One upon a time I was at my car dealer for maintenance.

I went inside every fancy car that I cannot afford to enjoy its interior.

I then went to the free water fountain to drink.

As I moved my head down to drink I reallized that while I can definitely live and even enjoy my life without the expensive cars, I cannot live without this free water, which is way more precious and expensive than all the expensive stuff.

A billionaire would trade all their wealth for this free water if they ever had to choose only one, that alone should teach us how wealthy we are if we just have enough food and enough water.

Thank You God!

I grew up in a very sunny location of our Earth. And once I moved out of my homeland into America, I didn’t find myself in Arizona or California!

In Upstate NY and Chicago, where I spent most of my time in USA, weeks could go by without any significant sunshine. Add to that my current job where I spend the daytime in a dull office, with no view of daylight, and it can get depressing without the life-giving sun!

Is that a good reason for me to be depressed, and blame it on the clouds? I asked myself. And I believe the answer is NO.

There is a physical aspect to this problem, which I tried to solve with supplements. For example, most people living in the north are deficient in vitamin D, so I make sure I increase my intake of vitamin D3 during the winter. The herb St. John’s Wort is also known to help with mild to moderate depression, so I get my share of it as well. And when it comes to the most helpful tool against depression, exercise, I still can’t get myself to be an athlete! However living in the city forces me to walk, which is a great side-benefit to living in a big city and depend on public transportation for my daily commute to work.

The second, and in my opinion most important aspect of the problem resides no further than our own mind. If there is enough sunshine inside, we will be able to handle the lack of it outside!

The question then is: how to make it sunny more often inside?

My recipe is simple:

When we have ongoing projects and a purpose, we have inner sunshine.

When our minds are active and well fed with good ideas and thoughts, we have inner sunshine.

When we have a good and active social life, we have inner sunshine.

When our spirituality is well and alive, we have inner sunshine.

When we live in love (of people and the Universe), we have inner sunshine.

Did I miss any sun-giving techniques? How do you handle the lack of sunshine?

We will never meet a depressed tree, a lazy flower, or a procrastinating apple. Indeed, people can impose their polluting products on the innocent lives of Nature, but no matter how much toxins they swallow, they keep giving their vivid colors, satisfying variety of tastes, and nutritional energy.

We can learn a great deal from plants. They are the eternal and genuine representatives of Life; how can we possibly afford to ignore their messages and lessons! We need them, not only for food and oxygen, but for the eternal examples of beauty, sustainability, abundance, contentment and unpretentious giving that they provide!

How about taking the Tree as a role model?! The Tree is doing something right. No, it’s doing everything right!
From now on, when you meet a tree, look at it with love and respect, and listen to some of the eternal lessons that it keeps trying to teach you and me:

1. Plant the seed, or it will remain an insignificant and mediocre being.
We have an idea, we have money, we have a learned skill or a natural talent; they are only “seeds”. The Tree tells you that seeds alone are not enough. She was a seed before, but growth comes with more than a seed. If you have a seed (time, talent, information, ideas) don’t let it die. It could become a magnificent tree, if you water and take care of it.

2. Hide the seed under the ground!
Seeds grow “underground”! The grown up Tree is telling you to keep your seeds hidden in the very early stages, until you make sure you put enough work into it to allow it to go above the ground. Once it grows visible and it has some roots, go out and show it to the world!
We repeatedly read and heard that those who talk don’t work, and those who work are too busy to talk about their work! Hide your seeds and let them grow underground, until they take some shape.

3. Give fruits, shade, beauty, or unseen oxygen!
To be of value, we have to give something of value. There is no way around that. The Tree is appreciated for its delicious and nutritious fruits, and for its beauty. She even gives us oxygen without us seeing or noticing this indispensable breath of life. To live beautifully like the Tree does, we need to figure out something to give to people and to the world; something beneficial and beautiful.

4. Be beautiful.
Yes the Tree is functional. She has many uses and benefits. She gives fruits and shade and woods and oxygen. All this giving doesn’t prevent her from also being beautiful! Like the Tree, we have to take care of how we look. Beauty does good. We enjoy looking at the Tree even if we don’t use any of its benefits; beauty alone is enough. When we take care of our body, without vanity, we just make a small contribution beautifying the human scenery wherever we go.

