Fear of Life by Alexander Lowen

"One day I read a book and my whole life was changed". This is what Orhan Pamuk writes in his book "The New Life".  That is a difficult book, it cost me a lot of time and energy to understand, if I did at all...

But. 

Recently, I read a book.  

My whole life was changed. 

No. 

Just, everything fell in place...It is a book by Alexander Loewen called the "Fear of Life". It is a book that you find searching in the category 'Psychology' in Amazon. It is such a coincidence how I landed on this book... I am grateful. After having read the book many things fell in place. Even my education on English language and literature :) The book discusses the Genesis, the Fall and the Greek mythology extensively.

I found this book because of tango. How could you tell...I stumbled upon a blog one day called the Tango Principles. The author was talking about a therapeutic approach called Bioenergetics and how it helped  him overcome the tensions in his body. Being the curious person am I went on reading. The founder of this school called Bioenergetic Therapy is Alexander Loewen. He has numerous books and is the founder of the institute with the same name.

I started reading him. 

A lot.

It is a beautiful book which wakes you up to yourself and to life, if you let it. A few years ago I may not have understood many things I read, or connect with. But now everything falls in place...

Loewen's main message is that we cannot be happy if we ignore our bodies and operate only with our minds. Yet, our cultural society and the civilization drive us to do so and reward us when we do so. We are all after success, money, titles, possessions because we equate them to happiness and security. 

Are they?

If freedom is happiness, how free are we when we have all those things? 

He says we don't need much to be happy, we just need to ensure that our 'self' is aligned with our body. Meaning listening to what comes from our heart,  core and physical body and not only or mainly from the left side of our brains. 

So true. I had to think back about my life and decisions...everything I decided with my heart and 'belly' felt right and made me happy...All decisions resulting only from rational thinking turned out to bring me unhappiness sooner or later...

Why do we do that though? Why do we ignore our instincts and always go with the mind? Because the civilization and acculturation educates us to do so. But then, Loewen says, our bodies are so much older than our minds. They are the products of millions of years of evolution, they have been through things.

Our bodies know.

All we need to do is to trust them more and let go...

As Long As You Live I Will Continue to Live

'Yes grandma' I would reply every time my grandma told this to me. She would smile, happy and content.

My grandma and I were born on the same day. 

May 6. 

Just that her birthday was 50 years earlier. 

I was apparently so much in a hurry to arrive and everyone was so much trying to get my mom to the hospital in time that nobody, not even my  grandma herself, realized that it was her birthday.

We always celebrated our birthdays together. 

Two cakes, hers with 1 more candle than mine. 

And she would say 'as long as you live I will continue to live'. 

'Yes grandma'. 

I can no longer see her smile.

My grandma and I were one. 

She was our home, and my country and my roots.

She was strong, beautiful and full of life.

My grandma always said that on the day she passed away we should not be sad nor cry, but we should celebrate. Celebrate the fact that she lived the life she wanted to live. She wanted us to drink raki and cheer for her.

My grandma always told me whenever I felt sad, I should wear my best clothes, wear my best make up and jewellery, look at the mirror and tell myself how beautiful I am. Then go out so that everybody can see me. 

My grandma never went outside without being at her best. Never.

And how beautiful she was.

She would look at you directly at your face, right into your eyes, and would tell you what she wants.

She would walk into the restaurants by herself, no matter how empty or crowded they were, nor if there were only men inside, and would lunch or dine the food she liked. 

How self confident, yet humble she was.

She liked the chocolate cake, I liked the strawberries.

July 17 2015. 

It has been eleven days, you continue to live.

How to Make Hard Choices by Ruth Chang

Another talk on TED, which came with an epiphany in the end. I love such stories, or such talks for that matter. This one is about making hard choices.

I have always been interested in this subject: making choices or decisions, because I repeatedly find myself in that situation. So this fifteen minutes talk spoke directly to my heart. It made me think about my own hard choices in a way I have never done before. 

Ruth Chang says that there is something we have misunderstood about hard choices. These are not a source of agony, a reason for sorrowful days or sleepless nights. Instead, these are chances for us to personally grow as human beings. 

"Understanding hard choices helps us uncover a hidden power that each one of us possesses."

I had to think about this. 
Really? Is that so?
I have had so many sleepless nights in my life because of the hard choices I had to make. All for nothing? But then I reconsider my thoughts, and yes I agree with her.
Each time I made a hard choice and started living with the consequences, I felt better. So much better. This was not only because of the feeling of relief I got, but also because of having managed a difficult situation without breaking, and because of being in control of my own life.

Ruth Chang says that hard choices are hard because none of the alternatives is way better than the other. Therefore, even small choices can be hard. Whether to have chocolate ice cream or creme brulee can be a very hard choice indeed, if I like them both and if I am craving for sweets in that moment. 

So what do we do?
We take the safest option.

We decide to become engineers than artists, because statistically the probability of getting a job as an engineer is higher than that of an artist. So, we take the safest option, because we fear that we are too stupid to understand the better option if the choice to make is hard. We prefer not to take any risks and we go for the option that is rationally comforting.

This is the very mistake we make. Remember, in hard choices no option is better than the other. We simply do not know...How can we know that engineering makes us happier in our future lives? Unfortunately, there are no fast forward and rewind buttons for life. So, does it really make sense to conclude that engineering is the better option?

