What inspires me now

As a part of the blog I share with you things, people and events that inspired and continue to inspire me. Today it's two books I am thinking of and reading right now, and my son with his amazing thoughts on life.

• Blink: The Power of Thinkng without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• "our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way...We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.”  

I bought this book 10 years ago in an airport to fill my time during the flight, it resonated with me very deeply and still does. I lost the book several years ago, but it has never left my mind. Intuition has long been my natural strength which I have long been using very weakly. Whenever I find myself inwardly exclaiming to myself "I knew it!" about something I FELT but didn't believe, I recall the story. Recently, in some other book I read that our subconsciousness works far better and faster than any computer ever created, we make decisions in an instant, based on deep and thorough calculations, done by this helpful "built-in genius", but the results of these calculations are usually blocked by something far more powerful that we can imagine - our mind and consciousness. Logical reasoning, beliefs, psychological barriers and protection in an instant slam down the gate to our subconsciousness blocking out useful conclusions and gut feeling we need so often. The book not only admits the fact that intuition can be right, but states that it can often be more correct that logical reasoning, and our task is to recognise when it can fail and learn to trust it reasonably.

• Prisoners of Our Thoughts by Alex Pattakos, Stephen Covey
• "I am convinced that, in the final analysis, there is no situation that does not contain within it the seed of a meaning." 

This book was mentioned by Stephen Covey himself in his other book "First Things First". Being a busy-and-give-me-more-tasks person like I am, I dove into yet another book on time management and then stumbled upon a very simple question - what's important and why? Talking about this Covey referred to works of Viktor Frankl, a former prisoner of Nazi concentration camps, who survived it just by finding a meaning behind the suffering he had to go through and see. This book reminds me of why I am doing things I am doing and really helps during moments, when things seem meaningless, or my doings - in vain.

• "Sometimes I think of life as a slice of bread. Every day we eat a small piece of it. When we've eaten it all, we die." - my 9yo son said to me one evening as we drove to a supermarket. 

This association delighted me, and reminded me instantly of one thing: it is important to enjoy the taste of every bit of this slice, without losing a crumb of it, concentrating on it 100% while it's still in my mouth, because it is limited, and one day it will end. Even if reincarnation is real, it will be a whole new slice of bread, baked and given to me by someone other.