2. Every moment of life is wonderful;
3. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” – William Shakespeare;
4. I am my biggest enemy and also my best friend;
5. Impossible is nothing but a limit created by human minds in order to stop the masses from achieving great things.

I’ll start this by saying that today I got back on my old habit of helping other people.

It’s been some time since the last time I got out of the house to help someone on a problem. The reason for that is because in the past 7 months or so I’ve been reading lots of books and other materials on business, and a point that is repeated very often in them is about the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule). It states that for many events, 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes.

I kinda took it too seriously (and slightly misused it) and slowly stopped helping others, because I was doing it for free and there weren’t any material results involved; it was bad for business.

But because helping others was an activity that I enjoyed doing and it always offered me great amounts of energy, after stopping I started to feel a little strange, de-motivated.

I didn’t fully realize it what it was that I was missing until today.

As I write this post, I just returned from someone who’s now a friend of mine.

I was at his place, working to set up his DSL internet connection, because in my town the Internet Service Provider doesn’t send a technician to do it for you. It isn’t a complicated thing, but if you have a faulty Windows installation, no driver for the network adapter, no DSL splitter and no technical knowledge, things are very complicated.

Anyway, it took me 4 hours to get it done. I didn’t get any money out of it, but I got something way more valuable than that.

I got a lot of energy, a new friend, and I haven’t felt so alive and motivated in a very long time!

The pleasure and joy that a person experiences when (or after) helping someone is a natural motivator. Most of us feel good knowing that we brightened someone’s day or helped someone solve a problem.

Helping others is also the best way to make new contacts and friends.

Putting the interests of others before your own interests helps in cleansing the mind soul and buoys your sense of altruism.

Helping others elevates the self and summons up the individual connection to the common good that lurks in the heart of almost everyone.

Initially I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it, because time is scarce, but I’m really happy I did it! The only minor problem is that I might get too hooked on this and pay less attention to my other activities. But I’m not worried.

If each of us will make the activity of helping others a conscious daily goal, the world would be a much MUCH better place as soon as the end of this year. Other than that, when you’ll get old and you’ll review your life, even if you didn’t manage to get featured on an episode of The Simpsons or to become a millionaire, you’ll feel confident knowing that your life mattered and you made a difference on this Earth. It mattered because you were able to help others.

That is the greatest feeling of all!

“Dostoyevsky once let drop the enigmatic phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time it used to seem to me that this was a mere phrase. Just how could such a thing be possible? When had it ever happened in the bloodthirsty course of history that beauty had saved anyone from anything? Beauty had provided embellishment certainly, given uplift—but whom had it ever saved?” – Beauty Will Save the World: The Nobel Lecture on Literature by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Beauty will save the world” isn’t just a simple sentence that tries to look philosophical, it is much more than that. It’s a prophecy that has come to happen these very days. In the following lines I’ll explain that, without emphasizing the importance of beauty in the Byzantine spirituality.

But first, we must take a look at the ancient trinity of ideals that Plato and Aristotle captivated the ancient world with - Truth, Good and Beauty. What do human beings need in order to embrace the good, the true and the beautiful? One area of the ancient philosophical debates zeroed in on the role of the artist.

Do artists lead people to the good life or cause them to go astray? Do artists lead the world into decline with their representations of reality, or do they lead individuals to goodness, truth and beauty?

One artist imagines himself the creator of an independent spiritual world and takes on his shoulders the act of creating that world and its population, assuming total responsibility for it — but he stumbles and breaks down because there is no mortal genius capable of bearing such a load; just like man, who once declared himself the center of all existence but was incapable of creating a balanced spiritual system. And then, when failure occurs, it is all blamed on the external disharmony of the world, on the complexity of the shattered contemporary soul, or the stupidity of the public. 

Beauty is commonly defined as a characteristic present in a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction to the mind or to the eyes, arising from sensory manifestations such as a shape, color, personality, sound, design or rhythm. The subjective experience of “beauty” often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being. In its most profound sense, beauty may engender a salient experience of positive reflection about the meaning of one’s own existence. An “object of beauty” is anything that reveals or resonates with personal meaning. Hence religious and moral teachings often focus on the divinity and virtue of beauty, and assert natural beauty as an aspect of a spirituality and truth. ~ Wikipedia 

Truth, Good and Beauty

The trinity represented by Truth, Good and Beauty isn’t just a dry philosophical formula.

If the crests of these three trees (Truth, Good and Beauty) join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light — yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.

In the present times, we are witnessing a fight against this trinity. And the heaviest fight is the one against Truth.

This fight is best illustrated by USA’s Bush administration. While the War on Terrorism is used to dominate the attention of the public, the administration is fighting in a covert war. A War on Science, a war on Truth.

The US administration has used suppression, distortion, and junk science to mislead the public on issues as far-ranging as abortion, geology and pharmaceuticals. A statement signed by more than 6,000 scientists, 48 of whom are Nobel laureates, asserts that:

“other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front.” 

At the center of this fight against Truth lies the protection of corporate interests and a conservative ideology. And the United States administration isn’t the only one that engages in such activities. More than that, this also happens at different scales everywhere in the world.

The Great Escape 

Out of the three ideals (Truth, Good and Beauty), one remains unpredictible, unexpected, hard to fight, deep rooted and always full of surprises. Beauty.

Given its magical nature it cannot be controlled to the same degree that Truth and Good are. It is too unique and too powerful. Beauty restores your trust in the world, it has the power to “corrupt” decisions and ideas, it has the power to change lives and to interrupt your habitual forms of reaction to world events (fear, anger, etc) and to provide a path to help you find the hope within yourself. And it is within the power of Beauty to perfom the work of both Truth and Good.

While everyone is delighted by Beauty, only a few are explicitly aware that “you can recognize Truth by its Beauty and simplicity” ~ Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics.

“Wisdom is the sum of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.” ~ William Shakespeare

Given that Beauty can be used in discovering the Truth and finding the Good, and it can’t be fought, I think Dostoyevsky was right, beauty will save the world! It already saved us countless times, and it continues to do so, even if we don’t want to notice it.

In the end, one thing I know for sure. And that is the fact that Beauty - in the form of music - saved me!