YOU GET OLD ONLY WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A PROJECT TO DO said Sir VS NAIPAUL

YOU GET OLD ONLY WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A PROJECT TO DO

As our reading abilities evolve, so does our choice of literature. After the usual classics of school years, one ventures and discovers, the other literature, which to me was Alberto Moravia (Italian, Jewish) and Agnar Mykle (Norwegian). Australia provided the local literature, Nevile Shute who was a celebrated Brit-Oz writer and of course I was already interested in understanding what made Australians, Aussies. I recognized the unique nature of Australian Humour, and The Outcasts of Foolgarah by Frank Hardy was a favourite. If you ask me what defines an Aussie, I can flatly claim: An Aussie is a person who has an Aussie sense of humour.

All that was gobbled up when I was introduced to the West Indies and its literature, I fondly remember my good friend Lincoln Myers from Trinidad who told me about VS Naipaul who was to be a constant companion and eagerly read each and every book he published, especially his travel books, starting with India: An area of Darkness. Visits to various Caribbean islands made me want to read other writers from the region, before plunging headlong into the magical realism of Latin America.

I am reading this morning Inner Engineering by Sadhguru.

Here is something he writes:

Learn to place your intellect in the sheath of your awareness rather than in the sack of memory and identification.

That reminded me of what Naipaul said: you feel old only when you don’t have a project, something to look forward to.

Whatever your age, rather than dipping into the memory captured by your experiences or thoughts, look forward to creating experiences and thoughts. In this way you invigorate yourself: mind and body

What projects do I have?

Apart from planning travels which are always a pleasant task…

A Diabetes and Wound Clinic in Easter Island helped by my Omaha Indian friends

Disease Prevention Public Health Education in a village along the Amazon

And Cuba that unending feast is always an unending project!

YOU WILL COME BACK AGAIN: LES AU REVOIR new artists to discover through SPOTIFY

There is something so wonderful about being in a city that you love and feeling very peaceful in your heart, and you are surrounded by silence and solitude. You friends and other lovers in Cuba are enticing you with their tender emails and messages and telephone calls. 
I have in front of me the last book by Sadhguru
Inner Engineering which I refer to from time to time.
I am using Spotify streaming service and I select the music to suit this dreamy mood. Even among the selections, now and then a song wafts through and touches your heart. You dont know the artists but with Google and YouTube and Wikipedia you soon know who they are.
I was listening to LES AU REVOIR
Here is the song in the original Greek.
http://lyricstranslate.com/en/les-au-revoir-tha-ksanartheis-lyrics.html#ixzz539p1TMHw
Greek

Tha Ksanartheis

Δεν με μέλει αν οι όρκοι μας σβήστηκαν

Δεν με μέλει εάν όλα ξεχαστήκαν

Πίστεψε με διόλου δεν πονώ

Κι αν εσύ ξεχνάς, ξεχνώ κι εγώ

 

Δεν με μέλει αν η καρδιά σου άλλον θέλει

Δυνατά σου το φωνάζω, "δεν με μέλει"

Δεν ζηλεύω αυτόν που αγαπάς

Δεν με μέλει, όπου θέλεις ας πας

 

Θα ξανάρθεις,

Όσα χρόνια κι αν περάσουν θα ξανάρθεις

Και συμπόνια θα ζητάς μετανιωμένη

Θε να 'ρθεις με ραγισμένη την καρδιά

Θα ξανάρθεις

Δεν μπορεί παρά μια μέρα να ξανάρθεις

Όταν μάθεις πως βγήκες γελασμένη

Θα ξανάρθεις ντροπιασμένη μια βραδιά

 

Δεν με μέλει αν πουλάς την αγκαλιά σου

Κι αν μοιράζεις σ' όποιον να 'ναι τα φιλιά σου

Θα 'ρθει η μέρα που θα με ποθείς

Σου το λέω, να το θυμηθείς

 

