I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundreth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarreling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused. You will find that you have fewer years than you reckon. Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose; how few days have passed as you had planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore its natural expression; when your mind was undisturbed; what work you have achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely.

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's sizeBut when I start to tell them,They think I'm telling lies.I say,It's in the reach of my armsThe span of my hips,The stride of my step,The curl of my lips.I'm a womanPhenomenally.Phenomenal woman,That's me.I walk into a roomJust as cool as you please,And to a man,The fellows stand orFall down on their knees.Then they swarm around me,A hive of honey bees.I say,It's the fire in my eyes,And the flash of my teeth,The swing in my waist,And the joy in my feet.I'm a womanPhenomenally.Phenomenal woman,That's me.Men themselves have wonderedWhat they see in me.They try so muchBut they can't touchMy inner mystery.When I try to show themThey say they still can't see.I say,It's in the arch of my back,The sun of my smile,The ride of my breasts,The grace of my style.I'm a womanPhenomenally.Phenomenal woman,That's me.Now you understandJust why my head's not bowed.I don't shout or jump aboutOr have to talk real loud.When you see me passingIt ought to make you proud.I say,It's in the click of my heels,The bend of my hair,the palm of my hand,The need of my care,'Cause I'm a womanPhenomenally.Phenomenal woman,That's me.

I realise I have become something I never thought possible: patriotic and proud about being an adopted Italian. In more honest moments, I realise that I might never quite be able to leave the country. That longing to leave, and the inability to pull yourself away from the bel casino, the 'fine mess', has been written about for centuries. Using the usual prostitution metaphor, one of the country's most important patriots, Massimo D'Azeglio, wrote: 'I can't live outside Italy, which is strange because I continually get angry with Italian ineptitude, envies, ignorance and laziness. I'm like one of the people who falls in love with a prostitute.' That, in fact, is precisely the feeling of living here: it is infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to pull yourself away. It's not just that everything is troppo bello, 'too beautiful', or that food and conversation are so good. It's that life seems less exciting outside Italy, the emotions seem muted. Stendhal wrote that the feeling one gets from living in Italy is 'akin to that of being in love', and it's easy to understand what he meant. There's the same kind of enchantment and serenity, occasionally insecurity and sadness. And writing about the country's sharp pangs of jealousy and paranoia, Stendhal knew that they exist precisely because the country's 'joys are far more intense and more lasting'. You can't have one without the other.

Fate is a woman, I said to them. In fact, she is three women. Young, like us, so that they will have the courage to be cruel, having no weight of memory to teach temperance. Young, but so old, older than any stone. Their hair is silver, but full and long. Their eyes are black. But when they are at their work they become dogs, wolves, for they are hounds of death, and also hounds of joy. They take the strands of life in their jaws, and sometimes they are careful with their jagged teeth, and sometimes they are not. They gallop around a great monolith, the stone that pierces our Sphere where the meridians meet, that turns the Earth and pins it in place in the world. It is called the Spindle of Necessity, and all round it the wolves of fate run, and run, and run, and the patterns of their winding are the patterns of the world. Nothing can occur without them, but they take no sides. I could also say that there is such a stone, such a place, but the dogs who are women died long ago, and left the strands to fall, and we have been helpless ever since. That in a wolfless world we must find our own way. That is more comforting to me. I want my own way, I want to falter; I want to fail, and I want to be redeemed. All these things I want to spool out from the spindle that is me, not the spindle of the world. But I have heard both tales.

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same?

Thich Nhat Hanh. a venerated Vietnamese Buddhist, speaks of a solution that is so utterly simple it seems profane.Be, body and mind, exactly where you are. That is, practice a mindfulness that makes you aware of each moment. Think to yourself, "I am breathing" when you're breathing; "I am anxious" when you're anxious; even, "I am washing the dishes" when you're washing the dishes. To be totally into this moment is the goal of mindfulness. Right now is precious and shall never pass this way again.A wave is a precious moment, amplified: a dynamic natural sculpture that shall never pass this way again. Out interaction with waves - to be fully in the moment, without relationship troubles, bills, or worries - is what frees us. Each moment that we are fully with waves is evidence of our ability to live in the here and now. There is nothing else in the universe when you're making that elegant bottom turn.Here. Now. Simple, but so elusive. A wave demands your attention. It is very difficult to be somewhere else, in your mind, when there is such a gorgeous creation of nature moving your way. Just being close to a wave brings us closer to being mindful. To surf them is the training ground for mindfulness. The ocean can seem chaotic, like the world we live in. But somehow we're forced to slice through the noise - to paddle around and through the adversities of life and get directly to the joy. This is what we need for liberation.

