Week Forty-nine – Highs & Lows!

One minute you are up, then the next you are down; life can be such a roller coaster!

Have you ever got out of bed and felt like you were right on top of the world? Some times we do, we “get out of bed on the right side” and we feel the world is at our feet. Some times we also have important events which we work hard for and when you reach the end result and you’ve done a good job, again you feel on top of the world; what a lovely feeling that is, the “Highs” in our lives.

But on the other side some times we also encounter the “Lows” that brings us right back down and you may even hit “rock bottom”. These events often take place right at the start of our day, and we get that feeling of “getting out of bed on the wrong side” setting us off to have a series of disasters which makes our day get worse and worse. We may even look for the 3^rd event to take place so we can get out of this bad patch; you know, the “things come in three” feeling.

We all go through these feelings and emotions in our lives; it’s part of being a human. But have you ever experienced Highs and Lows on the same day? Yes I am talking about hitting high and low in 24 hours, and I mean very high and then rock bottom! If you’ve never experienced this, it can be emotionally draining and leave you feeling completely disoriented! One moment is good and then it all goes bad! So how do you deal with this? How do you keep your wits about you and survive? Not easy as it all happens too quickly and that feeling of disorientation and dizziness lingers for a long time. I guess it’s what they call in show business “your 15 minutes of fame”; one moment you are the talk of town and then no one wants to know you!

So if think you’ve never experience this before let me give you some examples to help you understand what I am talking about. I guess the most obvious one would be when you get some good news in the morning follow by bad news! You get that phone call from your boss informing you will be getting a pay rise for all your hard work and dedication to the company; you hit a High here. And then you get a call from home to let you know the house is flooded and it’s not covered by your insurance! You’re on a Low now. That would be a real rollercoaster of emotions all in a very short space of time!

We often experience this at work too; I know I have. You’ve been working hard on a piece of work or a project, which you hand in and get praised for the excellent effort. At that moment you feel good, accomplished and ready to take on the world! You are on top of your game and you can’t get enough of it! And then boom! Something goes wrong, you make a mistake, something that should have been done or looked at was not and now you find yourself having to own up to it and fix it! All the “high” from the good work you did is gone and you are scratching the bottom of the barrel trying to get out of the situation you find yourself in! You no longer have the glory but the guilt, no longer the praise but the questions, you now feel emotionally drained because your adrenaline has gone from very high levels of excitement to very high levels of stress and your body can’t take it any more! Talk about a rollercoaster! You have just been on one and you had a front row seat!

But you know what they say? Life is a rollercoaster and you have to ride it. Remember that which does not kill you can only make you stronger! To get through these emotions in one day and come out the other side in one piece you need to stay together and focus on the task ahead. Get off your high ride and focus on your low drive. At the end of the day you only have one option – fix it and move on. Don’t dwell on the past and what you could have done, that’s all gone.  Your passed successes are there to support your mistakes, don’t just ride on the glory days, but drive the tough times too. Everything is a balance, and ok you are now deep down, but surely someone will remember what you did this morning too!

That’s the balance in life; “Highs” and “Lows” are there to help you be better at what you do. Highs remind us of what we can do well and achieve, it is a way to re-charge the batteries and leave evidence that there is something good we have to offer. Lows help us remember we are also human and sometimes things will go wrong, we will make mistakes and we need to learn from them using the experiences to better ourselves. In a way the lows permit us to learn and produce more highs as a result of these experiences, they need to exits for highs to be created. Without one the other does not exist. I guess no one can ride a rollercoaster that only goes up, it will eventually run out of track and then you face a massive drop. I rather have lots of reasonable highs and lows to make it fun and more interesting!

I’m grateful for all the experiences I have in my life. Not only do they help me learn and become better but also they are great sources of inspiration for my writing! This is week forty-nine of my yearly blog challenge, I only have three more to write before I am done, and believe me when you have written forty-eight weeks, it seems that subjects are begging to dry up! Thank goodness for that rollercoaster called life with its Highs and Lows, without it I’d be thinking, “what am I going to write about this week?”

Week Thirty – #Nowords

Some time not even words can describe how we feel or what we think about something…

 #Nowords

This week I find myself writing without words. And as strange and odd as this may sound, the last few days I have experienced something I had never felt before in my life. I set out to write this weekly’s blogs to express how I feel and see the world, pinning my theme on my visit and the events that are happening in Israel. These events and my visit sparked opinions, thoughts and idealisms that I believe in and I have express and share with you regularly as I write my weekly blog, I guess this week the theme is perhaps something I have never experienced and I find myself trying to put together words to describe how I feel.

