Vilia Ciputra

"You might think you are timid and afraid of life, but I honestly don't think so. It is never easy to live alone, but you do succeed on dealing with your problems and live alone. That's not timid. You might see me as a bold person and all, but you do know I don't like to live alone, though I can, and I need my alone time from time to time. Don't wanna be alone is actually timid in a way. Lol." "Maybe we are both courageous, but in different ways." "Or maybe we all are both courageous and timid in many ways, and that's what normal is about, and you are normal in a way." "Nah, normal sounds boring lol." "But you wished to be normal, previously. Gaaaah lol." --- What a peculiar mind. Lol. --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , a...

"Worry about the things you can control, not about the things you can't." Thank you for reminding me of this. Mindfulness is still a work in progress for me. Even after all the understanding of how my brain works and what I should actually do, the temptation of controlling the outcome as much as possible, was kinda hard to ignore. To have more faith on myself and on the bigger plan. To control the things I could and to let go of things that I can't. --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

"The way I see 'The future is bright for you' is not when everything is prepared and set up now, to make us safe from everything in life (a condition which obviously will never exist). On the contrary, it is a condition when we are ready, whatever life throws at us, at whenever. The priority is not on the tool, the money, the resources, the technology, or even the network. They are bonuses. It is more to the mind, the character and personal skills. A confuse soul with a million dollar mostly would either create a mess or a lame history. A soul with clear purpose and a thousand dollar will either survive or create a legend. Well, of course we have to earn that thousand dollar first, otherwise don't talk about visions and goals, cause they do have high prices. Everything has a price that we have to pay for, either in money, time, or life. What I'm saying is; no safety net is a bad plan, but so does a fault good plan." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow throug...

"Do you know butterflies were one of the favourite subjects of Chinese trade art in the mid- 1800s? The Chinese love butterflies. There's also a famous folk tale about two lovers who died broken hearts and reemerge as butterflies. Also, the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, 'What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.'" "I like that. Is this something you believe?" "Hm?" "That the end is also the beginning?" "For the caterpillar, yes." "But do you believe it's true for all things?" "I don't know. I'm not programmed to believe in that way. What about you?" "I'd like to believe that." "Do you?" "Sometimes I think, human are programmed to believe in such things, but I don't know if it's really in our best interest." "May I be honest with you?" "Is not being honest an option for you?" "...

"Why do you like tea?" "Do you mean the taste of tea?" "Maybe. Is the taste why you like tea?" "It has something to do with it." "Is it why you've given your life to tea?" "Given my life to tea, well that sounds pretty serious." "Is it not serious?" "I guess I've acquired a taste for tea. But it's not why I became interested. I think what I was really drawn to at the beginning was the idea of tea." "The idea of tea." "Yeah, I saw this documentary at college, it was from the 20th century. And it was about this man searching for the best tea in China." "China is where tea started." "Yes. I think it was his searching that compelled me. You know, the pursuit of this illusive thing, this process that was connected to the soil, to the plants, to the weather, and a way of life." "So, that's what you like about tea? The search, not so much the taste....

“How do you find beauty in the world? Or, rather, things that might not be conventionally “beautiful”, but are beautiful just for you. Say, everybody likes flowers. Everybody loves sunsets. How do you find your own vision of beauty?” “I love you, even if there isn't any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.” "...and that is beautiful." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

"We could see and live our lives from different and opposite perspectives, it doesn't matter. We could create the lives that we want through what we want to happen or what we don't want to happen. We could rush until the next stop, or we could stop until the next rush. The situations, circumstances, and rules don't really matter. The outcome will always have the biggest connection with what we decide out of them, and how we execute our decisions." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

I was cleaning my photos when Mr.Odd suddenly mentioned some places where we could stay in Bali next year. I was surprised that he thought about it already, since it is still a long time for me lol. But I know he is an advance planner. Last year, before our long stay in Bali, he read lots of books about living nomad and outdoor living. He prepared the outdoor tools, he changed his clothes to hikers' outfits with lighter weight, higher quality and better durability. He even weighed the clothes and all of our backpacks (learning from the climbers), to make sure that we only bring the necessities and that our baggage won't slow us or weighed us down. And it made me smile, noticing how he pays attention and prioritize what's comfortable for me. Love is weird and marriage could be tough, sometimes. If you ask me like few months ago, I would rather go alone cause we were arguing a lot about small things. Both of us are first-born, and although we are a good team, we are also very...

