Category: Knowing

The Pandemic and the Environment

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Ecology, Environment, Health Care, Knowing, learning, Life, Personal Excellence, purpose, Purpose Quest, Values, World affairsLeave a comment
Image Credit: business west.co.uk

In the last 6 blog posts in the ‘purpose quest series’, we explored how the pandemic impacted six important pillars for purposeful living; spiritual, mental, emotional, relational, health and money. Let’s explore the seventh pillar, the ecological aspect in this blog post. As in the past six blog posts let me attempt to describe my personal experience during the pandemic. 

With lockdowns being imposed, offices closed, and people starting to work from home vehicles movement reduced drastically. With airports restricting flights there were less flights in the sky. With demand for non-essential products reducing factories were operating at lower capacity reducing environmental damage. All this made the air cleaner, water cleaner, skies bluer and grass greener.

Unlike in the earlier six aspects, there was not much for me to do, the earth was healing itself. I had to only participate by using the freshness for my well being and helping others to use this Knowladge to make sensei of the positive aspects of the pandemic. Therefore I used the webinars I was conducting and conversations I was having with people to show these benefits and to use this opportunity to adjust lifestyles, so that even after the pandemic, we live in a manner that is beneficial to the environment.

With life coming back to normal in Sri Lanka, I am concerned to see that the amount vehicles on the road have gone back to pre-pandemic levels. Our airways are still clean as the flights are still restricted, but with the envisaged opening up of the skies end of this month, the air pollution levels are likely to start increasing again. Work from home is getting lesser, and in person activities are increasing. I am attempting to keep at least half of my learning experience delivered online even when things are back to normal. I need the other half to interact with people as we cant be totally devoid of human interactions to help them in their learning, growth and transformation.

So lets continue to communicate and role model to help people at least adjust to a mid-way level between total lockdowns and total free movement with their free will so that we can bring this planet to liveable conditions. If not nature will hit back with a bigger pandemic and will keep doing it more regularly to save the planet.

Natures Wrath – When Will We Wake Up?

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Ecology, Environment, Knowing, learning, Life, Pictures that Speaks, purpose, Spiritual, Sri Lanka, World affairsLeave a comment
mahogany landslide may 2017
 Landslide of a Mahogany Plantation

It’s May 2017. I got a call from the account manager from the company that manages my Mahogany plantation in the Ratnapura district of Sri Lanka. I have some bad news to share with you. What is it? I ask. One of your Mahogany plantations in Munihinkanda has got affected by the recent landslides. We have not been able to access the plantation yet as the authorities have restricted access to the plantations until they are able to confirm that it is secure. What is the extent of the damage? I ask. About ten acres of the plantation has slid down to the river below and we feel it includes one of your plots too.

As I digested this news my mind went to the time that a rubber plantation of a larger extent belonging to my father was destroyed due to a cyclone about 40 years ago. I remembered my involvement in the process of transporting the fallen trees to help my father recover at least a part of the losses. My mind wonders to the hundreds of lives lost due to this storm and thousands who have lost their livelihood as a result. I have watched with dismay so many natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunami’s, floods, landslides, forest fires and now a pandemic.

The question is, when will we humans learn to stop destroying nature? How many more disasters are needed before we stop damaging Mother Nature so that we can live in harmony with nature.

Everything is Waiting for You – Experience it All.

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Environment, happiness, hope, Knowing, Life, Love, Personal Excellence, purpose, Soul Nourishing Poems, SpiritualLeave a comment

Everything is Waiting for You – Poem by David Whyte

As you listen to this poem, reflect on the wonders of the world that we experience every day. Reflect on how we take them for granted or just don’t notice the wonder in them. Imagine if you pay attention. Everything is waiting for you, go experience all of it.

EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU – Words

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. 

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. 

Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. 

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. 

The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

How are Great People & Trees Made?

