Background - self help I have been busy studying self help and positive thinking all my teenage years. And I made good use of them to excell in my career. However, as you already know, I missed the whole point. By limiting myself to one subject and one path, and commiting to that I made a mistake. Opportunity cost of not making correct choices in life are huge. And the sad part of it is I have no idea of this alternate route. But, indirectly that made me a wise person. Here I am faced with yet another challenge. It feels like a mountaineer struggling to climb an eight thousander. I can see the summit, yet there is a blizzard and I am asked to go down and back to my home country. So then the question, what all those self help books taught me wrong. I am tough, I am punctual, I am manifesting like they asked me to do. Yet things do not happen the way I want them to happen. What is the wrong thing I am doing in life? Next hour Philosophical routes So I turned into philosophy. All my middle life I am a devotee to aged wisdom of generations of philosophers. I do it out of necessity than by random choice. I do not byheart phrases of socates wisdom to appear wise in front of friends. Yet I read so I can solve the problem of life once and for all. And I was amazed how much all these Eastern and western thinkers knew about themselves. I was humbled, tossed up like a trashcan blown away by a great vortex of wisdom. At the end I felt empty. I couldn't find a time and a place where anyone exist. Like a leaf, a feather, a droplet I drifted. One might call it a cessation of existence, or depression. Yet, here I am writing about the philosophical experience in crude terms. It must be paradoxical. As writing a blog article is not something done by someone who do not wish to have aspiration. How can I convert, or make a connection with ageless wisdom of ancient philosophers and self help gurus. That was my problem. As an example, when I examine concept of time philosophically I see there is no evidence for past or future. Which I have explained in detail in this blog. Yet when I look at self help publications, half of them are about time management and manifestation about future. Which doesn't even exist! Aren't these all bunch of lies? I asked myself. What I can do about future. This is where I decided to introduce the next hour principle. Next hour principle Next hour principle. As for the daily living I decided I am going to pretend there is next hour. It is short. It is tangible, unlike tomorrow or next week. And it is important as well. A day is made up of 24 next hours. If I was able to tackle the next hour well, there will be another next hour after that. At the moment I do not have to worry what is there. I only have to focus on this hour. The hour next to that do not exist. I do not want to argue myself into anything less than an hour. I have done it in the past, and that will inevitably lead to unpleasant nihilistic philosophical realms. Which have little practical value, but great objective and philosophical value. Hence, for the next hour I will focus on work. Writing few scentences adding to this article. Wash my cloths. Take a little walk. Something I can partially complete in an hour. Even if it is productive or non productive it doesn't matter. Even if its paid non paid it doesn't matter. I would not be worried about this afternoon or tomorrow while doing that. What do you think? Will it work for you? Would you try that?

Value of truth From early life in my life, I was told not to lie. By teachers, by parents by tutors' mentors and numerous adults. And with great respect I believed them. And I try to adhere to the protocol of the society, as far as I can and knew I was doing a wrong thing when and if I told a lie to my six-year-old friend at school. Then you may question me why I asked you to lie. Not to others not for any gain. And strangely why you should lie to yourself? I can explain, with good intentions. Unavoidable lies hmmmmm... As the life unraveled, I realized not everything I was told by all those who told me not to lie were truth, not all the time. And mostly because they did not know they were wrong. As an example, my teachers often told me to get good education and once you put your effort now, you can have a relaxed life when you're an adult. You will get a nice job and nice car and set for the rest of the life with a stable income. They didn't tell me the school system is built for the cooperate system, and majority of the kids would merely land on the ladder with a salary. And I will have to pay with time for the rest of my life to get that paycheck month after month to cash out for the stack of bills I have to pay for all the "luxurious" expenses of daily living. My parents and my teachers didn't know about the society machines as much as I know now. For that I can thank them for making me literate, so I can read and think for my own like a philosopher. A subject we were never taught in the school. Maybe cooperate machine would run out of labor if everyone became a philosopher and thought about themselves. Do not get me wrong. I am as human as anyone. I greed over a billion dollars to fuel my unending tastes the modern world has to