What goes wrong here is that we are confusing rationality with values, and think that everything what is essentially important in life has be decided and acted upon based on rationality. In other words, when deciding about important things, we think that we should be able to quantify and measure them to eliminate all kinds of uncertainty and mistakes.
But how can we? Isn't future by default uncertain?

Values are about feelings and about attitudes towards life, so they are truly subjective. Our love for our family, or our passion for a job are fully subjective. These are not quantifiable, therefore not measurable. Or can we say, I love my mother 3 kilograms, I want to become an engineer 5 cubic meters...? So, if we cannot quantify, how can we know one is better than the other? We cannot.
And the mistake we make is that we think we can...

"Understanding hard choices helps us uncover a hidden power that each one of us possesses."

Yes.
When we have hard choices to make, we cannot use our reasoning and rationalism because that doesn't help. What we do instead, is that we create reasons for ourselves to make the choices we make. Precisely this makes us to the people we are. Our ability and power to create reasons to do the things we want to do, to pursue the careers we want to pursue, to marry the people we want to marry, to live in the countries we want to live...

Imagine a life where we have no hard choices to make, because everything is justified by reason, there are no uncertainties, there is never nothing to question...What a boring life would that be?

How could we be the people we are without the choices we make?
Through the hard choices we make, "we become the authors of our own lives".

Ruth Chang: How to Make Hard Choices

What does 'context data' actually mean?

For a while I have been thinking about what context in data science exactly means, because it may mean so many things. Quite often we use context as a joker word or a variable (because it is vague) to describe many things. This happens especially then, when we are not sure what those many things are. 

So what is query context or user context in Web search? We can say, everything about the query or the user. And then what is everything? For me, the only more concrete bit there is the about part, which implies some attribute, i.e. something that is external. For example, weather forecast is a query, which is in English language. Hence, it has a language attribute, with a defined attribute value English. So, language is about a query, therefore it is an attribute, and therefore it is a part of context data. Context can be a quite subjective concept too, in that, what I understand as context can be different than yours .

Recently, I came across to a blog post, which nicely discusses what context is, and I thought it was quite helpful to have a bit better understanding of it. Here is the original post: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-newman/contextualizing-big-data-_b_6366014.html. 

The author discusses it from a product and customer point of view. So, when reading replace product with query and customer with user. Accordingly, context data has three compositional parts: demographic data + historic data + situational data.

Demographic data (this is about ‘who’ the user is):

• user preferences 
• his/her query patterns (long queries, short queries, questions, use of numericals…) 
• behaviors (how long does s/he dwell, how often quick back, how often and quickly does s/he change to another search engine)
• what other digital channels s/he uses (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,…) 

Historic data (concerns past records of user interaction):

• the set of earlier queries
• whether or not they were satisfied (click vs. quick-back)
• type of queries (e.g. popular, unconventional, multimedia…) 

This data also acts as a way to predict the behavior and future actions of users.

Situational data (this data is about the ‘now’):

• the current geographic location of the users
• devices used by them
• other current online activities as can be inferred by the preceding/succeeding links e.g. login to FB (social), Amazon (commercial), Twitter(social), Courserea (education) etc. 

This data helps gain an idea of what are the current preferences of the user are, or what are they looking for at a particular time.

Hoping this helps one or the other to have a bit more well-defined understanding of what context may mean, ideally in many other contexts that are quite different than mine.

Sait Faik Abasıyanık - Her and Me

I am running towards you in a boat

to not to die, not to go insane...

to live life; to live far away from all the expectations 

to live...

It is not warm the memory of her lips; no, it is not;

Not the scent of her hair

None of that.

In days like these, when the world is trembling with tempests

I cannot do without her.

Her hand has to be in mine,

I have to look at her eyes,

Have to hear her voice.

We have to eat together

And sometimes laugh.

I do not do, I cannot do without her.

You my ugly girl,

You my bread, my poison;

My flavor, my sleep.

I cannot do without you!

by Sait Faik Abasıyanık 

(1953)

Sait Faik is a nationally well-known Turkish writer, who is primarily praised for his beautiful short stories. He has written only a few poems, among which the one above belongs to. Just like the other poems he wrote, it is so simple, yet it gets me, probably because of its simplicity. The emotions that come across the simple beauty of the Turkish language he uses.

My grandma proudly used to explain: 'Sait Faik, he was our neighbor...he lived just in this next door house together with his parents. He was young back then. Young. Full of life...'.

He died of cirrhosis.

He wasn't yet fifty.

Below is the original version in Turkish.

O ve Ben

Sana koşuyorum bir vapurun içinde

Ölmemek, delirmemek için...

Yaşamak; bütün adetlerden uzak

Yaşamak...

Hayır değil, değil sıcak;

Dudaklarının hatırası;

Saçlarının kokusu

Hiçbiri değil.

Dünyada büyük fırtınanın koptuğu böyle günlerde

Ben onsuz edemem.

Eli elimin içinde olmalı,

Gözlerine bakmalıyım,

Sesini işitmeliyim.

Beraber yemek yemeliyiz

Ara sıra gülmeliyiz.

Yapamam, onsuz edemem.

Bana su, bana ekmek, bana zehir;

Bana tat, bana uyku

Gibi gelen çirkin kızım.

Sensiz edemem!