Mental Floss #1

Isn't happiness or to be happy a choice? Just like choosing your favourite flavour of coffee :)

Head vs Heart

Been trying to find the middle ground between rationality vs intuition, head vs heart and reason vs belief for a while now. Think I have it figured for now. For now. I've realised behind every rational thought or action is an emotional driver. Emotional drivers are commitment, independence, satisfaction,security, love, belonging, status, power, exalted sense of self, feeling of accomplishment, feeling of certainty.

You choose the job you choose to make the money you make for bills you pay for? Sense of accomplishment, achievement, provision of a good life to your loved ones, sense of independence et al. You choose a rational action basis the emotional payoff for it. For now am done looking.

Am in love...

…In love with the movie - English Patient. The movie is full of small, well thought out details, easy to miss but difficult not to appreciate. There is a scene when Katherine Clifton’s husband is waiting outside the place where he discovers she has gone to meet her lover, Almasy. You see him fiddling with a paper in his hand, he tears off a part of it and unrolls a chain of hearts torn out from inside the paper. Small moment - ironic and apt. 

Some quotes I love from the movie:

Madox: I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read so much into hardly anything at all.

Almásy: What do you love most?
Katharine Clifton: Water. Fish in it. Hedgehogs, I love hedgehogs. Marmite. Baths, but not with other people! Islands. I could go on all day.
Almásy: Go on all day.
Katharine Clifton: Your handwriting. My husband.
Almásy: And what do you hate most?
Katharine Clifton: A lie. And you?
Almásy: Ownership. When you leave, forget me.

Almásy: I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn't speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, "Faya!" That was a good day.

Almásy: I once heard of a captain who wore a patch over a good eye. The men fought harder for him.

Katharine Clifton: You speak so many bloody languages, and you never want to talk.

Hana: There's a man downstairs. He brought us eggs. He might stay.
Almásy: Why? Can he lay eggs?
Hana: He's Canadian.
Almásy: Why are people so happy when they collide with someone from the same place? What happened in Montreal when you passed a man in the street? Did you invite him to live with you?

Katharine Clifton: Will we be alright?
Almásy: Yes. Yes, absolutly.
Katharine Clifton: "Yes" is a comfort. "Absolutely" is not.

Katharine Clifton: My darling. I'm waiting for you. How long is the day in the dark? Or a week? The fire is gone. And I'm cold, horribly cold. I really want to drag myself outside but then there'd be the sun. I'm afraid I'll waste the light on the paintings, not writing these words. We die. We die, we die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have... entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we have hidden in - like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. Where the real country is. Not boundaries drawn on maps, names of powerful men. I know you'll come carry me out to the Palace of Winds. That's what I've wanted: to walk in such a place with you. With friends and an earth without maps. The lamp has gone out and I'm writing in the darkness.

Hana: Then I tell myself he spends all day searching, in the night he wants to be found.