Life n its Lessons

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

-Kalidasa

As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that wasn’t supposed to ever let you down probably will. You will have your heart broken probably more than once and it’s harder every time. You’ll break hearts too, so remember how it felt when yours was broken. You’ll fight with your best friend. You’ll blame a new love for things an old one did. You’ll cry because time is passing too fast, and you’ll eventually lose someone you love. So take too many pictures, laugh too much, and love like you’ve never been hurt because every sixty seconds you spend upset is a minute of happiness you’ll never get back.

Don’t be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!

Life is what goes on… After the thrill of living is gone …

Why is it a Thrill ? Well look back at your life and i am sure you will find your answers

Everything thats bought to life in this world .. Eventually gives in to death some day or the other
And with time a life filled with shared moments dissolves into a faded memory … Of someone who once was…

Does life with the winds of change and its countless mysteries thrust us forward.. Well maybe it does
But then sometimes an individuals will does stand firm ground ..

6 AM and i hear the cell phone ring … “Its Done” i am told …

Life goes on .. and will keep going on long after we all are gone …

Peace
Timber Da Wolf

Out of all my crazy thoughts this one by far is the most scariest or at least gets one thinking …

I remember sitting across the table with a friend of mine talking about how time flew by and now that he is 30 and i am 26 … Half our lifes have almost passed us by…

He Said ” I want to call it quits by the time i am 60.. don’t wanna live post that”
it triggered a thought in my mind … thought i’d bust his chops

Me: So your 30 … You think you have another 30 years left to live your life …
Him : Yes
Me: Ah… “with a evil smile”
Me: hey did this thought every occur to you that 30 years flew by so quick cause you were sleeping for 15 out of the 30
and you would do the same for the remainder 30.. So technically .. you only have 15 years left to live
Him: Looking at me stunned he said ” You got me thinking there buddy .. its a scary thought.. Just when i was thinking i have enough time to live my life”

Never told him this … but it was a scary thought for me too which i happened to put off as a joke ..

Think about it … i know i did that night

Peace
Timber Da Wolf

The word “symphony” derived from the Greek word “Συμφωνία”, meaning “sounding together”.
Life is nothing but a symphony .. A Musical Composition One plays Composer to…till the end of their time

The world around you is your Orchestra and your Audience …

So Play on Player ….and the world will swing to your tune ..

Peace
Timber Da Wolf

I was away from home for a long time … And now that i am back home. New York Feels a world away …I met some very interesting people had some great times ..

Every once in a while i would have a few drinks with a friend of mine.. Some one i lived with for a while too

I am a good listener i dunno how true is but many people say so .. And knowing myself a lil over the past 26 yrs i do know people can stretch my patience to extreme limits and get away with it

So anyways .. Every time we would have a few drinks this guy would go on and on about his times while he was in south africa. The Prestige he carried, The Power he commanded and the Life he once lived. Its was ok a couple of times listing to the same stories, Everyone has the right to cherish old memories

As months passed by … So did years.. I Kept listening to the same tales time and time again. Every time he narrated the story i saw a light myst in his eyes and a depth in his emotions that expressed his craving for the life he left behind once….

I never had the courage to tell him. Always felt my blunt words would be a little to harsh….So i kept giving him a patient ear for the longest of times… If you can help one feel a little light and better why not ? Goodwill although may go unnoticed but never goes unrewarded in life ..

As i look backed at my conversations with him one night before i was going to bed .. I came to a conclusion he was living his present … In his past ..

You may have been the prince of Babylon once upon a time.. But this is your life now .. Deal with it…. It doesn’t get better it doesn’t get worse unless you choose to make it so

Look back at life for answers from experiences
Look back at life to cherish the good times

Don’t Look back and Live in a time gone by ….

Peace
Timber Da Wolf

Once i was a child … And life was so simple It started with the morning sun and the school bus run… Day’s used to be all fun ..With no worries of life’s turns Once i was a child… And Life was so Much Fun Not much of a poet heh .. But i try I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and she happened to mention to me ” its simple to be happy but its difficult to be simple” That line caught my attention .. i paused for a moment and gave it a thought. Its Said life is a Circle .. But when i put this line into perspective i came to a conclusion that life is actually an oval and we just spread ourselves over it

We Start off in life with a very small patch to cover … From the Age of 1-12 all we seem to worry about is Toys, School, Home Work and Play…. As Time Passes by and adolescence hits you between 13 and 16 tend to spread yourself a little bit more to cover love and your interests in the opposite sex…. From 16 - 21 You get done with school and then you hit college spread yourself a little more to make room for love n friends along your ambitions towards your future… From 22 till 26 you spread yourself a little more towards your work and your wants in life which seem to be never ending …as the years fly by…

Being 26 i hear this quite often from friends ..” Life is a drag” “I am Spread too Thin”

Before i go any further the above time line is not based on my evolution so far .. Its my Generalized Opinion
Yes not an open book yet in many ways

Anyways well my Advice to all my friends has always been … Of course your spreading yourself too thin.. your Human after all one can only do so much .. Compromises have to be made since ..You do have 1 more area to spread upon in the coming years before you start unwinding your life

Between 26 and 46 All you are doing is spreading yourself a little more to settle down and have kids…. And spread yourself even more with work to full fill wants of yourself and your family …

Well Between 21 to 46 till your wants take shape at every stage of life .. Life is only as complicated as you make it ..

At very junction of life you have questions .. You have tricky situations .. And for the most part people either Ignore them and move on with their baggage or End up like a 2 month old puppy chasing his own tail in their quest for answers..

I have done both … My Conclusion was

Some Questions are best left unanswered and some mysteries (Women) are best left unsolved

Some Situations you can help … So move your lazy ass and address it ..
Some Situations you cannot do anything about as its not in your control … So stand the test of time ..

Worry is interest paid on trouble before its due …

Strive for self improvement and the betterment for others around you .. Perfection is an Illusion ..

Try the above and maybe your life in those years has a chance to be a lil less complicated… Hey don’t look at me for answers i am lost too

When One Gets to 46 … i assume ..One Winds down anyways …Kids get married .. You get old and Weak.. All that stretching in life leaves with wrinkles all around your body.. Yes even your ass won’t be spared .. So stare at it now all that you want .. lmao

This is a famous chinese question.

A philosopher once dreamed of being a butterfly and then woke up. And he asked himself, am I a man in a butterfly’s dream or was I a butterfly in a man’s dream.

Who Gives a damm … its a Dream

Peace
Timber Da Wolf

With Age Comes Experience …
With Experience comes Realization…
If realizations are are put to thought ….comes wisdom

Thus with age comes wisdom is untrue

I have met a number of people in life young and old, smart and dumb for some strange reason i still don’t know why i can’t seem to underwrite anyone.

i am fascinated with the idea of understanding human nature and what better way then to look around into people around you.

i am not sure which juncture of my life i came to this conclusion but it has been a blissful realization. Everyone knows “You Live.. You Learn” Life teaches every one lessons.

But did it ever occur to you if you pay a little extra attention to conversations you may have with people or by observing people in situations and their actions .. You might actually learn something life taught them

its food for thought .. For the past 10 years i have been speaking to a man at least once every few weeks. Every Conversation i have with him i seem to derive something useful.. i feel blessed to learn something from someone in 10 years what may have taken that man 55 years to realize…

Peace
Timber Da Wolf

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.