Let me see once in my lifetime: Hagia Sophia

I love travel blogs! And I’d love to have one, but I can’t afford travelling . I’m pathetic, but I’ll make sure I travel a lot in the future, possibly around the world Since I can’t exactly blog about places I have visited, let me blog about places I have to visit at least once in my lifetime.

I came to know about this wonder Hagia Sophia (meaning ‘Holy Wisdom’) from Omar Nasiri’s book “Inside the Jihad”. LOL, I know, I’m not that well-read about beautiful places on Earth, so thanks a lot Mr Nasiri for enlightening me on the Hagia Sophia (and thanks to Wiki too, for telling me the meaning of ‘Hagia Sophia’).

The Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya) was both a church and a mosque and is now a museum, if I’m not mistaken. There are Christian themed mozaic and Muslim themed artefacts inside, and I’m sure it is a very beautiful building. I happen to love domes too, they give an exotic feeling.

I wish I could upload a photo, but unfortunately I can only find copyrighted photos from Google. , so wait for me, Turkey, one day I’ll go and see your Hagia Sophia for myself.

Planning your goals is rarely effective!

I live in a land whereby planning your goals (short term and long term) is something that people do regularly, naturally and perhaps with little thoughts because it’s just understood that you plan your goals before you start doing anything. This is of course something that is highly encouraged by all those self-help books which ardently believe that goals make your dreams come true…and which thinks that results are all that count.

Long before all those motivational talks on goal planning blablabla, I believe that each of us has some goals in our minds. But those motivators convince us that by considering seriously realistic goals and putting them down on a piece of paper that we pin up on our bedroom wall, we can be more focused and channelled all our energy into that goal. Goal-oriented. Purpose-driven.  Assigning such terms to something that we do naturally simply makes me sick. The more promoted those terms (“perfect step to success”), the more corny they sound. YUCK!

Let me fish out an interesting paragraph from an extremely interesting book entitled “Inside The Jihad” by Omar Nasiri (pseudonym):

“Every boy has a dream…to be something fantastic…As a boy grows up and becomes a man, he gradually lets the dream go…But if his dream is destroyed at a very oung age, the boy will either be destroyed totally along with it, or he will become strong. He will become strong because he no longer has anything to lose…A boy without a dream is dangerous.”

Now that sounds pretty reasonable. Those of us who are so preoccupied with goals may actually limit ourselves. We plan realistic goals because we fear the disappointment that comes along when we are unable to accomplish it. And how many of us are actually aware of our potential? If we ever knew our potential, we would not be calling it ‘potential’ because we would have made the most out of it.  Of course there’s that adage of reaching for the stars so when you fall, you fall on the cloud, or something like that. But again, it’s an oversimplification-of-a-complex-reality.

On the other hand, when you let go of your goal and just do the best you can do, that’s when you will come to realise your potential. When you don’t have any goal in mind, you have “nothing to lose”,  and you are not afraid of the outcome. Well, I’ve tried this out and it worked for me.

Then again, Paulo Coelho suggests in his popular book “The Alchemist” that with a final goal in mind, you are bound to achieve not only your dream but also countless experienve. That works if you don’t care about what you might get in the end, because what you hoped for might not be achieved. Instead, you get to experience lotsa other delights which are supposedly what makes you stronger, just like Santiago who managed to realise that his journey was much more valuable than the chest full of gold he discovered (that is, his initial goal).

So one thing remains true to these days, that result is never the most important aspect of anything.