To find the words to express how I feel let me start by sharing with you two movies I watch on the flight back from Tel Aviv this week. Let me also add that my visit to Israel was cut short due to flight cancellations and an international travel ban to Israel, and not because of the fear of being there. On the way back I was so drained, emotionally, that I took the opportunity to do nothing but to watch these movies for the 5 hours I was on their air, something unusual for me as most of you would know of my principle of using my “me” time to write, but at this point I could not focus on writing (I was struggling to find words to describe how I felt)

The two films I watch, and completely unintentionally in this order, were Divergent and Noah (and at that moment I did not pick them either for any particular reason other than I had heard of them) and little did I know they would connect the dots in my troubled mind.

Divergent is a typical futuristic film about us destroying the world and then trying to live in it. The cinematographic effects of a dull, semi-destroy earth with an endless fence build around the city are impressive and the story line an interesting concept of a new race trying to keep peace in the world by segregating people and avoiding confrontation which would destroy the world again. For me this was an interesting concept as I am a great believer that one of the key sources of conflict in this world is segregation and this film just proves this. The “Divergents” in the film are individuals that don’t fit in any of the five well-organised factions created by the new order in which you are sorted when you become of age (18 years old) and thus become a threat to the peace in this new society in a world build around segregating people with clear differences and privileges. The Divergents are a threat because they accept that differences are good and you can live in a mixed society. In this film the world as we know it has ended and I am not sure the new one looks any better than what we have today. The conflict evolves because of the segregation of people and the Divergents who are trying to change the world.

The second film “Noah”; what can I tell you that you may not already know? It is based on the biblical story of Noah and his Arc and just like Divergent has some amazing visual effects. It is a really interesting film to watch as it portraits a side of the story I had never seen before (I guess I can’t recollect those religious teachings I had when I was at school) but the message behind the film resonated even more after having seen Divergent. In the film, Noah believes the creator (God) has asked him to build an arc and save the world, but without the human race. Noah has seen how we have, as humans, destroyed what he (God) had created and him and his family have been tasked with saving the animal spices and then perish once this is done. Interestingly in the previous film we had destroyed the world and we were trying to re-build it, albeit, not very successfully, so I guess Noah was right. In the end Noah realises that he’s got the wrong message and he is meant to save also the human race and start a brand new world full of goodness and better things; I guess he doesn’t know that it will then be destroyed later on by humans and try and fix it again by the Divergents! Kind of going around in circles every 1000 years! You can see that as I watch the second film I was feeling chills down my spine, why? Because I was on a flight back from Israel where right now we are in the middle of destroying god’s creation and if you are to believe in religion this is happening in the Region/land where his son, who was meant to be the saviour of man, was born and crucified.

I don’t intend this blog to have any political or religious angles or express my views about who is right or wrong. But this week I was blessed with an experience I am not sure many would ever experience, and other experience far too often.

Having spent 2 days in Israel during the war between Israel and Hamas was an experience that left me without words. And I have no words to describe it for many reasons. I think I don’t have words to express myself because I have so many emotions and feelings that I don’t know where to begin. During my stay many Israelis said to me “it’s very brave of you to come and see us” but I didn’t feel brave, I didn’t feel scared either, I didn’t feel worried being there. I was happy to be there and support my colleges in this terrible conflict that is so close and far too common for them. Being there during this time opened my eyes to many things, which many of us would never even think about. When you grow up in a place where you have never heard a siren go off and then have to run to a shelter for cover, there are no words to describe how this feels. Talking to a friend who has young kids it dawned on me how it must be for a young person to grow up with this in your backyard. Again there are no words to describe how it must feel. Some of my colleagues, their children are serving in the front line, again no words to describe how this feel. Seeing a missile being blown up in the sky intercepted by a defence rocket every day, again there are no words to describe how it feels. And then for me having to leave early because the international community starts to isolate a country by stopping flights, I have no word to describe how that feels. Having been there and close to all of this, I don’t know I feel; sad, angry, upset, scared or devastated by these events, I never imagined that being there during the conflict would have such a deep meaningful impact on me, specially, and I do believe in fate, watching two movies so relevant to my experience on the way back because I wanted to switch off my mind from it all.

I am truly grateful for these experiences I gain. I was never scared to go to Israel, I don’t give into situations to determine my life, I believe that if it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go and cancelling my trip or not getting on a plan means I won’t get run over by a bus outside my house, if it’s my time to go. But I do believe that perhaps I was given the chance to share this experience with my colleagues in Israel to make me realised that if the creator once flooded the world because we had messed it up and in the future we will live in a world that again, we messed up and try to rebuild, we should take a good look at our actions now and how we live our lives, because what happened back then and what will happen in the future is an indication that we should not mess up this world by war, segregation and devastation of the human race.  This world was created for all of us to share in harmony and live together, even if you are a Divergent.