Welcome. Some tiny beads of inspiration and reflections about life.(By Hans Van Rostenberghe)******** Please visit the archive (on right of page) or browse per topic according to label (under archive)
Saturday, 4 September 2021
Give and take
Thursday, 2 September 2021
Benevolence
A
homeless man admitted to the hospital asked me where he could get a
deck of playing cards. I answered him that he could try the convenience
store within the hospital compound. Somehow I knew the likelihood of the
convenience store selling playing cards was quite low and even if they
would sell them there, there was no way the man had money to buy them.
When later, I drove home, I thought about my day in the car and became
aware that I had been not nice. I think it was guilt that made me search
and find a deck of playing cards and go back to the hospital and give
it to the man.
Tuesday, 31 August 2021
Teaching
I have been a teacher and a doctor for many years in my life. I have been formally teaching medical students, trying to deliver knowledge to them in the most interesting and most logical and understandable way, stressing why certain bits of knowledge are absolutely essential to keep in our brain and not in our smartphones.
I have made PowerPoint presentations. As a teacher you know whether the delivery of your lecture is effective or not because when it is effective, the audience, our students are quiet. They sit and look at you. They sit and look at your slides. And that is quite a rewarding part of teaching. I have had colleagues who were teaching and they became very irritated with the students because there was a constant background noise of students talking with each other in a slow voice. One of these colleagues burst out in a bout of anger demanding absolute silence. It worked for a short while. He got absolute silence for a few minutes but then the noise started again. The cause of the noise was not the students. The cause of the noise was a lack of preparation of the lecture by the teacher. He did not captivate the attention of his students. He was knowledgeable, he was good in his field but he did not apply basic principles to give a lecture that makes your audience silent.
It is not extremely difficult to give a good PowerPoint presentation. Two ingredients only. One, read a good book on how to create and give a good PowerPoint presentation. Two, empathy. Empathy? Yes empathy. Imagine yourself being part of the audience listening to you with the background knowledge of the person in the audience. What would you need to stay focused on what is said? What would jolt your attention back to the speaker and slides when you had been distracted by something else? If we think like this while making our slides, while preparing how we will deliver it, while doing the actual talk, we will be reasonably good orators, keeping the attention, avoiding the background noise of people talking to each other instead of listening to the talk.
But teaching is so much more than sharing knowledge. PowerPoint presentations are NOT the best way of teaching. I have created a few pages on interactive teaching with links below.
interactively teaching knowledge
Sunday, 29 August 2021
Connection
I think it is all important to get connected
When we talk about connection, chances are that the first thing we think about is internet connection in order to ensure our online meetings run smoothly or we can browse the internet. However...
Connection to the beauty of nature
Connection to our conscience
Connection to the love that sits in our heart
Connection to our creative talents
Thursday, 26 August 2021
Small Opportunities
Friday, 20 August 2021
New and old
If we want to start anew, we have to be ready to give up the old.
He or she does this to me, I will just blindly follow the bad behavior
Let us all be leaders of the good. No matter how others behave,
Friday, 13 August 2021
Hope
Wednesday, 11 August 2021
Like a butterfly
Friday, 16 July 2021
Can we all get on that path?
Sunday, 4 July 2021
A JOY forever
This afternoon, I got a call from a friend who was a teacher for the disabled. She had dedicated her life to help classes and classes of disabled children to reach their best potential and to live a life of purpose using whatever talent they got. I admire persons like this for what they do.
Today she called me about her friend. Her friend had delivered a baby in the hospital where I work and was after three days still in the ward because of a problem with her heart. She got a bit depressed about having to spend so long in the ward and also today the docs in charge of her, thought it was not yet safe to let her go home.
The teacher with her wonderful heart agreed to pay for her friend, so she could get a comfortable room instead of the open ward. I helped a bit to arrange the private service that is available in a wing in our hospital. The teacher went to settle the payments by 6pm and at 8.45 pm I read her message that her friend was still not transferred to the private wing. She had allowed herself to become very upset with the nurses from the public ward for waiting for the next shift to send her friend to the private wing.
I read a series of her messages on my phone really expressing her disappointment with the nurses who lacked the empathy to arrange a transfer of a depressed mother to a much more comfortable room that was already paid for. I agreed somehow that the nurses were not displaying a high level of empathy with new mom, who experienced feelings of depression.
I think we have to be patient a bit.
Many of us, including the teacher from the (real) story above, have found the humongous joy that lies in caring for others, in helping people, in going the extra mile and doing something a bit out of the ordinary to uplift some of our friends, family or even strangers. At this moment in time, it looks like many other people have not yet discovered this unlimited source of humongous joy.
