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week-ender

oisercage — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:49:00 +0000

Make it a good one.

viktor frankl

oisercage — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:53:29 +0000

Viktor Frankl liked to say, “You must over-estimate man. If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. If we over-estimate him, we promote him to what he really can be.”

For someone who had spent time at Auschwitz he seemed pretty upbeat about life and human nature. So, I had to read his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

I hope this essay lifts up your spirit the way his book did mine when I first read it.

“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

Shortly after Frankl arrived at the camp, the guards ordered him to strip off his clothes and put on the rags of a deceased prisoner. Later, he asked another captive what happened to the group of people that the wardens had pulled out of the lines. The old-timer pointed to the smoke rising in the sky. “Your friend is up there in Heaven.”

As Frankl adapted to camp life, he observed the psychological breakdown of many of his comrades. He strove to maintain his own sanity despite the harsh environment, the torments from the guards and the irrepressible questions on his mind: “What is the point of this suffering? Will I survive? If I do survive, what will my life be worth?”

Frankl knew when a comrade had lost the will to live because he was no longer prepared to endure the daily trials. When his suffering had lost meaning, he just wanted to get as much pleasure as possible NOW. “Cigarettes could be exchanged for twelve soups, and twelve soups were often a very real respite from starvation…Thus when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and once lost, the will to live seldom returned.”

It was amazing to Frankl that he and some of his comrades wanted to survive, in spite of these conditions. He came to believe that those who did had one distinguishing mark: the will to meaning fulfilled.

He made a firm decision not to commit suicide because he was working on a book that he hoped would be a great contribution to the world (nicely anticipated!). He realized that, with that purpose in mind, he was no longer afraid of his suffering. He had acquired a superhuman motivation to endure it. He surmised that “he who has a why to live will bear with almost any how.”

After the war, he continued his research and discovered that happiness, which we sometimes pursue through pleasures or a list of highly-praised achievements, is only a by-product of the will to meaning. In other words, happiness is what happens while you’re minding your business. Your business is to find out why you’re here and what great thing you can do with that time. If you succeed at this – and it will be hard – then happiness may come crawling with its tail between its legs. And, if it is your lot to suffer, then at least you will bear it nobly.

“Success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

So, don’t fret if you don’t get through that list of “10 Things to Get to a Happier You” today. Just do the one thing that your entire being is burning to do.
Happy Thursday!

berlin travelogue

oisercage — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:20:21 +0000

Berlin, with its 3.438 million people is an empty city. We arrived on a rainy Wednesday. The city was still and it felt as though we were in slow motion. This was understandable on a rainy Wednesday night. But as the rain thinned out and the sun came up we were completely freaked out. There was a quietness that made you want to run for a pulsating club room. This city is a sprawl, the streets yawning widely. And, as you walk around you start to see another Berlin behind this one. This one where people sat at wooden tables outside the cafés and drank with friends.

The past lurks everywhere – in buildings with bullet holes, in the cold tomb-like Holocaust Memorial downtown, in unexpected tributes on back streets. Then, the silence becomes mystery and even if you’re not a history buff you become curious. You want to know what lurks behind the walls.

For more about my trip to Berlin (with Cristina, Maite, and Ferando who joined me from Spain) check out the interactive slideshow!I hope you enjoy it.

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german perspective

oisercage — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:30:15 +0000

This photo is from my first trip to Berlin. I was so shocked by the amount of grafitti that there was because I had always thought – probably through second-hand impressions – that Germans were extremely orderly, bordering on freaky. But as I soon as I got out of the metro, the grafitti was everywhere. Some small as if they were signatures. And others that took up entire façades on the buildings. I saw them on people, too. This juxtaposition made me smile.
Hope it does the same for you. Happy Tuesday.

