Passionate Living

Sanguine means being a person who celebrates spontaneity. Sanguine means being a person who is cheerful most of the time, and is quick to forget upsetting matters. Sanguine means being a lighthearted, easygoing, free spirited soul that becomes the center of attraction and spreads joy and contagious laughter to as many people as possible.

Shiny Happy Birthday Girl Smiling by D Sharon Pruitt

Being a melancholic [1], I appreciate very much the sanguine quality in other people, and especially the small amount there is inside myself. Because being a melancholic is often the opposite of sanguine – the opposite of spontaneity and bright cheerfulness – the simplicity and authenticity of the sanguine spirit is truly attractive to me. Since I made the distinction between the two, and learned which one I am more, I’ve been trying to be more sanguine everyday: trying to be more humorous, easy, laid back, and light as possible. The world needs more sanguine people.

But sometimes, sanguine isn’t always charming. Being sanguine takes trust, because the charm lies in making certain small mistakes and flaws that would be irritating and upsetting for other people if there is no trust there yet. The charm lies in being slightly oblivious to your surroundings, slightly suffering from short term memory loss, and slightly considering most things with less weight than other people. For someone to appreciate a sanguine person, there needs to be an established relationship between them in order for the joy to be comfortable for both people.

The littlest mistake

This thought crossed my mind the other when I was driving in traffic: a silver hatchback sedan was driving more slowly than all the other cars, and it was driving hesitantly in the middle of the road – there were lanes enough for two cars, but the silver hatchback took up both lanes so everybody behind had to drive as slow as it did. In another case and another scenario, this might be a nice sanguine experience: sometimes we need to learn to light up, enjoy the moment, and just let it be without thinking about it too serious. In the case of the silver hatchback, just let it drive obliviously like that, and love the charm of how the driver is clueless about her surroundings.

But traffic is the last place you want to show your sanguine side. Traffic is the one place where we interact intensively with each other, without there being trust among us. Most of the people on the road have never met, talked, or shared, so when the littlest mistake is made, the biggest consequences can arise. Therefore, being sanguine in traffic is like asking someone whose urgencies you don’t consider, to consider your urgencies without any benefit for them.

This is why sometimes jokes can become misunderstood. As I wrote before, comedy needs trust in order for it to be comedy. Else, it would just be a very irksome and disturbing behavior from someone whom we will think to be childish and irresponsible.

Welcome comedy

There is a time and place for everything, and to know which is when is what we call wisdom. It’s possible to be sanguine in any place and time, and spontaneity and lightheartedness should always be welcome in every environment. But that’s the point right there: it’s needs to be welcomed first, for it to be accepted.

We can’t simply stroll into a party and start being sanguine; we need to be invited. We can’t immediately explain why a person is wrong; our judgment needs to be requested first. We can’t put and enforce principles on the public, without them understanding the principles behind it beforehand.

Trust is imperative in every relationship. The problem is all of us think we are important enough for other people to understand us and give us permission immediately. But, like driving in the middle of the road and forcing everyone to play along regardless of each individual’s different urgencies, exercising the rewards of a relationship without building the trust first will only hurt the connection further – like drawing money out from an empty back account.

Are you a sanguine person? How is your trust in your relationships that matter? Let’s discuss about this in the comments.

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[a name="95_1">1] The terms “sanguine” and “melancholic” is borrowed from Florence Littauer’s book “Personality Plus”

Must beauty hide behind the sadness of a tree by Lemuel Cantos

Last weekend I attended the AXIS 2010 International Java Jazz Festival [1]. I hadn’t planned on coming before, because I felt I didn’t appreciate jazz enough to justify the time and money for a jazz festival. But because Diane Warren [2] came to perform, and me being a musician and all, I decided to come anyway during the busy and jam packed Saturday night.

One of the bands who performed were Tika and the Dissidents [3] – a local indie band whom I heard from Adit, my guitarist. I first heard them when Adit and I were traveling to Bandung together, and he brought their CD. I chose to see them at Java Jazz because their schedule was precisely before Diane Warren, and I wanted to know how they sounded like live.

During one of their songs, the vocalist – Tika – said the inspiration behind it was the thought “every woman is beautiful”. She said every woman is beautiful in her own way, and guys should know that too. Of course, the audience responded with a cheer (or at least most of the female audience), but standing at the back line I said to myself I want to contest that theory:

IF every woman is beautiful, then it should also be TRUE that every man is handsome. Is this correct?

