"Mono No Aware"

Today I learnt about this beautiful Japanese concept of "Mono No Aware". My understanding of it is derived just from English interpretation of it but it's such a beautiful concept that regardless of words or their essence to capture it I think I know quite well the feeling those words are trying to capture.

Literally, it can be translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things", life, and love. The feeling it tries to convey is the feeling of wistfulness, the deep joy touched by that hint of sadness at the awareness of impermanence of things. The awareness that the joy and beauty in the current moment is transient - and in a way that makes that moment even more special, but also knowing that the moment is going to pass and the best you can do is live that moment and cherish it to the most.

There are moments where you come across something - a term, an explanation, a description - and your first reaction is "Yes, that's happened to me before!" And that initial feeling of pleasant surprise of learning a term, an 'explanation' a reaffirmation of what you've been feeling soon gives way to a mind boggling realization of the depth, the profoundness of something that simple.

And in your mind - a window opens, an seed is sown, and the way you think will never be the same again because of that awareness. And this moment, the one I'm writing in, and that moment, the one you're reading this in, will never come again too - close your eyes, savour the thought, the moment, and live it.

Mono no Aware :)

Comments

Anonymous said…
hi Satyendra,
i was searching one of my friend by name of satyendra and got to see your blog...and i am really impressed by your way of expressing day today thngs and happenings..

Aarti
10:44 AM
neo said…
Hi Aarti,

I just came across your message. Thank you so much for the sweet words of encouragement. They are really appreciated and mean a lot. If you write I'd love to read some of your work too :)
take care,
- Satyendra
9:35 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

going mobile !

Using the push registry to launch midlets : MIDP 1.0 specified only one way to start a MIDlet: manual activation by the user. However the MIDP 2.0 specification adds two new mechanisms to launch a MIDlet: in response to an incoming connection or at a scheduled time. While the process is not really difficult as explained in the papers and articles given on the net ( http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/midp/questions/pushregistry/ ) The actual implementation of it is tricky mainly because of the practical difficulties and platform implementations. We needed to auto start a MIDlet each time the phone boots up and the most obvious choice seemed to be using the Java Push Registry Alarm method. Having read a couple of tutorials and seen the example code given it didn’t seem something too difficult to do – however, and such is the software jungle, overcoming the practical difficulties seemed to be the biggest hurdle. For example, in my case I was using Eclipse 3.0 with the java WTK ...
Read more

Expertise

Some of you may be aware of the interesting research done by Dr. Anders Ericsson around the theme of "Acquisition of Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice" An important finding is that it normally takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert in any discipline. Of course, I can imagine this would vary a lot depending on kind of practice and how it builds on your earlier skill. So I did some quick behind the napkin math: 1. Practice Required = 10,000 hours Assuming a concentrated effort to put at least 4 hours of practice into honing your expertise in your chosen field - the other being taken up by other information tasks (e.g. did you know a large part of the so called “information work” is actually searching for information? – fun fact I gathered while working on Enterprise Search ) 2. Time required to gain that expertise = 10,000/4 = 2500 days 3. Which makes it about 7 years to gain expertise in a discipline. Interesting!
Read more

3 Idiots and Chak De India

I'm a strong believer that who we are shapes a lot of our decisions. So assuming that hypothesis is true, let's try to look at two roles from two major bollywood actors: Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. The purpose to try to see how how they perceive themselves - or project themselves if you will - based on what appeals to them in a role. The two roles we'll look at are - Shahrukh as Kabir Khan in Chak De India and Aamir Khan as Ranchoddas (Rancho) in 3 idiots. Take Racho's character, A genius , who believes the right way is to chase excellence and not success (box office?) which will chase after you if you excel at what you do. The traditional system doesn't understand him and resists his ways at first but ultimately he proves his mettle. Interesting to note that Aamir's characters doesn't do badly in the courses but tops it - despite doing things against the system, and eventually is very 'successful'. If you remove the context of the movie from the a...
Read more