Is your mind free?

The second best movie for me ever is “The Shawshank Redemption” (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Estates/2857/shawshank.html) – the first one is a Brazilian movie that does not fit well in this subject, so I’ll talk about it in another blog. But back to “The Shawshank Redemption”, it is a great movie – it shows how hope and freedom play an important role in the lives of human beings. I want to talk about Freedom here. Not the one used by politician to come up with artificial excuses for wars, nor the one worshiped by young fellows to justify having a purposeless life, where you can do whatever you want without a clear goal of where you want to be. No. I want talk about the inner Freedom which dwells in each one of us. Freedom of mind, Freedom of thoughts. Our mind is a fantastic machine, capable of producing marvelous things and horrible tragedies. But it sometimes can also be locked down in a prison. Negative thoughts can definitely become the walls of your mind. We all have been (or will go) thru bad experiences in our lives, and these experiences sometimes tend to crystallize around our brains making impossible for our minds to go beyond what happened, and achieving the truly Freedom. Bad experiences should never be forgotten, I agree, but they can’t preclude us from moving forward. What’s happened is past, and it does not exist anymore, it is all rooted in the tangled electromagnetic connections in your brain. Put them aside, keep them in a folder called “Past”, train your brain with that experience, and move on, move forward. One great book that is somewhat related to this subject is “The Endurance” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264578/): Captain Shackleton has just lost his ship in the middle of the Antarctic continent, without the proper equipment/food, and responsible for the lives of his entire crew. It does not get much worse than that, and this bad experience could have created an instantaneous wall around his brain which would result in a complete disaster. His aptitude, however, was memorable: “Friends, we lost our ship. Let’s now go back home”. And indeed, after 2 ½ years surviving in the worst conditions ever sustainable by human beings, not a single life was lost. Can we do the same? Can we say to ourselves: “Something bad happened in our lives. Let’s learn from it. Keep it aside – and now let’s move on!”. As Andy Dufresne says in one of the classic passages of The Shawshank Redemption: “Salvation lies within”. And so does Freedom.

Happiness

Do you have any secret to achieve fully happiness? I bet you do. Work hard, be a family guy, treat others fairly, help others here and there, have some wealth so you can buy things you ever wanted. Yeah, that may work. I think the secret for happiness, though, is to make others happier every day, and that’s it. I wish I could live every single day of my life based on this principle. Perhaps, that’s why I’m jotting it down now so I won’t forget it.