The tragic thing about tragedy is that it is unexpected.  It is like a lightning bolt which zaps life, burns whatever it touches and disappears, leaving us to deal with the mess in its wake. Death is a thing no one gets accustomed to.

That is how I feel about the news I received on the morning of October 12^th, 2014.  My good friend and conveniently my cousin also, Genadiy Kondratyuk is no more.   A loud crash at midnight, rain, blur, a car accident — the tragedy was death.  Life is a vapor for all of us and his evaporated at age thirty-one.

There is a fine line between living and preparing to live.  Genadiy never walked it.  He always lived.  He did not await retirement to travel, nor worry about long term security, those things which people burn daylight hours for, hoping to taste life in the distant future.  For him, every day got lived with all of his senses.  He explored his town like he explored the world.  For each moment he spent at home in Portland, he spent four elsewhere.  Months in India, and Africa, and Mexico, and anywhere else his heart beckoned him to go.

He enjoyed many things, but when it came to food, he was a connoisseur.  He savored the curries of India and the fine chocolates of Belgium.  When a bite of something did not meet his expectations, he did not torture his taste buds but left his meal in search of the best for he always knew where to find the perfect phở or coffee house, even in cities foreign to him.

I will miss my friend and the adventures we have not taken, for this one he ventures alone.  I will miss his faithfulness, kindness, and generosity which was a genuine gift to me.  And as heaven smiles to receive him, I mourn— for I will miss him.

Photo | Fancy.com

Talk is not cheap. I once worked at a CPA firm where everyone spoke in low voices, breathed confidentiality, and had sensitive noses as was implied by the fact that wearing perfume was strictly forbidden to clients and employees alike.

The firm dealt with a lot of old money and was respectable enough to name the price; a thing they did most generously. This is where the lesson that talk is not cheap was most thoroughly instilled in me.

The public accountants, consultants, and attorneys were pleasant, patiently listening to all of the stories told to them by their clients. They did not challenge the visitors’ desire to converse. By trade, they were legal authorities, estate planners, and wealth managers but when clients wished to add the roles of friend, counselor, and chatting partner to their list of services— they did not object. Yet upon return visits, clients shortened their stories, cut the crap, and got down to business. The reason, quite simple: time is expensive.

When clients gave wordy accounts of their travels, adventures, and families to the partners of the firm, they did not realize that they were getting charged the same triple digits per moment as they did while receiving legal advice or financial counsel. By and by, as they reviewed the charges on their bills, they realized how expensive talk really is. After the dawning dawned, return visits took on a different feel— the clients came to the office, smiled graciously and got down to business.

This experience illuminated the price of time. Time is always passing and how each moment is filled matters. Some doings are too worthless to justify the time they occupy and it is best to cut them before we get the bill.

Photo: Jonas Hafner | Your work is brilliant! | aufzehengehen.de

An elaborate kiddie playground geared with a large wooden fort intersected my jogging trail. I meant to jog past it, but a gust of curiosity blew me off course and into the fortress. I stepped into the bark dust and made my way up the wooden steps, trying with difficulty to remember what one does inside of this contraption of slides, steps, and bridge-like passages. I meandered through, trying to understand how such a thing holds children captive for hours as they exert their energy with insurmountable pleasure and endless joy.

I walked over the teetering bridge connecting the two wings of the fort, trying hard to deduce which quality disappears when kids grow older. Just then a few vibrant children whiz past me and the mystery unravels. Imagination! It is not the playground that captivates, but what they create of it in their young minds. It becomes a beautiful world as they act the princes, and become the Princess, or turn into heroes, or bandits.

A little imagination sprinkled over a wooden fort is like fairy-dust tossed on Cinderella’s pumpkin. The stale playground transforms into a magical kingdom full of secret passages and daring escapes where anything could happen— and just about everything does happen. Imagination is the thing that is lost when reality makes things impossible and reason dilutes the magic.

I stifled the voice of reason and let my imagination run wild. I compared my world to the wooden playground and myself to a child playing in it. In my mind, I did not become a hero or a princess, but I became something better, I became the height of myself— in my mind, I reached the maximum potential of what I am and my world reached the height of what it is building up to be.

Nothing around me changed. I was still standing on the teetering bridge of a wooden fort, yet as I imagined, I received insurmountable pleasure and endless joy because I was using my imagination. Not to create things outside of myself as adults do— but to recreate myself and my world inside of me.

 Photo: Zhanna Krukovets conquering Bolivia | thank you!

It has been said that life is a voyage.  The analogy fits Life like a glove. It fits because a good voyage is good as far as it is actually taken.

Then if the voyager keeps at it even when the thing gets out of control, when the unpredictable happens, when he is tested beyond what he thought he could handle and when the terrain gets so rough, death seems to lure at the end of every step.  That is when he realizes that every time he comes to the edge of himself, more of him materializes.

There are so many untapped measures layered inside of us withering away unexplored because the safe paths carved out by the forerunners are less troublesome than taking the initiative to forge the lives we envision. A life that is forever moving towards the destination of the mind’s eye does not magically happen; it is a creation or a composition of actions which continuously flow till they chisel out the picture in your mind.  The trick lies in the continuous movement because the force needed, gains momentum through action. There is always the natural desire to settle down.  In a job, in a relationship, in many things and settling may be for your benefit.  Where a person is unsettled he is carrying the thing in question with both his hands and cannot pursue other endeavors.  What he settles he lays down to free his hands.  This allows him to pursue those things which he could not touch while his hands were full, but it is important to pick up other things.

Often with the big few questions of life resolved, people set up camp mid-voyage.  They begin to do the things which stagnate rather than moving them further along. This is not of the essence! The key lies in flowing forward and not letting an accomplishment thwart momentum, but rather be an aide allowing us to glide through more tunnels and crash into fewer walls on our voyage through life.

 Photo: Teresa Queirós

As I navigated through the world of academia I felt myself grow slightly downward. At the end of each semester, I was compelled to readjust my mind, analyze what I learned and unlearn the things that kept me from being free and pliable because something in the liberal path to knowledge dismantled me.

I came to some conclusions, but it was not until I studied for my GRE that I stumbled over an observation.  A vital part of GRE preparation consists of studying vocabulary. Which is especially important for the Verbal Reasoning section and study guides provide a mean list of a couple hundred words that are likely to be seen on the test.

I like words and wanted to learn them all. Not just for the test, but for life so I did what I was taught— I made notecards. The pile was toppling tall and to underwhelm the task, I divided the words into manageable sets. Three separate categories formed: positive words, negative words, and neutral words. I meant to divide them evenly, but comparing the stacks, I was bewildered. The neutral stack was dingy, the positive stack was a bit less dingy, the negative stack was like the leaning tower of Pisa hovering over them both— the negative words completely dwarfed all the rest.

By negative words I mean the words that deconstruct rather than construct, for example, the Kaplan GRE study guide offered twenty-seven words meaning “to criticize,” while it provided just nine words “to praise.” To further unbalance the situation, the English language allows for most positive words to be negated, but not vice-versa. Happy can be turned to unhappy, generous can be made ungenerous, and ingenuous can be made disingenuous, while most negative words rarely yield to that kind of superfluity. Unsad, ungreedy or disodious are improper.

I realized that the negative vibe I felt was not pure emotion, but the result of a negative system of learning. Words are the foundation for obtaining knowledge and the foundation assigned to me was focused on deconstruction, giving me more aides to tear apart and criticize rather than to build up, create, and express my thoughts, ideas and emotions in a constructive way. That is perhaps why those who berate, decry and defame sound more sophisticated than those who attempt to point out the good, the true and the beautiful.