5. Be, don’t scream.
The Tree doesn’t need to hang a sign enumerating why she’s good and beautiful. She just is! You take the fruit and eat it, you enjoy the greenery and beauty, without her yelling at you: look how good, how delicious, how beneficial I am!
Do your work, and let it speak for you. Speak in actions and people will praise you in words.

6. Mangos are not better than apples.
Trees are great because they come in so many different flavors and looks. We definitely won’t like to have a world where all the fruit trees give out mangoes, no matter how much we love mangoes! The beauty of the world is the great variety it has to offer!
We, the human trees, are the same. We don’t need to be like anyone else if it’s not in our design. We don’t need to give strawberry if we’re designed to give apples; first because we can’t, no matter how hard we try, and second because apples have their fans, just like strawberries have theirs! Go with your design, your natural abilities, this is what you’re supposed to give! Don’t think you have to be designed any other way. Your own fruits have their very particular use and fans. If you’re an apple, trying to be a strawberry will just give you and the world some fake and tasteless strawberries, while making you miserable and uselessly exhausted.

7. Grow at your own pace.
Every tree has its own pace and needs a different time to grow. Don’t rush. As long as you know your special kind of fruit, work on it, and forget about how long it will take for the tree to grow high into the sky!

Are you really free?

May be you are, but not completely. There could be aspects of your life where you’re not totally free. You could be in debt, therefore your money is not free; you have to surrender your payments every month, God knows for how long! May be you dislike your job too. You “have to” go every day, or you won’t find the money to survive. You feel “forced” to do something meaningless and uninteresting. That’s not freedom. As you can see, freedom is not only about being out of prison!

Freedom, or the lack of it, can even be more subtle than that. Any addiction, be it a substance or a behavior, is a restriction on our freedom. Addictions imprison our free will to do what we know is right and beneficial and to avoid harm.

Addiction to a substance is not limited to drugs or nicotine or caffeine. Some people have to have their sugary treats every day. Others can’t imagine giving up McDonald. Many know that vegetables are what they should eat, but they don’t seem to be free enough to eat the veggies and forget about the toxic processed foods. This is not freedom.

Bad habits are sometimes the closest thing to a life sentence! People could struggle for decades just to overcome a single habit like procrastination! Decades for one single behavior to get out of?! Others spend their life time trying to escape their bad eating habits, that’s a life sentence for our rational mind, imprisoned and guarded by our taste buds and appetite!

We cherish freedom. It deserves. But we don’t seem to grasp the extent of the actual lack of our innermost freedoms. When our body is the prisoner of our habits. When our mind is the prisoner of our body. When our mind and body are the prisoners of our emotions. When our mind, body and emotions are prisoners of our subconscious mind!

When we rejoice in our being free from a physical prison, it’s only a distraction from deeper and much more dangerous prisons!

It feels bad when someone is rude to us. We feel hurt and offended. This person yells at us or gives us a dirty look and we think, how ugly he or she is, how insensitive.

Try to remember the last time you yourself were rude to someone. May be you felt bad afterwards, and that’s a good sign that deep down you’re not comfortable making others uncomfortable! But I especially want you to remember how you felt while in the action. You probably were angry; that person got on your nerves, someone did something that made you feel awful, and you gave them back something just as awful. Someone did something which you felt was stupid or inappropriate, and you slapped them with a dirty look in return, and may be you added a hurtful word that would let them realise how stupid or how badly they acted. You took your revenge!

Try to remember a time when you were feeling so happy and optimistic. How easy was it to smile in peoples’ faces, to act kindly and gently with mere strangers when you were full of energy and happiness? Couldn’t be easier, right?

Now compare your state in the two situations! Which one would you rather have more of? Which one would you have most often in your life?

A rude person is a person in crisis! When someone is suffering, what they need most is help, not judgment. We know the action is bad enough, and we should know just as well that the doer is in trouble! When someone is rude to you, just think how miserable they are! Don’t focus on your hurt, and you won’t feel bad or hurt. This is not just idealistic kindness, it’s good for you! When you have compassion for the person who hurts you, you shift from feeling bad, offended and hurt, to feeling compassionate towards the suffering of that rude human soul. You move yourself from a position of weakness, inferiority and anger to a position of power and positivity.

Our actions are just a reflection and an extension of the state of our inner world. We’re rude when it’s dark in; we’re happy and gentle and forgiving when it’s light and bright inside!

We get hurt to the degree of our vulnerability. That’s true of our immune system just as it is true of our emotions and thoughts.