Sorrow (A Song)To me this world's a dreary blank,All hopes in life are gone and fled,My high strung energies are sank,And all my blissful hopes lie dead.--The world once smiling to my view, Showed scenes of endless bliss and joy;The world I then but little knew,Ah! little knew how pleasures cloy;All then was jocund, all was gay,No thought beyond the present hour,I danced in pleasure’s fading ray,Fading alas! as drooping flower.Nor do the heedless in the throng,One thought beyond the morrow give,They court the feast, the dance, the song, Nor think how short their time to live.The heart that bears deep sorrow’s trace,What earthly comfort can console,It drags a dull and lengthened pace,'Till friendly death its woes enroll.--The sunken cheek, the humid eyes,E’en better than the tongue can tell;In whose sad breast deep sorrow lies,Where memory's rankling traces dwell.--The rising tear, the stifled sigh, A mind but ill at ease display,Like blackening clouds in stormy sky,Where fiercely vivid lightnings play.Thus when souls' energy is dead,When sorrow dims each earthly view, When every fairy hope is fled,We bid ungrateful world adieu.

If you try to convert someone, it will never be toeffect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals andendures them with the same impatience. You keepwatch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that areracking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged soulswhose faith comes down to a more or less deliberatetorment they would like to see generalized, instituted.The happiness of others never having been a motiveor principle of action, it is invoked only to appeaseconscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever wedetermine upon an action, the impulse leading to itand forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,and do so all the better if we disguise asconvictions the misery we want to share, to lavish onothers. However glamorous its appearances, proselytismnonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No oneis willing to endure alone the discipline he may evenhave assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary'sbonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberatebut to enchain.Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he enviesyour vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas orslogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself.

You were like reading a good novel. The kind were you wanted to turn every page, & never put it down... And absorb every second. But for whatever reason, that novel isn't there for me to read, & so, it's endless chapters are gone from my reach. And I don't dare to pretend to be surprised. But I do dare to wonder why.And though it's gone, I smile because it was the best novel I ever read. In those brief moments the novel of you possessed me, mind, body, & soul alike. I felt joy & adoration in such a degree, that if I never do again it'll be okay. When you read a great novel, you never forget it. And you never let go of the feeling of it in your mind. The captivating nature of it. But greater than a novel, not mere words on a page, but a reality. Reality in a vivid form that can't begin to be put into words. That words, could not touch.You're the kind of novel one would desperately want to finish. To keep near at hand & close at heart. But it can't be. And though it's a mournful & somber thought, there's enjoyment in the knowledge that for a brief moment in time, it was there. The novel of her, was a novel of breathtaking wonder. And if I never get to read another page, I'll cherish those I had the privilege of reading. And you can only hope that whoever reads it next, values it in the way you so know is deserved.

We look at other people's lives, & we see what looks like a beautiful, adventurous, wonderful or tragic life. But so seldom do we see or even understand that what we see isn't their lives. Especially nowadays with news feeds, & statuses, we see only the surface, with not hint at the inner workings.To me, it's like a movie. We see the culmination of ones efforts, work, hardships, difficulties, progress, & pains. On a big screen that is life, but so rare & seldom, do we every acknowledge nor see the directorial point of view. The metaphorical behind the screens.So while we view others lives with a romantic envy, sweet longing, disheartened sympathy, or joyous reverence. We are so oblivious to the fact that their lives take the same trials, hardships, wonders, difficulties, & joys as we, it's merely manifested in a different on screen production. My longing, is to see that which is off screen. The inner workings, mundane & trivial, as well as the intense & breathtaking because without it, the picture it culminated in would not be.If we only take things at face value, we'll miss the wonders of the inner working. That which lies beyond sight, hidden away within. While it is what appears without that we all see, that which lies within makes what we see make sense.And it's in understanding someone's life & situation, that you can come to value their life & them.