offer. Including a luxurious ride in a cruise ship on my retirement. But when the wisdom is ripe, I can totally step down from the stupid game and see my way into the peace and happiness admis chaos and the noise of the greedy world. Now I pity politicians, murderers and robbers. They took the easy way to ascend to the same objectives I tried to accomplish following rules, without realizing they were the rules made by humans. Not gods. Maybe Kings and fellow humans like politicians' dictators and robbers. But clearly in jungles there are no rules, and everything flows naturally, with fear survival and greed. Ethics? Is that even a thing? Why should you lie to yourself? I apologies for deviating from the topic. But the fact is we all lie to ourselves all day every day. Philosophically speaking, tomorrow is a lie. As there is no evidence for it. Nobody knows what is going to happen, that is not created. But with past experience we can predict that the sun will rise, it might rain. If its winter, there will be snow. And if its spring there will be blossoms. But as for the stock market and trump news we can be markedly wrong with our predictions. But think about it for a moment, if tomorrow does not yet arrive, anything said and done now about tomorrow is technically a lie. And in this sense, and in this sense only, that I asked you to lie to yourself about tomorrow. Instead of predicting you will die of your cancer, you can lie to yourself you will live one more day. It doesn't matter there is a less chance. Instead of thinking you will lose your hockey game you can lie to yourself you will win. You will win, or you will lose are both lies until the match is played and it's a thing of the past. Only when we are at the other side of the game that we will surely know what it was. So, there is no harm lying about it in a positive way as there is no way of knowing the truth. Why suffer today for a tomorrow which never occurred? If you're a robber you can lie to yourself you will never get caught, and if you're a policeman you can lie that you will catch the thief in the act tomorrow. Same is true for the Judge. So, what are you going to lie to yourself about tonight?

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese concept, of finding beauty in the imperfect, incomplete and impermanence world. The roots of the concept travel deep into Buddhist traditions and philosophy. Anyone who is in search of meaning of life would have understood that the nature by default is an ever-changing impermanent flux of energy and matter. It is really not necessary to chase behind what "matter" is and what "energy" is. We can call it even a universal soup, if you do not like the name matter or energy. Whatever, you name it, it would just be a name, and the thing you point, is going to change from one form to another with the passage of time so you can never exactly point to anything before it disappear, and same is applied to yourself too. I would call this philosophers' nightmare. Some may call it a "crisis in existence". Once, one really understands the true nature of the things, there is the question of meaning of life. The validity of all the big questions of life disappears. Any question, any problem would disappear when we consider universal time scale. As, these are just local phenomena in a specific time in a specific consciousness. Imperfect So, how can someone make sense of the world? Otherwise, which has no meaning? Beauty of the impermanence / imperfectness -> Wabi Sabi This is where wabi-Sabi comes in as a philosophy. Instead of looking for perfection and permanence, this invites us to see the beauty in the imperfection. Instead of keeping perfectly square tidy house, happiness can be found in untidy, ragged edged places. If you take a walk in the nature often you would see that, naturally forests, trees and bushes are chaotic. They tend not to make patterns often. They might make "apparent" patterns to the human eye. Like fractal patterns which found in nature. Yet even these patterns do not repeat themselves infinitely. Except in mathematical concepts, infinity is not found in nature as patterns. But we can call infinity is found as a "change". So, these smart Japanese people have found ways to find happiness in their imperfect gardens, by embracing the Wabi-Sabi nature. Even in Japanese Poetry Like Hiku and Tanka, they use uneven numbers of words, to represent the uneven nature of it. Kintsugi is a Japanese technique of repairing broken ceramic bowls with an artistic twist. Once repaired, with the markings of imperfections they see. Often, I am confronted by perfectionists when I do not care about the wrinkles in my shirts, curls on my hair and broken English I use in my posts. Sometimes, they criticize loopholes in my arguments, the imperfect nature of my philosophy and paradoxical effects of the big picture of what I write. Do, I care about these comments and views? Absolutely not. I enjoy making art from words, like Jean-Michel Basquiat. What fun is there to life if everything is a perfect square and everyone walks in a line according to the rules of the society? So, what is imperfect in your world. Or are you worried about taking action due to perfectionism?