Good bye and welcome to my new home

After writing for nine months on this blog, I am now emboldened enough to move to a self-hosted website, Next Step to Nirvana. In these nine months, I wrote 128 posts and I am extraordinarily grateful to the 408 readers who have become followers. I have written all kinds of stuff so far. Essays on current topics, pictures of my garden beauties, and recipes. This blog became my solace and safe space for experimentation. I even learned to write poetry and encouraged every step by loyal readers who have become my friends. Recently, I was telling my love that research has found that oxytocin (bonding hormone) levels go up even during social media contact. This blog is one of my primary oxytocin sources.

Here are some statistics so far.

I am grateful beyond belief for the support, friendship, and fellowship that my fellow bloggers have given me. I have been able to transfer all my materials here including comments to the new home. I hope that my readers and followers will continue to visit my new home as well. Please do. After two weeks, I will have to take this site down so I can focus on building the other one.

Here is a link to my top post on videogaming on the new website.

Hope is a sweet thing

This weekend, I had the most harrowing personal experience. An online friend was going through a hard time, which I got to know through her social media postings and I had to intervene and get her the help that she needed. It took me hours to handle the crisis. I couldn’t sit idly by when someone was in pain. The next morning I talked to the hospital to check on her. Once I knew she was resting and getting the care she needed, I felt this huge adrenaline letdown and my entire body was fatigued and my spirit was tired. All this for one evening’s stress about someone who might have been in danger. I cannot even imagine what the thousands of refugees endure through loss of home, family, and everything that they know.

Evolution has wired us to be compassionate to like-others. It makes good genetic sense to be compassionate to our family and friends, kith and kin. In our modern world, an online friend is a member of your tribe. Not too long ago, anyone who did not look like us or share our skin color or family history was an enemy and was killed. My experience with this incident makes me so much more appreciative of people who are compassionate to distant others. Like the Prime Minister of Finland who opened up his home to refugees. And the Swedish Prime Minister and Swedish citizens who said that their Europe takes in refugees. And the Germans who are cooking with the refugess.   France and UK have promised to take 44,000 refugees. 

This is progress. Despite all the negative images that media blasts us with day after day, this is evolution of us as a human race. Why would people help others with whom they do not share bonds of affection or kinship? I think it is because we, humans, are capable of moral imagination.  That is exactly how we survived and thrived for millions of years. I end this long, busy weekend with hope. Hope that we will be okay because we take care of each other.

The gift of magi story

Who among us have not been moved and touched by

The gift of magi story?

Romantic, magical and sentimental.

I ask,

“O’Henry,

Did you mean to write a parable of comic irony?

A warning to lovers not to let things fall down the cracks between people.

An admonition to talk.

Like, “wake me up if you see the lights”

Let me know when the gas tank is empty

a day before my big meeting with the sponsor

No, I don’t want another vacuum cleaner!

Give me a DNA Kit instead.

Understandings bloom from shared information and not just infatuation.

Della’s hair will grow back.

Mocking both of them and the watchless platinum chain.

Then, Jim will be mad. He is just a child.

O Henry, they were not the wisest.

They were the stupidest.

They need a therapist.