What Attracts You to Other People?

Pain and love,
not angry pain, not tearful pain, not reproachful, not desperate...
Pain and love...pain and bliss.
As in birth, as in death.

When I was a little girl,
Grandmum told me a secret:
"If you really want something,
there will be a way."
Is it angels or the power of positive thinking?
Is it determination to act
or the courage to be guided?

Between these impulses the adventure is born.
The roaring of the ocean never stops.
Almost everyone is struggling.
Colours so sharp
Hot, fluffy sand
with dry, salty crust on top
The taste of tears in your mouth

The pain just doesn't go away
And you are not alone
This realisation comes
when you open your eyes,
your ears and your heart
and you hear other people out.
You stop and ponder,
why should this be?

Sunshine breaking into trillions
of fragments
in the shallow.
The power of money,
love and creation.
Living so high
Falling so low
Rocks meeting water
Sand meeting grass
Blue meeting blue on the horizon
Human meeting perfection,
the perfection of the human mind.

On a damp, fog-shrouded morning, a paleonthropologist from Madrid stands before the entrance to El Sidron and gingerly lowers himself into a black hole.

An underground river had hollowed out a deep vein of sandstone. Ten minutes into the cave,
he discovers 'the tunnel of bones'.

Located here are the last nine Neanderthals -
five young adults, two teenagers, a child about eight and a three year-old toddler.

All showed signs of nutritional stress in their teeth - not unusual in young Neanderthals
late in their time on earth. But a deeper desperation is etched in their bones.

They were cannibalised by the first humans.
Whoever ate their flesh, and for whatever reason, starvation or ritual, within days they died. The ground below them collapsed,
leaving little time for hyenas to scatter the remains.

The scientist picks up the mineralized bone
of our closest prehistoric relative,who dominated Eurasia for 200,000 years. With large brains and enormous strength, they
seemed equipped to face anything on earth -
except for those modern human migrants
from Africa - us.

Why did one kind of human being survive, and the other disappear? With each generation, humans became increasingly skilled at predicting and avoiding danger.

Even now, after the wilderness has been pushed away by the modern world, our foreheads are wrinkled by any of a million and one other common worries. Our minds keep assessing and judging almost everything.

We are living in fast earning and spending times. Most people deal with their money in the same way that they deal with their feelings.
The lucky ones give and receive graciously with a hug and a smile.

They waste money, as if they are not worthy
of holding onto anything precious. Others are insatiable, greedy for more and more.
And some are as tight with their purse as they are with their heart - giving and receiving is awkward and embarrassing for them.

In the early human times, the tight ones would not survive. If your group rejected you, it wouldn't be long before the wolves found you.

Is that why, so much energy is spent worrying whether people will like us? We're always looking for ways to improve ourselves or putting ourselves down because we don't measure up.

We are so sophisticated now. We can dream up a fantasy of a person we would like to be,
then compare our real self to that impossible, perfect image.

Think about the ambition of any Stone Age man. A better chance of survival depends on more food to keep him alive through times of scarcity. Better shelter protects him from weather and wild animals. More children give him a chance that some can survive...

And our modern mind continues to look for more: money, status, love, new car or house.
If you succeed, then you are content for a while
until you want more....

Thus evolution has shaped our minds so that we are almost inevitably destined to be never satisfied...

The stories of a happy childhood are all the same - the parents love each other, there are other children to play with and there is a bit of nature to have adventures in.

The stories of a damaged childhood are all different - unique, tragic and complicated, just like most human lives.

When those children grow up, almost half of them will at some point be so overwhelmed by misery that they seriously contemplate suicide.

With professional help, advice and wordly wisdom, it's difficult to rekindle that spark of the great fire of life...

Love radiates from infants. In springtime, the power of youth abounds but what will happen at the end of summer?

We are living longer than ever before, but with each extra year, we are losing the hunger to conquer the world.

Who knows what the future holds? There is only hope. In the warm afternoon sunshine of mid-life, is the abundance of the harvest.
The joy of sharing....