2017 Wish for You

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

. . . I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

Neil Gaiman

 

Relishing My Pastries

Pastries from Aroma Bakery in Burnaby

Most of you know, I do intermittent fasting which means I skip breakfast so that I can do fasted workouts. I don’t always eat pastries, but when I do, I eat it only for lunch. This pic shows what I had for lunch earlier this week. From left to right, you are looking at a cream-filled dark chocolate eclair, a napoleon which is a Russian-style mille feuille, and 2 cream puffs!

I woke up the next day still f*cking sexy. It’s possible to eat what you want when you eat clean 80-90% of the time, workout smart and keep yourself in vibrational alignment with things, people, circumstances that keep you feeling good.

#HappyFriday #pastries #SOML

Tennis Racquet Sale

For Sale: Men’s tennis racquet with Free Djokovic falcon dampener!
HEAD Graphene Speed XT with 4 1/2 grip size.
Strings are Prince Tour Xtra Spin 1.35 (for spin and control).
Modified for power: Lead taped at 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3 o’clock positions. Silicone has been injected into the handle to customize the racquet for strength-training purposes as well as more lead tape at 6 o’clock position and racquet throat.
Base and overgrip are new; replaced with Head brand grips.
Price: $95

Bother You No More

When something is bothering you — a person is bugging you, a situation is irritating you, or physical pain is bothering you — you must work with your mind, and that is done through meditation. Working with our mind is the only means through which we’ll actually begin to feel happy and contented with the world that we live in.

Pema Chödrön

Ian Schneider via Stocksnap.io

Resistance is Futile

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them – while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.”

Eckhart Tolle

Friends

Seth Doyle via Stocksnap.io

by Marcia Sirota, MD:

Friendship, like many other things in life, can have an expiration date.
There are some friends who stay with you for your whole life but there are also many friends who come into your life and are part of it only for a certain amount of time.

Through our lives, we grow and change. Ideally, our friends will grow and change with us. As we mature, we develop different attitudes and different needs.

Some things that we considered necessities in the past become things we can do without in the present; some behaviors political views or religious affiliations that we could accept before become deal breakers, today.

We realize that some people act in ways which didn’t bother us so much when we were younger, but now these behaviors have become intolerable.

As we grow stronger, healthier and more conscious, we begin to see all of our relationships much more clearly. We identify the friends whose values we once shared but who we see today as just too different from us.

Sometimes we simply grow apart as we make life choices which put us in different social or economic circles. Some people choose a more traditional lifestyle while others opt for a bohemian way of life.

We can also get into conflicts or misunderstandings with an old friend. As we evolve and change, they might still be attached to seeing us a certain way. If they’re unable to accept the new, more improved version of us, the friendship can’t be sustained.

Parents’ Wedding Anniversary

original photo

digitally retouched

My parents are celebrating their wedding anniversary this week so I took the liberty of fixing one of their printed photos. This is their honeymoon picture which I removed some noise from. I also desaturated the photo which developed into a much cleaner picture!

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad! I love you.