This quote reminded me of a conversation that I had with a close friend of mine, last week. "I don't wanna spend my entire life to find solutions.", he told me firmly. And he is one of the most logical, non-judgemental, accepting, and caring person that I've ever known. He also reads lots of philosophy books and global-issues related books, and he is actually the first person that I would go to, whenever I need a deep discussions about philosophy, history, politics, religions, and even Western-Eastern related matters. So, for someone like him, to put and end at the search of solutions, was both intriguing and yet relieving to me. Especially when it happened at the same time when I was actually trying to reconstruct my understanding and definition of time, energy, potentials, and life. The urge to improve, is just as addictive as the urge to be different, or to reach perfection. Changes could be addicting at certain point, and it works like a distraction to our mind an...

"The publisher and editor Karen Rinaldi feels about surfing the same way that I do about cheesy piano rock, only more so; she dedicates every spare moment she can to it, and even wiped out her savings on a plot of land in Costa Rica for better access to the sea. Yet she readily admits that she remains an appaling surfer to this day. (It took her five years of attempting to catch a wave before she first managed to do so.) But 'in the process of trying to attain a few moments of bliss', Rinaldi explains 'I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to be suck without caring is revelatory.' Results aren't everything. Indeed, they'd better not be, because results always come later - and later is always too late." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supportin...

"The goal of life is to think and decide less and lesser in daily basis, until you have only very few important matters to think and decide about. It's actually weird but kinda funny, how knowledge works. They have been with me for a long time; the idea of managing time, creating habits, the importance of making less decisions, and managing energy. Yet, it took me reading so many books about those topics for many years, until yesterday, I finally grab the whole ideas and how they affect each other, just for that one single point. It is one thing to know about things, it is another to understand them, and definitely another more to really grasp the whole idea of those things. It changes my reasons completely." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my ...

"I have stopped doing things for the sake of anything other than because I feel like doing it and happy to do so." "Not even for helping others?" "Not even for helping others. Should I decide to help others, it will be because I like doing it. They owe me nothing in return, and I will forget it as soon as the help is done. I am a very selfish person. I don't like to give anyone and any external power the pleasure of being the validation of my happiness or sorrows." "Not even me? ;)" "Well, should there always be an exception, you might be a good one. :P" - The Only Exception - Paramore - --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

"When we do the wrong thing and we know it but prefer not to fix it, we actually are giving up our very own power to the circumstance. It will only be a matter of time before we realize how high the price that we have to pay for that. Cause the worst part of normalizing doing the wrong thing is not guilt. Guilt is a small thing. The worst part is when we are forced to tolerate the wrong things that others do to the people we love, because we couldn't stand up for them and ourselves when they said, 'You did it, too.'" --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen, the environmental-ist who co-founded the radical group Deep Green Resistance, how he manages to stay hopeful when everything seems so grim. But he tells them he doesn't - and that he thinks that's a good thing. 'Hope is supposed to be our beacon in the dark', Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just 'the future' - to make things all right in the end. And sometimes that attitude can be justified; if I go into hospital for surgery, for instance, I do simply have to hope that the surgeon knows what he's doing, because no contribution I can make is likely to make much difference. But the rest of the time, it means disavowing your own capacity to change things - which in the context of Jensen's field, environmental activis...

I remember what my lecturer said to the class back then; "We often expected to play the role of the heroes. We took other people's problems as ours. We blame ourselves for their failures and unhappiness. We take their expectations and dreams as our responsibilities. And that's when you burnt out, losing yourselves in between. Being an adult means being able to differ; either you are in trouble, or you are surrounded by other people's troubles. People will expect you to take action and do something about it; sorting their problems for them. But, you don't have to." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

I purposely left all of my mobiles and gadgets home yesterday, and went to the mall with Mr.Odd with just two books that I wanna finished. It was an interesting experiment. First, I totally forgot about Peduli Lindungi app that we need to enter any place here hahaha 😂. Luckily the guard was nice enough and let us in after we explain about the situation and showed Mr.Odd's certificates and told him that I had mine at the same time as his. This also made us learn that we actually can link each other's vaccines certificate on the app lol. Well, we do keep each other's now just to be safe for next time. Secondly, it was so freeing. I have been putting off my mobile oftenly lately on working and reading hours, which I found to boost my productivity and focus a lot. Yet to really leave it at home and not having its' presence was a totally different feeling. I didn't feel the need to check anything, I give full attention to whatever around me and to everyone in front of m...