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Ecology, EQ, Knowing, Life, Personal Excellence, Soul Nourishing Poems, StrugglesLeave a comment

Good Timber by Douglas Malloch – Read by Mark O’Keeffe

As you listen to this poem (words below), reflect on what your challenges and struggles have done for you?

The tree that never had to fight
     For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
     And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
     But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil
     To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
     Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
     But lived and died as he began.

Good timber does not grow with ease,
     The stronger wind, the stronger trees,
The further sky, the greater length,
     The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
     In trees and men good timbers grow.

Where thickest lies the forest growth
     We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
     Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
     This is the common law of life.

Did the Pandemic Stimulate you Intellectually?

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Ecology, EQ, Health Care, IQ, Knowing, learning, Life, Personal Excellence, psychology, purpose, Purpose Quest, Spiritual, Values, World affairsLeave a comment

When the world started changing due to the pandemic it had a big impact on my focus on my intellectual development process. This blog post tells my story and I hope this will help you to reflect on how the pandemic affected your intellectual development.

Image Credit: medspace.com

Let’s start with the question, what is the meaning of intellectual? While different people may make sense of the word ‘intellectual’ in different ways, based on their thinking, to me intellectual is the quality of my thinking and understanding aspects I am concerned with. The stronger my intellectuality becomes,  I tend to understand aspects I am concerned with and the related complexities in a deeper manner. The shift in priorities brought about by the pandemics resulted in some interesting changes to my intellectual development processes.

Continue reading “Did the Pandemic Stimulate you Intellectually?” →

What is the Right Age to Transform?

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Inspirational Speechs, Knowing, Life, Personal Excellence, purposeLeave a comment

A compilation of five powerful Short Speeches by Jay Shetty, Brendon Burchard, Tom Bilyeu, Robert Quinn, and David Rutherford.

Reflect on when you felt or lazy or asked yourself “what to do with my life” or “what is my purpose”. Have you ever felt it is not time yet or its too late. Reflect on these questions and beliefs again while watching or after watching this video.

Inspirational Speeches

 

 

The Sweetness of Defeat

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Knowing, Personal Excellence, psychology, Soul Nourishing PoemsLeave a comment

Defeat – a Thought Provoking Poem by Kahlil Gibran – Read by Shane Morris

Reflect on the sweetness of your defeats as you listen to this poem. 

Defeat, my Defeat, my solitude and my aloofness;

You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs, And sweeter to my heart than all world-glory.

Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance,

Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot, and not to be trapped by withering laurels, and in you I have found aloneness, and the joy of being shunned and scorned.

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield, In your eyes

I have read That to be enthroned is to be enslaved, and to be understood is to be levelled down, and to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness, and like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed.

Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion,

You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences, and none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings, and urging of seas, and of mountains that burn in the night, and you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul.

Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,

You and I shall laugh together with the storm, And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us, And we shall stand in the sun with a will, And we shall be dangerous.

Kahlil Gibran was the key figure in a Romantic movement that transformed Arabic literature in the first half of the twentieth century.

Soul Nourishing Poems

 

Valuation done in Heaven

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Knowing, Life, Love, purpose, Quoates for Reflection, SpiritualLeave a comment

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Reflection Guide:

Reflect on the value you put on simple things of life, those things we take for granted, things given to us free or we obtained cheaply. Look at such things from someone less fortunate than you. Would you see a different value? Perhaps thats heavens way of helping us see the proper price of goods. Feel the attitude of gratitude.

Quotes for Reflection

The Real You

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Knowing, Life, Love, Personal Excellence, purpose, Soul Nourishing PoemsLeave a comment

Presenting “You”, a self motivation poetry. This heart felt words will motivate you to love yourself, understand your insights and who you really are.

 

 

Credits: Co-produced & edited by ~ Jagan Kanojiya Jr. (Founder of For You Entertainment) Brought to you by ~ For You Music ~ Wayne Jones

Soul Nourishing Poems