Privileged

It’s hard to recognise our privilege because we always take so many things for granted. Simply being able to read this post, while sitting in a first-world country, is by far the greatest privilege that we all have. Beyond this ignorance of living in the developed world there are so many smaller privileges that aren’t as obviously recognised and recently a wise random made me realise some I had.

Friendship Part 3 – Sentimentalism

The logic goes that as most of us, to some extent like ourselves, we tend to find our own traits desirable in others and so it is no surprise that we would seek such in our friendships . From experience though, the opposite can also hold true - someone too similar can be a cause for rivalry and hatred. In any case, sentimentalism is one of those values that I hold dear. I treasure most insignificant events as memories and hold on to them, maintaining my very own “boxes of memories” – scraps and bits from many events, scraps even as useless as old receipts or transport tickets.

Get Lucky

So if there's one phrase uttered more than any other between the messes and ramblings of stressed university students during this period of reflection, it would have to be "good luck". Good luck remembering the dribble you somehow learnt thirteen weeks ago. Good luck proving to the university that you know things even if you can't prove yourself with an open book in front of your eyes. Good luck to all those who are in the progress of questioning life itself, when existence seems like 300 pages of readings that were expected weeks ago.

Friendship Part 2 – Idealism

So now with geographical convenience out of the way, we can truly see who puts effort in to see us and vice versa, but where does this effort arise from. Why is it that we put effort into some and none into others? This is where differences between people come into play. This is, essentially, what makes you like someone. For me, one of the most important criteria is idealism. By idealism I simply mean the ability to think and discuss big.

Friendship Part 1 – Geographical Convenience

Friendship is perhaps one of the toughest things in life to try to understand, well actually people in general are the toughest things in life to understand, but platonic relationships are just more common than other types. I mean there is an entire show dedicated to showing how "friendship is magic" in which friendships are tried and tested every episode, and more of the essence of friendship is explained and understood. In any case, after a lengthy discussion with a good friend of mine, I put forward the question of criteria. Everyone selects their friends based on differently ideals and I think such ideals are important in the sort of friends you end up with. Due to the complexity of this issue I think I might actually, for once, make this a multi-part series on my thoughts into friendship.

Failure

If only life were so simple as to always ascend upwards and to be relentless in its constant reaffirmation of happiness for all - but life is rarely like this. For the bulk of us, it seems that life is one harsh defeat after another. As my sister always says: life is like a business cycle, going up and down periodically but in the long run, hopefully slowly rising towards happiness. A quote my good friend likes is by Confucius: “our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do”. How we deal with failure is a large part of life and i believe i can safely say that i do not deal well at all.

General Relativity

So it’s no doubt that Einstein was a genius, achieving so much for physics with his one grand notion that time itself was relative depending on your movement. He did far more than explain something that was physically accurate but also explained something that is psychologically true as well. When you are bored and not “moving” much, time seems to go at a snail’s pace as you stare at the second hand tick by, however when you are out and about having fun with friends, and “moving” - time seems to rush by and you wonder what happened to the last few hours. Funnily enough, psychologically, time is relative as an inverse of Einstein’s physical general relativity.