meditation, happiness, and a lego truck

I am bored. What should I write about today?

Recently, I've been encountering some stress. And also recently, I've been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" I vowed to read this book ever since I saw her talk on TED.com (you should go see it). In the book, she talks about meditation in India. One way to happiness, according to some Indian monks, is by coming to the realization that both happiness and sorrow are inevitable in our lives. Therefore, it is wiser to detach from these potentially very emotional experiences, accept it as it happens, and go on. Then, one does not need to be overcome with sorrow every time something sorrowful happens. Because as I said before, it's not the thing that happens that is bad, it's how people interpret the event that makes it bad. And if one achieves this respectful status, one can achieve a type of constant state of happiness/joy, knowing that life is going the way it should be.

I tried thinking like this. Long story short: it's really hard. And I think I should try meditating regularly. I used to do it a little, but I'm still very much a noob.

In other news, I have been working on this huge lego truck my brother got long ago. He waited for me to come and help him because it's an extremely complicated piece of lego-ness. I'm making this thing and many times I'm just like "who took the time to think up of this, make it, organize instructions for it, and write 4 assembly books for it???" And yes, it must have been a group effort of a lot of people. But how many simple things in life do we take for granted? That shirt you're wearing, somebody had to get the cotton, process it, dye it, design the shirt, cut the fabric, ship it everywhere, wholesale it, retail it, advertise for it, put a brand on it, etc etc etc. I mean, goodness gracious! All around us are the results of thousands if not tens of thousands of people! And this lego truck I'm building ironically is: me trying to build a truck out of the scrap pieces of lego which are the work of some ambitious people over at LEGO.

Unrelated to my previous point: it seems, a main purpose of LEGO is to provide people with the means to build their own creations. What a great idea.