Easybeats, Vanda & Young notes thread

The gentleman on the train jovially burst out 'well caught' as he made a clumsy attempt to pinch his pen off the woman's chest with his thumb and index finger. She didn't look amused...

When you drop a pen and it lands on a co-passenger's chest shouldn't you let the woman hand it back?

He had pushed himself onto the seat next to me and I had only caught a glance of him from the corner of my eye thinking he was an orthodox Jew with his hat and suit but he turned out to be an eccentric music critic or professor of some sort. Don't know.

I couldn't help but laugh at this little interlude unfolding at my feet, literally, as the gentleman regained momentum and made his way to the exit.

Eccentricity seemed to be pouring out of him as he ventured on, leaving the train - the kind of assumption I made without any other reason that having watched the pen drop on the chest of the woman sat opposite me, listened and watched.

The other misconception on the train is that when you look out the window and observe the world flying by people often mistake it for watching them in the window mirror.

Suspicion and paranoia thrive on the train and all you can do is shrug your shoulders and get on with your observation, ignoring the turning heads and stolen gazes to check your do-abouts. Tut tut tut is all I can say, relax!

People are judged by appearance and action every single moment of each day. Didn't matter anyway because it was simply a brief happenstance on an overcrowded train to London and not even deemed an encounter. When you are awake on the train there can be lots of fun experiences to be had - even if it's by yourself and no one else shares the joke...

...which possibly where I enter the category of eccentric passengers who make a small communication transfer on the rush hour train and subway, e.g. smiling, grinning, thanking or sorry'ing when none of it is necessary or expected.

Enjoy your train ride and if all else fails, pick up your phone and pretend someone is telling you a joke on the line - perhaps that will make you grin and it feels almost legit.

Ho ho ha ha ha - Laughter Yoga is so much fun!

It lets us play and have fun as our sense of humour and joy grows daily!

Besides there are little shops who nurture our sense of feeling good - even at the train stations.

Awesome thoughts, mate.

I don't want to sound full of myself but I was reading through some of the pages I have written in the past and to be honest, there were some quite cool things put in words and sentences amongst the rest of my sometimes unlikely blurb.

Many of my shared thoughts are not unique. However, my words have been spun around my own thinking and shaped into those lines which make them individual.

I am a strong advocate for shaping our own thoughts but I also listen and ponder, I become an info magnet and contemplate what's shared.

And then I decide.
We decide what's worth our attention.

I love when other people's words are shared in individual phrases and streamed with added intellect or varied vibration instead of plainly sharing what has already been said in the exact same letters and structured in the exact same way.

Having said that, there are so, so many fabulous quotes by famous people that are inspiring me daily and no douth inspiring you, precious reader, so they are worth sharing in their original flavour, too.

As long as we think when we read what's so then we are not too far off the track.

And don't just swallow it all - raw and unsweetened (perhaps another Danish transmorgryph, not sure).

So to finish this whole self-indulgent nonsense off I'd like to quote one of my early life idols and bring you to where we need to be in order to grow and learn - and don't forget to add your 12 hugs per day...

In the undying words of Bruce Springsteen, 'Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man, and I believe in the Promised Land' (which may have been taken completely out of context but never mind for now)...

The Promised Land, Paradise, Nirvana or any other name we use to describe something magical and perfect, which we continuously strive for and yearn for outside the self, while we forget to stop and listen to our heartbeat and listen to the peace within, relaxing into the safe haven and becoming one with the void where all these wonderful aspirations and places become one with here and now and you!

Be at peace with yourself and peace will come to us all - no nonsense and no religion either.

Just think what's worth your fretting and what's not!
I think that's it for now.

Books.

As the train was rolling steadily along its tracks I experienced the full range of emotions from laughing loudly to sobbing. My fellow travellers gazed regularly in my direction and I wondered if they thought I was not normal.

But what good is a book if the story does not engage you and entrall, lure you into its depth and allows you to feel. Feel as if you are the storyteller yourself.

These is My Words by Nancy Turner.

I lived the life of Sarah Prine as she told her story in her diary through the years from being a settler during unsettling times of cowboys and Indians to being an Officer's wife and running her own ranch in the territory. These clumsy lines, written by an uneducated child becoming a studied woman.

Yup. I liked the book.

So books.

I was reminded that lives are changing and our perception, our views, our world are constant and ever evolving elements throughout time. My Kindle was tugged away in my bag because My Words was not available for Kindle, so instead I had to add the bookweight to my luggage. One of these things I will always happily do because a nice companion on a long journey cannot be weighed up in grams or ounces.

I cannot imagine life without books.

And I am certainly one who hasn't often picked up a book over then past many many years except for those relating to my work whether this was in technology companies yonks ago or those about my passion and present work, holistic health and laughter, joy and communication.

The cult classic Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury published in 1953 sprung to my mind as I was thinking of books and their impact. The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and so-called "firemen" burn any that are found.

Well, it's a job just like any other. Good work with lots of variety. Monday, we burn Miller; Tuesday, Tolstoy; Wednesday, Walt Whitman; Friday, Faulkner; and Saturday and Sunday, Schopenhauer and Sartre. We burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes. That's our official motto.

Fahrenheit 451 - the temperature at which books burn!

The people who have formed the resistance to this atrocity memorise one book each and become that particular story.

So much information is available every moment of every day and sometimes it blurs our view of what is in fact true and false. The information posted on the internet is written by people and sometimes twisted to suit whoever wrote it - just like it is with any journalistic representation. We engage our minds in other people's lives via blogs and real-time messages.

Pick up a fictional novel from time to time. It really clears the mind in a wonderful way when you open a book on the first page and prepare yourself for the journey. Clears the mind to be ready for the world of the author who ransacked his mind to come up with lines of enchantment or perhaps it just flowed into a captivating story.

Honestly, take time out.
Whether it's with a book or just being sat on a tree stump pondering...

No pressure, just leisure!