Δεν με μέλει που όποιος θέλει σ' αγοράζει

Κι αν ξέχασες τους όρκους δεν πειράζει

Ότι τώρα δυνατά ποθείς

Θα 'ρθει η μέρα να το βαρεθείς

 

Θα ξανάρθεις,

Όσα χρόνια κι αν περάσουν θα ξανάρθεις

Και συμπόνια θα ζητάς μετανιωμένη

Θε να 'ρθεις με ραγισμένη την καρδιά

Θα ξανάρθεις

Δεν μπορεί παρά μια μέρα να ξανάρθεις

Όταν μάθεις πως βγήκες γελασμένη

Θα ξανάρθεις ντροπιασμένη μια βραδιά (x2)

http://lyricstranslate.com/en/tha-ksanartheis-you-will-come-back-again.html#ixzz539orZcEJ

English translation

You will come back again

I don't care if our vows are erased

I don't care if everything is forgotten

Believe me I'm not in pain at all

And if you forget, I forget too

 

I don't care if your heart desires someone else

I'm shouting you that loudly, " I don't care"

I'm not jealous of whom you love

I don't care, wherever you want, you can go

 

You will come back again,

No matter how many years will pass, you will come back again

And you will ask compassion regretful

You will come with broken heart

You will come back again,

It can't be, you will come back again one day

When you find out you were fooled

You will come back ashamed one night

 

I don't care if you sell your hug

And if you give your kisses to anyone

The day that you will desire me will come

I'm telling you that, you should remember it

 

I don't care that anyone who wants can buy you

And if you forget the vows it's alright

The thing you strongly desire now

The day you will get bored of it will come

 

You will come back again,

No matter how many years will pass, you will come back again

And you will ask compassion regretful

You will come with broken heard

You will come back again,

It can't be, you will come back again one day

When you find out you were tricked

You will come back ashamed one night (x2)

I love the sentiments expressed. I have always felt that those who treaded upon me on their way to somewhere or other, will always come back 

So I close my eyes 

think of a few friends who went away and say:

You will come back again..

and here is the song:

WELCOME TO 2018 CONTINUATION OF THE HAPPINESS OF 2017

Historically speaking, the New Year's Eve has not been kind to me. I can think of only the disasters that had happened on that day in various countries: Melbourne, Guyaquil, Miami, La Habana, I can go on and on.
I wanted it to be, as it was when I was a junior doctor, like any other day, one day passing on to the next, without the pressure that one had to be joyous and make decisions or resolutions. All seemed artificial. In Baracoa, we used to sit up all night by the Malecon singing and watching the sun come up before going home and those days were pleasant.
As usual cards and messages and videos, some of them not very nice, began arriving. I appreciated the fact that people are thinking of you, at least fleetingly, for that moment while they are dispatching these missives to the coterie of their friends!

But this year it was different and I enjoyed it very much.
First of all I had arrived in the USA feeling very content and happy after my trip to Asia and Qatar. I had the luxury of spending the last two days of the year in complete privacy and tranquility at the empty home of my sister. I was invited to dinner to my best friend's house and there were just six of us.
we had enough food and wine and champagne to drink but the centre of attraction was the depth of our friendship and how much we were concerned about each other and genuine expressions of affection. 
This was not a liminal moment but a moment well lived and I felt very good.
It is good to have FRIENDS..
We humans are capable of maintaining intimate relationships with 10-15 people at any one time, but up to 150 social relationships at a time. this number is referred to as Dunbar Number.
Since I have CUBA where friendships have a deeper meaning (a social context, solidarity in that context ) and have a roving geographical realm, the number is slightly higher for me, still intimate relationships are within the 10-15 range..
Last night included some of those from 10-15 intimate range.
From Wikipedia:

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individualknows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.^[1][2] This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.^[3] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships.^[4] Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar".^[5]

Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.^[6][7] Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

Dunbar theorized that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size [...] the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained". On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again.^[8]