Varalakshmi Puja

Sandeep
Today women in South India celebrate Varalakshmi Puja, honoring the goddess of wealth and prosperity. In this religious observance married women will ask for prosperous peace within the family.

To work hard to gain prosperity and happiness for ourselves, family, and friends is really what matters. I wish I didn’t have to involve my thoughts and passions in grotesque public spectacles. If it weren’t for those who, instead of hoping the best for their friends and family, pray for the wealth and prosperity of a nation, none of my mental energy would be directed towards this blog. I’d have another blog, perhaps of a literary tint.

Alas, no longer are those threads that bind individuals to the public realm vague and tenuous. Like it or not, we’re all in a failed arranged marriage with the state. Instead of continuing to beguile ourselves, thinking that we can somehow get counseling or start a war or something, we must understand what matters. And that’s this one life, what we make of ourselves, what we make with friends, family.

It’s okay, be comfortable with self-interest.

The Self-Interested Horoscope, A New Series

Sandeep
Today you will make a remark to a colleague or friend in which you are surprised to detect an inner compulsion to attitudinize. You will perhaps say, Yes Jane I agree fostering entrepreneurship in poor countries is critical, or maybe, I think theoretical neuroscience is cool. This thought will begin to irritate you: you worry that you have been writing yourself in as a character in your friend’s mind. Even worse: you then think that this misplaced emphasis on seeming a certain way to others has drawn your thoughts away from contemplating truths within yourself.

You will not wallow for long in a cesspool of anxiety, restlessness, inadequacy, and inner indolence. No, you will consider how easily one can experience cascades within oneself. You understand it takes hard work to avoid a situation where ideas about yourself advance by way of acceptance; maybe it’s easier not to be candid with oneself.

You will finally understand that you paradoxically make others happier by paying more attention to yourself. Because when you start to seriously explore your own mind, you gain a more intimate understanding of the shades of truths within your being. Throwing off your cloak of lazy acceptance and brandishing the glorious self-scepter of emotional exploration, you wake afresh tomorrow, peacefully beginning a new life, a life more honest and fruitful to yourself and to those to whom you are close.