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New Youtube Channel/London any way you like

oisercage — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:25:20 +0000

Hello Friends,
I’ve been hard at work on a some new projects! I’ve been conversing in a little html and javascript. I finished putting together an interactive London travelogue on the platform Impress created by @Bartaz. I liked Impress because it’s a cool new way to tell a story in pictures – more fluid and now I can add music! Check it out below or try it yourself!

Hope you enjoy it.

Music: Blow Away by A Fine Frenzy

my favorite {mistake}

oisercage — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:38:03 +0000

Maybe the thing that attracts people to creative endeavor is precisely the freedom to make mistakes. You can learn lot of things without understanding them. The only way to understand is to create (do something). In doing you will make mistakes and the beauty of a creative endeavor is that mistakes are acknowledged, respected, even cherished. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not doing it right. In the more so-called practical fields people’s feet are often held to the fire over mistakes that won’t change much of anything except to illicit an extra phone call. Overzealous reprobation stifles creativity. It leads to functional idiocy.

“You’ve never seen a book that says Failing 101,” a friend says to me. “But every time I research an interesting project, they said that of the best things about their work is failure, and how they came to where they are, is because of previous failure.”

I am learning about photography, writing, and html/css coding on my own while I work. In the process of trying to makes something worthwhile, I have made many mistakes. In the course of writing this blog for a little over a year now, I have made many mistakes. But every mistake led me to my next lesson.

When I got lucky, the mistake was a new wonderful discovery.

You always have two options: make mistakes or stay where you are. I always think about this when I’m watching tennis. The thing that makes a swift player is not his years on the field but his recovery time.

Recovery time from his last mistake. A player who makes a mistake and laments it is done. The same goes for a singer, dancer or filmmaker.

This photograph is one of the first pictures I ever took in June 2006 as a would-be photography enthusiast. I was trying to measure the light correctly and in the process I forgot to focus. But, what a lovely swirl of color it came out to be. It is, to this day, one of my favorite photographs in my stack.

Friends, I’ll make more mistakes in this space as I grow. This blog will grow as I grow.
Thank you for walking with me.

easy like sunday morning

oisercage — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:41:16 +0000

I find myself coming back to certain country songs. I love the way some country songs are written. The verses sound less like clever wordplay and more like a recited play. By the time the song is over, I feel like I’ve had this intimate experience with some character from Nashville. After 2.40 minutes I feel like I know the characters in the song. They remind me of old French tunes, now international classics because of crooners like Edith Piaf. They always told a story, often heart-breaking. Many country songs are also about jilted love (Before He Cheats, Whiskey Lullaby) but others are so exultant that they inevitably make it onto my Sunday Playlist. I’m very new to country but I like to tap along these:

Hope you enjoy!

beauty {routine}

oisercage — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:22:52 +0000

Note to Self: Let no one decide what you are or can be. What you think of yourself is far more important, what you think is a far better determinant of your future than what anyone else thinks. So, be careful what you think of yourself. Being is believing. xo

in the morning

oisercage — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:45:43 +0000

I’m on an Emily Dickinson kick right now, just in time for Spring. All her poems are like this one – about dawn, the sun, the trees, the bees…It makes me want to photograph every little thing. And here comes along Instagram to allow me to do that! Little poems and little pictures about little things that make a big difference in our day.

Poem by Emily Dickinson/Edited via Instagram

{wide open} spaces

oisercage — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 07:44:22 +0000

I took these pictures in Bavaria, Germany where I was attending a journalism conference. Just outside the halls of the seminar, in the village of Hexenagger, were these lovely fields. The yellow castle, Schloss Hexenagger, sits atop a hill surveying the landscape and villagers below. Some of these villagers looked like real life gnomes. I have nothing against gnomes – real or porcelain – but it was funny to see them puttering about in their gardens. And the gardens are absolutely beautiful. Bavaria is absolutely beautiful.
It was tranquilizing to be there. All this perennial beauty. It lowers the blood pressure and makes everyone so patient and charming.
Enjoy and stay zen!