Everyone gives help to the degree of their capabilities, their power. Only the powerful can be in a position of helping. The more power you have, the more help you can give. And the more compassion you can feel towards the darkness and suffering of those who hurt you.

What is a country? A piece of land? That’s part of it. What really makes a country is the millions of “units” who inhabit it: citizens, people!

Can you imagine a country with no people? It would be useless, and meaningless.

How about a smaller entity: a company, or a big corporation, what is it? It’s a business, indeed. It’s there to make money by selling a product or service. Could a business exist without customers and providers, buyers and sellers? No! Then the money alone is useless and meaningless without the people who create and sell, and the people who pay and buy!

But companies could function just like a despotic country: The top executives and owners make all the money, while the workers make minimum wage!

You know one example too well: Wal-Mart! It’s where one branch could close the day having made hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the cashier goes home having made $8 an hour, from which he or she will even give a few dollars in taxes!

What would we think of a country where the president and ministers are rich and happy, but the citizens are sad and poor? It’s a country which needs a revolution!

Why don’t we feel the same about corporations that don’t make their employees happy?!

It’s totally right that the CEO makes more money than the cleaning crew, but the question is: how much more?

The question is: What is the quality of life of the cashier compared to that of the owner?

Thankfully, many young (and BIG!) companies are now adopting a new culture of making the work place fun and the employees happy (think Google and Zappos, for example).

It’s not only about paying people enough; it’s about the quality of the hours they spend at work.

What does a company that is rich but sad have to offer to the world, to life?

As customers, we should use our money and voice to vote for companies that care about its people, and against the ones that use people as mere means to make money.

Money is here to serve us. Once people are used to serve money, the world becomes a toxic place. That’s what it is now in many places and cases. It shows how much the lack of compassion and humanity is at work!

The math is simple and clear: Corporations – Lack of compassion + low quality of life for most employees + abundance of money for owners and top executives alone = very bad deal for our world!

My income is no greater than my expenses. I’m in debt. I am not rich. Am I poor?

An accountant can calculate our net worth accurately. But none but us can calculate our comprehensive net worth, our real life wealth.

See, wealth is not only monetary. We often overlook other assets in our living account balance. Our “income” is not only the money that we make.

If we’re healthy, we’re wealthier than the sick in terms of health.

Would you lose your eyesight and get $10 million instead?

I wouldn’t, which means I have a quality that is much more expensive than the ten million!

Would you go to prison for 5 years and get a million dollars for it?

I wouldn’t go to prison even for one year for a million dollars. Therefore, every year of life that I live free is worth more than a million dollars, only it terms of freedom!

Every good friend, every brother and sister and parent adds up to our wealth. Would you trade your sister for a million bucks? If not, that means you have what is worth more than this very sum of money. How about a loving spouse, would you trade her or him for 2 million? If not, then you have something more precious than millions of dollars!

Next time you see this expensive car driving by and you say to yourself, “God, why can’t I afford such a car!”, ask yourself if you would take the car and lose your legs or your hands! If not, you have something more precious than the car, you’re already rich!

Or when you pass by that glorious house and sadly wonder why they can afford such a house and you don’t, ask yourself if you would take the house and get a terminal and painful cancer!

Would you trade your intellect for a billion dollars? Get the billion and go with a blank mind? I damn wouldn’t, even for a trillion dollars. We have in our little and fragile heads something more precious than a trillion dollars! How incredibly rich!

If we think of the monetary worth of all our assets that we overlook we will never feel that we’re in financial trouble. We’ll see the abundance that overwhelms us. And as the wisdom goes, we get more of what we focus on. If we feel rich, without money, the money will end up coming too.

Until the current generation surprised us, and did the unthinkable! Armed with mobilization and coordination tools that weren’t there a decade ago – Internet, blogs, and social media – the youth of Tunisia and Egypt broke free from the fear, and empowered millions to finally take it to the streets and do what they always dreamed of doing: demand the fall of their dictatorial regimes, and stay there until the heads of the regimes completely leave the scene.

Egypt in particular is very significant to the whole region. Culturally, Egypt is the leader of the Arab world. It shares borders with Israel, and was the first country to initiate peace under President Sadat. Mubarak has kept Egypt in a state of fake stability. To the outside eye, it may have seemed stable. We knew better! Egypt was sitting on a time bomb. The explosion was inevitable. We just didn’t know how it would happen, and how ugly it would be.