"How would you spend your days differently if you didn't care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? All have the shining eyes of people who know they're doing things that matter, and who relish their work precisely because they don't need to try to convince themselves that their own contributions will prove decisive or reach fruition while they're still alive. Yet there is a sense in which all work -including the work of parenting, community building and everything else- has this quality of not being completable within our own lifetimes. All such activities always belong to a far bigger temporal context, with an ultimate value that will only be measurable long after we're gone. And so it's worth asking: what actions -what acts of generousity or care for the world; what ambitious schemes or investment in the distant future- might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results? We're all in the po...

"Dolce Far Niente is this sensation when you sit at a coffee bar in an Italian village while you drink coffee and watch the passerby. Time slows and for half a second you admire life in its simplicity, and you only want to smile." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

"As Kieran Setiya recalls in his book; Midlife, he was heading towards the age of forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he would later come to understand as the result of living a project-driven life, crammed not with atelic activities but telic ones, the primary purpose of which was to have them done, and to have achieved certain outcomes. He published papers in philosophy journals in order to speed his path to academic tenure; he sought tenure in order to achieve a solid profesional reputation and financial security; he taught students in order to achieve those goals, and also in order to help them attain degrees and launch theid own careers. In other words, he was suffering from the very problem we've been exploring: when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning. And it makes sense that this feeling might strike in the form of midlife crisis, because midlife is when many of us...

"I'm still amazed whenever I read books or the writings of the people who lived far before me; such as the philosophers, or like Simone; and found that they actually have been thinking about the problems that we are facing now and how still very relatable they are with us, now. Sometimes I wonder, if only I have started to read philosophy since I was a kid, I might have grasped the idea of life much earlier and avoid many repeated mistakes that the people before me had done before. Of course one could argue that life is personal, experiences are tailored, and conscience is a monologue, but still there are two purposes of learning something; first one to acknowledge and another to understand. Maybe it could speed up the acknowledge part." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writi...

"At first, I thought it was just the noises of opinions in my head that distracted me, thinking that the world has become too noisy with too many sounds and distractions, that it becomes harder to really listen to myself. Turns out I was wrong. There were many noises around me that I didn't realize, engaging continuously with my brain and sensory, resulting a restless mind. I first noticed of how rare silence is, when I installed sound meter on my mobile last year, and started to use it ever since on every place that I visited, just to check the decibel meter around. The acceptable safe sound for average 24hrs exposure is below 70dB, yet we who live in the city, often being exposed to higher than that. For instance; the calmest midnight on my apartment would be around 45 - 52dB. Imagine daytime. The more I read and learn about how our body and mind work, the more I realize how important our surrounding and mental clarity is. How important solitude and silence are to the qualit...

"So, while doing the 5/25 of Warren Buffet's, I stopped at 7 and couldn't even go on more. Well I mean, I could go on more, but I know those things don't really matter to me. At first, I thought maybe I haven't dream big enough. So, I check on my bucket list that I made many years ago, and I re-read my old journals where I wrote all of my monthly progresses. Instead of feeling dissappointed, I felt like I deserve a pat on my back lol. I actually feel kinda proud of myself after double checking on my progresses. I've crossed so many things from my list, that I have only very few left to focus on. Basically, everything after that 7 was really just bonuses for my life. But Buffet said 5, so I'll see how to work on 5. Lol." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , an...

"More than anything, I think we should memorize things that made us laugh, things that we did right, and things that made us be in love again, the most." --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

There is a huge difference between understanding the train of thoughts of an idea VS grasping the bigger picture of the idea. --------- - Aim for a better tomorrow through healthy lifestyle, diverse insights, creative arts, and minimalist living. -  ViliaCiputra.com Thank you for supporting  my intention  through owning  my artworks , reading  my writings , and following  my Instagram . You could also support my page with buy me a coffee at the link below. 

I learnt since many years ago that the easiest and fastest way to master anything is by adding it into the daily habit and ritual. To make time to do it every single day, no matter how small it is. And it is always about mastering the very basic skill that build the foundation to the overall character of the appropriate skill. When I wanted to learn English, I made it a habit to write and speak in English everyday for certain time. When I wanted to write better, I wrote anything everyday. When I wanna understand myself better, I spare some time to sit alone with myself everyday for 30 minutes at least. When I stuck with creative idea, I do any creative activity daily. It's always been done that way including at work. The first thing that I always asked any new apprentice or worker at my studio was to make 500 perfect round end using steel and iron pins (they are some of the hardest metals around which are hard to be shaped). Some of them usually stopped and argued that their round ...