Modern life has transformed most of human beings into a commodity. If he conducts investment, he wants to highest profit. If he has good job, he wants to the higher position in the company. The main objective is to change his skills, knowlegde and his personality package with other who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exhange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfication except the one to consume.
This condition may be influenced us to see the relationship. If one gives 100% of his love, other persons must give 100% of her love. Or maybe you are familiar with this sentence – so cliché ‘Our feeling is not the same stage’ or ‘I could not trust you 100%’.
How can we measure love? When we start talking about percentage of love, we will trap in the calculation of love, love may be up and down. Love may be decreased, then it could finally die because there is no room to grow.
Let the love grows naturally, everywhere, every part of our heart. Do not calculate it, do not limit it. To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.
When I read newspaper, I was shocked. The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) issues fatwa for Moslems that bans on yoga, vote abstention and smoking. According to MUI, yoga has Hindu elements so they ban it. Because they are afraid that it will corrupt the Moslem beliefs. Then, vote abstention is forbidden too. Why do we have to vote if we feel that those candidates are not qualified? Hello… This is democracy country aight? Ban on smoking? Do they realize that many Indonesian Moslems are smoker? Have they thought the labors who work in tobbaco factories will have no jobs if they ban smoking? I think in order to discourage people to stop smoking, why dont give enough information about the bad effects of smoking and not using religion. Whoah, other pointless rules after the Pornography Law passed!!!!
A fatwa in the Islamic faith is a religious opinion on Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar. In Sunni Islam any fatwa is non-binding, whereas in Shia Islam it could be, depending on the status of the scholar. (http://wikipedia.org)
Some friends once asked me the reason I like Jazz Music. Well, I like listening Jazz coz it’s fun and unpredictable. Jazz swings!!! In every Jazz gig and of course in the hand of masters of Jazz, the juggling act between the planned and the spontaneous creates a tension that makes each gig at once uniquely relevant to the moment of its creation. Honestly I become entranced with Jazz because of its rhythms and improvisatory nature.
Indeed, “Jazz music rewards a kind of restless, wide-ranging curiosity about life and the people and forces in it. Its proven itself to be endlessly adaptable to the cross currents and often startling phenomena of modern life. Comedy, tragedy, high-mindedness, downhomeness, sophistications, pathos, joy-Jazz contains and celebrates all of these things and more.”(Wynton Marsalis-The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Jazz)
I just can say…. Jazzy Kinda Something. If you are smart, sensitive, sexy, fun and social inquisitive, then Jazz is out there waiting for you.
“I hate this, he does not call me” the girl says. “I miss him. Damn, I hate this situation”. The girl says. Do you think that she sounds frustrated?“
Hell ya! I don’t know what she wants, I have done everything that she wants” the guy says. He sounds frustrated too.
Have you ever been in that kind situation? You feel anxious about your relationship? You want to have steady relationship? Then, you start wishing upon the stars. One of my bestfriends called ‘khayalan babu’ (‘analogy to Cinderella situation’). Someone will take you to the best restaurant for candle light dinner or the prince charming will kidnap you and bring you around.You know what, we always hope to become lucky in love. Yes lucky! People are starved for love, they watch movies about happy and unhappy love stories from Pretty Women, Enter and Breaking, Cinderella, Romeo Must Die etc. Moreover, we listen to mmm….trashy songs about love. (One of my bestfriends once made fun of me because I listened to This Love-Maroon Five. He said, that song is chessy and corny!) Yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned bout love.Media conglomerates portrays love as the chemical attraction between two people and nothing more. And yes… it might be affected to our lives without intentionally. The love stories that we see in TV or listen in the radio are usually about two people who, from different world (such as telenovela, the guy is rich and the girl is poor), manage to come together, then the story simply ends. We suppose to believe that they on to live happily ever after. But where, exactly, is it that they go? They go to their own perfect worlds with their own perfect romances. Life inside themselves – in the perfect dream life. You know what? People sometimes like the clowns in the amusement parks who are funny, happy, colorful and larger than life on the outside, but on the inside their stifled and sweating and dying to get out. That is what real love is. I can’t blame people for wanting to stay inside. They prefer to see something colourful-jolly than face bloody-dark things. But love calls us out of our fantasies to face the reality of a world that is suffering and to do our part to make the world a better place for everyone.
WHoah….What’s love? I can’t describe it with my own words because I am still learning what’s love is. Anyway, let me quoted Erich Fromm’s statement, my dear friends. He states that love is an art. It is about unity, not conformity; oneness, not sameness; openness, not isolation; togetherness, not separation; activity, not passivity “Love is an activity, not a passive affect, it is a ‘standing in, not a falling for. Well…the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving not receiving”.
One of my collegues asked my friend, are you married? And she answered “Not yet”! He replied “ Don’t get married. I wish that I don’t get married. Besides, you’re too young.” The other guy said “Are you not happy with your wife?” He replied “if I can have other ones, why not? What do you think?.The other guy said “One is enough for now. Headache!”Then both were laughing. I just stopped my works for a while and glanced to them, then I got back to my works.From that short conversation, suddenly I remember Albert Einstein. He said that “Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.”It also reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir. They kept the relationship as a union that remained a settled partnership in life. I think those moments might be frightened both Sartre and de Beauvoir. Frankly speaking, those moments also might be frightened by most of people, or maybe for most of us. For them, giving part of their freedom is a very expensive price that they shall pay to enter the ‘bar’ that they call ‘marriage institution’. Let me quote one of his statements regarding freedom, “freedom is a kind of damnation: as Sartre affirms: “We said that freedom is not free not to be free and that it is not free not to exist.”