It took place, and it wasn’t ugly, at least from the side of those who exploded; the pro-freedom protestors. The task wasn’t a breeze. You had a president who had been in power for thirty years. During the last decade, if not earlier, he had been grooming his son, Gamal, to be the next president. Gamal had many friends too, and he brought them to power. The gang was free to do as they pleased. They had no limitations of any kind, not even keeping a thin safety net to avoid a revolution of the hungry. Under Gamal’s peak power, prices doubled many times, those who used to be middle class joined the ranks of the poor class, to name a few disasters. In short, if you were not one of the lucky friends of the regime, your life became increasingly unbearable.

This regime of historical corruption had to take many measures to sustain its existence over the years. They had a green light to do as they wish for that end. In almost every institution, only the worse of men rose to the top. A man or a woman who could say “no” or have an independent opinion wasn’t to hold any leadership position. State Security wasn’t at all for the security of the State; instead, it was “Regime Security”. People weren’t any safe exactly because of this extremely powerful and numerous security monster. Mubarak and his regime had built a huge, complex and powerful institution of corruption that transformed Egypt into a private property of their own.

Then we had the Revolution. Mubarak made one concession after the other, usually too late, and completely disconnected from the millions of determined protestors. The Egyptian army seemed neutral, but on the ground, Egyptians felt that the army was closer to them than to Mubarak. When all of Mubarak’s speeches didn’t end the massive troubles, and the protestors didn’t seem to lose their momentum and determination to stay in the streets until he steps down, Mubarak was forced to step down, probably by the very Army who initially refused to obey his orders to shoot and bombard the peaceful protestors.

We could think that the nightmare is over in Egypt, that we will finally focus on building a bright future for this great country now that Egyptians are over with the criminal and paralyzing regime of Mubarak and Co. I wish it was so!

Just imagine a mafia-like regime that had been building itself and securing its powers for decades, can you see it completely fade away once Mubarak left the presidency and went to his palace, some 370 miles away from Cairo?

The mafia that stole hundreds of billions of dollars, and whose security arm imprisoned, killed, tortured, kidnapped, sexually harassed and even raped opposing activists would not honorably accept the defeat and leave the stage to the winners. Yes the head has left the scene. But he’s living unharmed and unrestricted in an isolated palace, with all his family, who were also partners in crime. Will Gamal, the ambitious son who wanted both wealth and power, just accept the fact that his once so bright future turned into a black page of Egypt’s history? Like any mafia, we don’t know all the members, the helpers, and the informants. They could be in the least expected of faces and places. Mubarak, Gamal and their invisible mafia are definitely still working behind the scenes, and we’re seeing the sure signs of their presence!

Let me tell you one of today’s (Thursday 24^th) “signs”! One of Egypt’s most important pro-Revolution thinkers, Tarek Heggy, disappeared from Facebook! Such a trivial incident, you would think? Well, first of all, don’t look down at Facebook, it’s where revolutions start nowadays! Now let’s go back a few weeks in time. During the Revolution, when nothing was sure yet, and the Regime not believing that it could be defeated, Heggy was clearly supporting the uprising and its sole demand: taking the Regime down. His Facebook account kept disappearing, his recent posts deleted over and again. At the exact same time, other popular pages and accounts supporting the uprising were deleted or suddenly posting naïve calls for Egyptians to accept the great concessions accomplished so far and go back home! Read: hacked by the Regime’s e-oppression department.

The Revolution successfully over, Egyptian State TV suddenly became censorship-free. There, where he used to be banned, Heggy had his first interview. He spoke freely about the former regime, made Gamal Mubarak look stupid, and even declared that he was going to submit important documents to the ICJ against one of the big figures of corruption under Mubarak, who fled to Europe. Scheduled for another interview today, Heggy posted a status on Facebook stating that the interview was cancelled a few minutes before its scheduled time, due to “political interference”. A few minutes later, his account disappeared again! Who’s still exercising their e-oppression in the shadows?!

Within the last few days, an Egyptian priest was murdered in his home. Some homes belonging to the Bahai minority were burned down. Christians organized protests demanding the arrest of the killers, joined by Muslims, who were never mentioned in some shady opposition newspapers that date back to the former regime (which had organized opposition, for decoration purposes!). The former regime was already found to be connected to the terrorist attack against the Church of the Saints earlier this year. Dividing Egypt’s Muslim and Christian population has always been one of the regime’s favorite techniques to turn anger away from politics, with the added bonus of having good reasons to keep Egypt’s Emergency Law which has been in place for 30 years!