Let us not become angry with those who are still searching for that source. Let us try to inspire them. Hiding all the good things we do under the pretext of selflessness, humility or modesty will slow down the process of spreading the knowledge of what is the source of the most humongous joy. Let us not cling to unnecessary shyness about the good we do. The news is already full of bad things. Let us spread the good things in our life. This is not boasting, this is not pride; let us make it a point to inspire at least a few others tomorrow. If it was successful, we can repeat it every month or even every week or every day. Imagine how the knowledge will snowball. and how our world will soon be filled with loving kindness, people helping each other and making the extra effort to relieve suffering and increase joy. A humongous JOY
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I started to build "the kindness revolution" website. I will add in poems, essays and RAK.
Can visit the site via this link: https://the-kindness-revolution.webnode.com/
Thursday, 1 July 2021
A small story of empathy...
Sunday, 27 June 2021
Truly Alive
I read the above quote in a chicken soup for the soul book on random acts of kindness. It is filled with heart warming stories of strangers doing just a simple small random kind act and making a huge difference for the person that was on the receiving end.
I feel there is so much wisdom in the quote.
Tonight I went outside for awhile to see the moon reflecting in the water of the sea. I was on the beach and a few Casuarina trees were giving extra shadows and frames to the extreme beauty of the moon and its giant reflection in the sea. My heart was conscious of a superb treasure and I felt like becoming truly alive.
I thought for awhile and became so grateful to the universe for the gift of eyesight.
I thought for awhile longer and a sense of gratitude for so many other things flooded my heart and mind. It is when we are conscious of so many treasures that our soul comes to the surface and makes us feel like we are truly, truly alive.
Thursday, 17 June 2021
Best growth
My dear readers,
The other day I read somewhere that one of the most important, if not THE most important ingredient of living a life of purpose that is filled with job satisfaction, feeling good and peace of mind is to ensure our continued growth. And it is not physical growth. At my age physical growth can only happen in the width (getting fatter) and that is certainly not what we talk about here :) 😆😅.
Somehow to keep growing, we have to keep an open mind. Today I learned an important lesson, I want to share here with you. One old friend who was many years my junior, an ex student at the university I work for, has really advanced in life to a very important position. His social media messages get lots of attention and while many of them are truly humorous giving us a good laugh, some are didactic and others are opinion based. It was on some of the opinion based messages, that I had exchanged differences in opinion in private with him. He indicated before already, that he did not want to debate about these opinions with me. I should perhaps have respected that. Today however, I gave him a bit of honest feedback on one of his recent messages, particularly harsh on a very junior person that had inadvertently reached the news of Malaysia, after being barred from an exam in her university for a controversial reason.
The response I received: unfriended from Facebook. Up to now I had rejoiced to see this friend of mine go up to a high position in the capital of our country. I was quite sure that he would keep rising to great heights. Now with quite some sadness in my heart, I became aware that he is facing some major obstacles to continued growth. It are not the "friends" who always agree with what you say that help you grow. It is the ones who express their different opinions, who dare to give some criticism now and then, who ensure our continued growth. I am most grateful for friends who do on and off disagree, who do give critical feed back. In the moment it may hurt, but in the long run, I do know that these are my best and most valuable friends.They help me grow.
The internet is supposed to help the world grow towards unity. But if we use it in an immature way; if we block out all information that is a bit disturbing to us; if we avoid reading different opinions; if we just want to bask in glory and get hundreds of likes, for whatever we say or do, we are on a dangerous path of limited or reverse growth. It may taste nice for awhile but it tends not to last. I pray for that friend in the above true story, that sooner rather than later he comes to his senses and keeps a truly open mind.
A truly open mind means NOT to absorb all information that comes our way, but to read and be open for all information, using a very good filter. Filtering out the toxic food for our mind (the nonsense), but letting in what is valuable and keeping in a separate room things that we cannot accept right now but might make sense if look from a different point of view.
I wish you, my dear readers a life filled with continued growth, not in belly fat, but in terms of spiritual, emotional, personality, character growth. It involves a basic humility and courage: we need to dare to doubt and avoid to be to easily certain about things that appear right on first sight. It was Voltaire who said: doubt is not comfortable but certainty is madness. Voltaire said it in a specific context but I think we can apply this to many areas of our life.
Wednesday, 9 June 2021
Nice and warm
Monday, 7 June 2021
Start walking
Friday, 28 May 2021
Opportunity possibility potential
Any loss of power tends to hurt them and insanity becomes only worse.
Helping a person in need, going out of our way to help
We will not have to do insane things to be able to cling on to our power.
Monday, 24 May 2021
Fear Folly
Friday, 21 May 2021
In Tune
When all of heaven seems filled with clouds and rain
when love seems to render betrayal and abuse
when the world seems a barrel of greed and madness
a streak of bliss tends to appear from an unknown place
Sometimes it is a small spot of blue with a sunny ray
Sometimes it is a word of hope, a word of truth
Sometimes it is a miniature gift of love, of gladness
It's like a slap on the back, a bliss, a little grace
When all seems dark, blue or filled with gloom
On a spot along our way, a flower will bloom
There is no doom, no storm that is big enough
To become immune to God's always-present love
Let us fall in tune…
By Aufie Zophy