The permutations of beauty

Think about that for a moment: is every man handsome? I think accepting the belief that every woman is beautiful is far easier than accepting every man is handsome. Because history and society has had its share of mass murderers, corruptors, terrorists, kidnappers, violent husbands who are largely the male population. Yet from the logical relation, it should hold true, that ALL men are handsome.

IF you disagree and say NOT ALL men are handsome, how can ALL women be beautiful? What’s the difference between women and men such that ALL women are beautiful but NOT ALL men are handsome? It’s like we’re going against a law of nature when we make that statement.

Therefore, I think NOT ALL men are handsome, and NOT ALL women are beautiful. There are four combinations in total, based on beautiful inside and beautiful outside:

1. Women who are beautiful outside, not beautiful inside
2. Women who are not beautiful outside, beautiful inside
3. Women who aren’t either
4. Women who are both

The same also holds true for men.

The four pillars of beauty

This writing might make you think I’m a chauvinist [4], but I can assure you I’m not. The reason I’m writing this is because I want to ask the truth behind our beliefs. I feel the idea “every woman is beautiful” functions more to console the feelings of women who feel they aren’t beautiful, and gives women a justification to NOT do the hard work to BECOME a beautiful woman.

Beauty is a state of success, therefore it demands hard work and high commitment – whether you’re striving for inner beauty or outer beauty. To say that we are all already beautiful inside is mostly a fallacy – the fact is we all have our ugly sides that still need to be educated. Don’t let the idea make you think that you don’t have any work to do – on the contrary if you have the idea then there’s much work to do.

The conclusion: No, NOT every woman is beautiful, and NOT every man is handsome. Everyone needs to put in their hard work to be beautiful. This includes studying to be articulate in an intelligent way, exercising to be healthy and young in a physical way, experiencing enough adversity to be strong in an emotional way, and understanding grace to be humble in a spiritual way.

The question is then: are you beautiful?

Maybe you’re just pretty.

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[1] Official Java Jazz International website. I share my thoughts about going there HERE (also includes pictures!)
[2] Diane Warren website. During the concert, she only appeared on stage twice; the rest of the show was to promote her new project Due Voci
[3] Tika and the Dissidents on MySpace. Turns out they have quite a number of fans (and Tika, if you’re reading this I’d like to know your thoughts)
[4] Check Wikipedia for the definition of chauvinist
[5] Photograph by Lemuel Cantos

Popular Affair by ~charlie45

Read the pilot episode here

Cecilia and I continued the topic about having affairs as she took out another menthol cigarette from the twelve-pack. She thought it was a problem specific to a certain group of people, but I told her that isn’t the case. This problem hits all layers of society from all backgrounds of educations; from the ordinary factory worker to the multi-platinum best-selling Hollywood blond.

I told her the story of a friend of mine who works as a shift manager in a garment factory. He told me at one time one of his subordinates jokingly asked him why he didn’t have an affair with one of the lady workers. Of course, this made my friend tickled to the bone from the sheer silliness of the question, but it was an honest suggestion from his coworker.

Cecilia looked slightly surprised when I told her even the simple people have domestic problems, including cheating wives or husbands. For the uninitiated, that may come as a surprise. But the truth is this: the problems remain the same throughout all layers – the difference is merely in the style and exposure it gets.

The next best thing

There is a happiness mentality that starts with the sentence, “If only I had …”. But anybody who has ever worked towards that blank sentence finds out what they sought for in the beginning didn’t bring them the happiness they expected. It’s an endless rat race as we chase down the next high, constantly searching for that sense of fulfillment but only achieving a fleeting moment of success.

Humans are very hard to satisfy, using external objects. The simple folk dream of city life, the city folk dream of luxury living, and the high rollers dream of riding the wave of the next big hit. What’s on the mind of the simple folk, is also on the mind of the privileged individuals. If a humble cab driver can have an affair, so can a millionaire have an affair.

Which raises the question: what is the real reason behind an affair? If it’s money, then the millionaires should be living happy marriages. Instead we may even see more cases of infidelity in the upper class.

Independent inside

There is no guarantee from anything that comes outside of yourself. The next big thing we think we’ll be the answer to all our problems is not. Instead, it may just be the source of our next set of problems.

I told Cecilia how she needed to be independent inside if she is ever to reach the happiness and clarity she so much desires. As long as we still rely on external objects, we will never achieve a permanent state of intrinsic security and will always be on the run. As long as we never love from the inside, affairs will always be an open option as a place to run away to.

Sometimes people prefer the drama and romance. But the happiness isn’t there. The happiness lies in the domain where we take full responsibility of our relationships, our wealth, and our character.

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And the next song: #4 of 26 – “Hey Shorty” (Read the story here)

Hey Shorty by Endy Daniyanto