At a thousand miles an hour

Funnily enough, I never have time to regularly post on WordPress. Why? Because I am too caught up doing other things. I always find myself using the classic excuse “I don’t have any time” for anything and everything. It’s pathetic. I decided to change this, I made a timetable…set out my priorities and listed dates to which I wanted things complete. Suddenly, I did have time, I even had at least an hour a day to do my own thing. I was amazed, at how much time I actually usually wasted (especially aimlessly shopping on eBay). Useless things that take up my time without me even realizing.

My problem lies here though. I did my timetable and it worked,  but why oh why can’t I keep to it? I have noticed that should I follow the timetable religiously for a few days I’m doing well, but the minute I stray from it,  I’m back in la la land!

I think the problem is we must be having too much time and too many things to do. We want to read the news, catch up with friends, see that movie we’ve wanted to see for over a month and ofcourse spend hours on Facebook.

When will we realise that everything does not need to happen all at once. In fact, if we don’t spend that time watching that TV show we never really liked, we would actually accumulate a great deal of ‘leisure” hours. Time is precious, it is a gift, we just need to slow down and recognize we have a lot of it. The old saying “Life is too short” can be true in many instances, we find we recall this quote at times of death or sickness or some other misfortune. Life is not too short, life is what we make of it and how we use it.

Maybe you haven’t been or will never go to Paris or Egypt, but maybe you have made a  big difference in someones life. Maybe you are the best cook your parents, kids or grandkids have ever been lucky enough to have. Maybe you are the best person, the greatest friend in a mates life.

Loosen up, and enjoy life. We should stop focusing on the time we have left, and focus on what we want to achieve right now. At this hour, at this minute, today.

Choices?

Generation Y is what they call us. Generation Y is blessed they say, with technology, thousands of career options, travel, money and the likes. However I put to you this question, are choices a good thing? My nana and me often talk about the ‘good old days’ that’s her good old days I should mention, and I often walk away thinking how exciting life must have been for her.

She was free to do as she pleased, sure she didn’t have the latest iphone and new technology updates every two days however she wasn’t confused by everything available to her. In her day, you picked a career out of the 5 or 10 open to you and that was it. You didn’t need to finish school, you needed to make money and support your family.

This may seem completely ridiculous to some of you who believe that we have it a lot easier now with information at our finger tips. But what if this isn’t always a good thing. We are constantly being updated, reinvented, renovated… when do we have time to just stop and enjoy life. Are we simply to preoccupied with existing and surviving day to day or are we truly living life?

If we could live on the bare minimum, the absolute core necessities, what would life be like? Would it be easier? Simpler? Happier? I love life contrary to the pessimism in this post, I just wonder are we living it to its full potential? The choices we are offered today often make us second guess, which one is better…are we choosing the best option, is this the safest option. Why are we so worried that there is something else better out there?

My conclusion is that too many choices are unhelpful. I don’t want to have to choose one apple out of the 30 available to me, I just want to know which is the best, juiciest one that at the end of the day I am going to enjoy. I believe we need to slow down, take a moment and enjoy the present.

Stimulus packages, Share prices, Job losses; Oh the world’s woes

Watching the news and reading the papers I am constantly slammed by headlines of the global economic crisis, the mass job cuts worldwide and the increase in trade barriers to protect economies. Yet, I can’t help but feel selfish. We are bickering constantly over money whilst more than half of the world’s people live below the internationally defined poverty line of less than U.S. $2 a day according to 2008 data from the World Bank.

Whilst for most of us this is a shocking figure, how many people reading this will actually try to do something about it?

Poverty in the world is tremendous, if you look at any statistics you will see it. Every day, nearly 7,500 people become infected with HIV and 5,500 die from AIDS, mostly due to a lack of HIV prevention and treatment services. (The Millennium Development Goals Report – 2008).  I am not going to go through all the figures and stats because I know that you understand the severity of poverty in the world.

The reason for this blog was to inform and hopefully encourage people to get active. You need not head down to the soup kitchens or donate hundreds to charity (although these would obviously be great), instead I want to suggest a site called Kiva. Some of you may of heard of it before, it is basically a non-profit organization which aims to give entrepreneurs aid in achieving their goals in developing nations. 100% of loans made (which start at only US $25) are given to borrowers in areas such as Asia, Africa, South America etc. Over time, the entrepreneur repays their loan; the concept of  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. You then can choose to reinvest your money with another entrepreneur or simply put it back in your bank.

The recent bushfires in Victoria really made me think about alms giving. I thought if millions of money was raised in the span of a few weeks, what else could we do? I understand that money is tight in times like these for most of us, however if each person could donate even $10 to a worthy charity such as Kiva, WorldVision, Amnesty International etc. we could help millions of people stricken by poverty.

In fact I thought about big corporations such as Woolworths and McDonalds as well, what if these companies donated a percentage of their daily earnings to third world countries. How much better could the world potentially become?

I do not underestimate the sadness in the number of job losses around the world, family members of mine have lost jobs and are completely stumped as to what to do next. I simply believe that although the world may seem to be a bad place for many of us with a roof over our heads, access to clean water and a nice warm plate of food each day, their are people in much worse situations than us.

Please let me know if you are aware of any organisations like Kiva, as I am extremly impressed with their work.

Immorality of the Catholic Church

In Brazil, a nine-year-old girl has been allowed an abotion after being raped. The girl was expecting twins after being raped by her stepfather, who had been abusing her since she was six.
Despite this, the Roman Catholic church has threatened to charge the mother of the girl with murder for agreeing to the medical procedure. (asiapacificnews.net)

How on Earth do the men at the Vatican fail to see that:

1. The girl is 9 years old, if she were to have the baby her physical health could prove fatal and her emotional health severely interrupted.

2. She was raped, if she were to have the baby how would the baby feel upon finding out she/he was brought into the world in such a way

I am disgusted at some of the Catholic Church’s decisions, it is living in the past instead of keeping pace with the times. I do not believe abortion should be a common medical practice for women who have put themselves in sticky situations however in the case of rape, bringing a baby into the world on such grounds is insane!