Last night there was a power failure in my neighborhood. I was writing some emails on my desktop computer when all of sudden the power went down. Total darkness followed. And because the hour was pretty late (3 in the morning) I decided not to wait until the power comes back and I have gone to sleep.

But getting to sleep meant getting to the bedroom, and even though I don’t live in a huge apartment, getting from one room to another can be a tricky business if the visual sense can’t help.

I managed to reach the bedroom without too much trouble, but stumbling around in the darkness, without any visual sense of direction, has been a challenge…

We all know that our brain gets rusty if we don’t challenge it too often. If you, like me, aren’t too fond of geeky sudoku or crossword puzzles, you should want to mix up your daily routines and make a challenge out of ordinary things.

In this post I initially planned to talk about the benefits that different opinions present to society. But I had a slight change of mind after stumbling upon a brilliant independent short film on choice.

Black Button

Mr Roberts finds himself awoken inexplicably in a white room. A man sits before him at a desk and in between them stands a black button. If Mr Roberts pushes it, he will receive a briefcase filled with millions of dollars. Or he can take the key to the door and leave penniless. The catch? Pushing the button will result in the death of a human being.

No one in this world, as far as I know … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. – H. L. Mencken
The worst things in history have happened when people stop thinking for themselves. – Donald Trump

Lately I’ve become very skeptical about the self help industry. Most of the self help books that I’ve seen talk about things that everyone already knows and the few that don’t do that usually take the dangerous path of simply lying to their readers – very dangerous lies.

Reading that you can do everything you want by yourself, in a society based on teamwork, is wrong & dangerous as it discourages consciousness and encourages narcissism. Only a few of us could get food on the table if it weren’t for others, but they teach you that you can earn enough money to buy a 20+ million villa in Maui without help from anyone else. The sick society that this idea creates is too scary to even talk about here.

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose. – Woody Allen
A good, real, unrestrained, hearty laugh is a sort of glorified internal massage, performed rapidly and automatically. It manipulates and revitalizes corners and unexplored crannies of the system that are unresponsive to most other exercise methods. - Author unknown, from an editorial in New York Tribune, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren

Whether it’s the giggling of a child or the enthusiastic hollers of a talk show’s studio audience, we hear laughter every day. And we love hearing it, because we all love to laugh!

As a motor reflex, laughter is usually present by the time a child is 4 months old, and the instinctual development of smiling and laughing very early in life suggest a high level of importance.

Laughter ringing, laughter pealing, laughter roaring, laughter bubbling. Chuckling. Giggling. Snickering. Snorting. These are the sounds of soul saving laughter which springs from our emotional core and helps us feel better, see things more clearly and creatively weigh and use our options. Laughter is an incredible gift in many aspects, both psychological and spiritual.

Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life – Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work everyday some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. Be aware of wonder. – Robert Fulghum , “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten”

Remember kindergarten? You know, the good old days of naps, fingerpainting, playtime, milk and cookies and learning the basics? How long has it been since you have been to kindergarten? If you’re on this page, reading this post, I think it’s a safe assumption to say that it’s been awhile… And while the kindergarten memories can accompany you for your whole life, people usually forget the basic lessons learned in those blissful, carefree years.

I have a lot of memories from my kindergarten years. A lot of friends I had back in kindergarten are still some of my closest peeps. I feel I have their back no matter what and they feel the same.

I remember one time when they took the swings away from us because one kid was swinging too high and for some reason he jumped off, straight into a wall…

I could probably write a whole book about my memories from the kindergarten years, but what I want to talk about here are the lessons learned back then. They are so simple and yet so easy to forget.