Many Egyptians fear a counter-revolution. They are right in their fears. We still have the same prime minister appointed by Mubarak during one of his “concessions”. We still hear news of activists being arrested. Those arrested before the fall of Mubarak are still in prison. Some of the dirtiest and most corrupt figures of the regime are still free. None of the killers of hundreds of protestors was investigated.

This is why we still have calls for the Revolution to continue. We want this prime minister gone. We want everyone guilty of corruption, torture and murder in court, for a fair trial, including Mubarak and his family. At least the ones we all know of their corruption and crimes. Only then this great Revolution of Egypt will be safe, and the youth who created it can focus on building a solid future for Egypt, without fear of mysterious thugs kidnapping them, one by one!

We spend much of our life at what we now call: “work”. We have 168 hours every week, we spend one third sleeping, and the rest is almost fifty-fifty between work and life! Should I say: work/working vs. life/living? That would be a dull situation, but is part of many people’s life!  

We can say something nice and idealistic like: we should only do work that we love. True, in theory. The whole system today is not designed to make it such an easy task though. Since the industrial age, when people, or workers (that’s us!) were required to work in assembly lines, humans were mostly expected to operate like machines. Go to work, do the exact same thing over and over and over, get a paycheck at the end of the month, spend all of it, etc. You know the vicious circle.

Now more people realize that job satisfaction became almost a life or death choice. It’s moral life or death! Mental, psychological life or death! I don’t know about everyone, but I’m speaking for myself, at the very least!

Fixing the system itself is not a one man’s job. Every one of us is none but a “one man job” anyway! Therefore the task will not be quick and will not be easy, the task of doing something meaningful and finding satisfaction in what we do for half of our waking life.

What is a job that brings satisfaction? That sounds like a straightforward question. It just occurred to me. But to answer the first part of the question (what job?), we need to define the second part, the goal (satisfaction): what is satisfaction in a job?

I didn’t write this post to answer this question; rather, I wrote it to pose the two-part question.

What is the satisfaction that we’re looking to have in our jobs?

What are the possible jobs that could bring us this kind of satisfaction?

To properly answer the questions, one important guiding thought to keep in mind is to come to terms with what we’re not good at. I, for one, am not good at repetitive tasks. Let me say it differently: I’m bad at doing the same thing over and over and over. Finding myself in this situation will drain my energy and almost drive me insane. Once I master a task completely, I need to move on to something else or I will sink in boredom. This is my ultimate weakness, which could turn into an advantage in different situations. We have to realize what we’re bad at, because our weakness is the strength of another person. There is nothing wrong with that, life is designed so people work together and complement each other. Ideally, the world needs some switching of roles: everyone should move to that other place where someone else is being miserable, but we can be happy and do a good job. But that won’t happen on a global level. We need to do it one person at a time, starting with ourselves!

Yes, it’s not only good, it’s a must to “realize” that we’re terribly bad at certain things! It makes the difference between a life of misery and a life of productivity and fulfillment.

The Mafia is very powerful, Hollywood gave us many proofs. Why they are powerful is because they operate as united families, each one helping the other, and every member of every family being strongly committed to the big goals of the “community”. Their goals were, or are (they’re still out there?!) evil and harmful. Selfish. Enriching to a small group of people, but destructive to the broader community.

Organized crime is successful because of its very same descriptive name: “organized”!

People of good intentions have at least one lesson to learn from criminals, about efficiency. We already see Organized Good Intentions at work (look at non-profits and charities), but the world needs much more to function properly. There are way more UGI (Unorganized Good Intentions) than OGI!

We have enough people believing in justice and sustainability to change the world, but most of them are operating individually. Their influence is therefore negligible. The same number of people networking and working together would sweep away many wrongs and problems, like a strong tsunami of goodness and wellness. We now have networking tools, a fertile Internet and its universal fruits, that never existed before in human history. It should make OGI much easier and more attainable.

We need to look around and spot the like-minded and like-hearted people. Find common goals. Form small “mafias”! Every small mafia will then connect to the other kind and unselfish mafias of the world. Together, those mafias working their Organized Good Intentions will restore the sanity of our Earth, dethrone the happy criminals roaming freely, and ensure a livable Planet for the generations to come!