All the difference in the world

I haven’t posted a Blogger Inspired entry in months. The last time I posted one was in July of last year.

Anyway, I am a subscriber of a blog called Marc and Angel Hack Life. I love this blog so much! Their entry for yesterday is entitled How to Make All the Difference in the World. The entry is about an old woman who scrubs the shells of a couple of turtles to help them swim better. Marc sees the old woman doing this every Sunday when he jogs around the area. He asked the old woman what difference it makes that she helps a couple of turtles when “99% of these turtles don’t have kind people like you to help them clean off their shells.” According to the old woman, “Sweetie, if this little guy could talk, he’d tell you I just made all the difference in the world.”

The entry just made me think of my dad…

My dad loves helping other people. No matter if he doesn’t get anything in return. A simple thank you would suffice. What he wants to see is for our neighbors to rise above their stations in life. Just this past couple of days, he’s been helping a number of jobless men in our little area get legitimate jobs abroad through my aunt (his sister) who has a recruitment agency. Two will be leaving before March ends. Four more will be following suit.

You see, you never know that the difference you make in a person’s life could spell the whole world to him. It can be the start of something big. For that person, you just made all the difference in the world. A difference need not be something grand. It need not be something that can affect a hundred people in one fell swoop. It can be a simple gesture to someone.

Make a difference in your own simple way. I hope I am making a difference in other people’s lives, too.

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Being childlike once more

Aside from the blog traffic, what I love Entrecard is when I find great blogs that inspire me. One of the blogs I found through Entrecard is Live Passionately. It is an inspiring blog that I am a subscriber to. Her most recent post inspired this entry. Her post is entitled Beauty Happens in the Stillness of Your Presence.

Her post talks about a childlike timeout. It says…

When is the last time you gazed up into clouds, and discovered a creative activity or type of artistic expression that is intended to be beautiful or thought-provoking.

In all honesty, it’s been years since I last looked in the sky in the eyes of a child. When I look up, it is always with worry. I have never had a single day for years now that I wake up without a worry. Christine’s post made me stop and think about those times when I enjoy just staring up in the sky and figuring out if I was seeing an angel, a teddy bear, a hand, a smile… Even at night, I love staring at the stars and wishing for things that are beyond my reach. It makes the child in me happy. These days, with worries about so many things, health, finances, the future, well, you can just imagine how that could dampen a day.

I am always catching up: work, family issues, personal issues, the wanderlust in me…

Christine: Ask yourself this question: How am I going to love and honor myself today?

I am planning to take a day off tomorrow. A day solely for ME. I will watch this cheesy movie opening tomorrow. I will have a foot spa. I will drink coffee and look up in the sky and see if I can find the teddy bear that I saw a couple of years ago.

Note: Thank you, Christine, for a post that inspired me.

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Bloghopping

There is no specific day of when this type of entry of mine will come out. If and when I find a post that’ll inspire me to write something about it, then Blogger Inspired comes out. Like now.

Gellianne wrote something about Target: Blog Hop to 100 blogs and I was reminded of the time when I was still bloghopping like crazy daily.

I believe it was early 2005 when I started bloghopping like there’s no tomorrow. I was still maintaining an old blogger.com blog of mine and had no idea what a Page Rank was. I love bloghopping because I want to gain other blogger-friends. I used to exhaust 30%-50% of my day bloghopping. Every blogger who happens to be linked to one of my daily reads will receive a visit from me. And their linkies. That time, I usually go back and forth to a daily read’s blog several times a day to check if he or she comes up with a new entry or answers a previous comment I made. I was that crazy with bloghopping. I met some really cool people back then. And they’re still friends of mine. Some are still active with blogging, others have minimized, if not stopped, blogging altogether.

I just miss those times. Nowadays, there are just so many things I need to do in a day sometimes it drives me nuts. If time permits, I bloghop as much as I can. I love leaving comments, sometimes a very long one. And I read your blogs when I visit. I really do. That takes a lot of time for me because when I comment, I want it to be a comment related to the topic I am commenting on. I feel ashamed when I leave a generic comment. That is also the reason why if I know my time is limited, I don’t visit your blogs.

Now, what I primarily love about bloghopping is discovering great blogs. There is a new blog that my sister, LiLo, and I subscribed to. It is Panaderos’ A Man of My Town. We just love his entries!

I don’t have a target number of blogs I need to bloghop to anymore. Unlike before that I can bloghop to more than a hundred blogs a day. These days, I visit as many blogs as I can. And would ask for a link exchange from those blogs I truly liked. I subscribe to some. I used to think that I should specify a day of bloghopping alone. But I can’t follow that kind of schedule. Now my rule is: Leave me a comment and when I am free, I will return the visit. It may take a few days before I visit but rest assured that I will return the favor.

How about you, do you have “rules” that you follow in bloghopping?

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Happiness in giving up

When I created this blog, all I thought of was I really need a personal blog. A blog without sp*ns*red posts (bawal yang word na yan dito hehehe). A blog wherein I am not conscious of rankings or the number of comments and visitors. A blog entirely mine.

That is why the tagline of this blog is “Where freedom is what I strive to achieve”. Freedom from so many things. Primarily, freedom to let my mind wander and my fingers to do the talking. And to talk about anything and everything that comes to mind. Spur of the moment writing ito hehe… Kaya you will notice that I post 2 or 3 times a day. Scheduled posts yan. Including this one

Anyway, this post is actually inspired by Vera’s post. She wrote down something about giving up and there is a question in the entry that caught my attention… is there happiness in giving up?

My answer to that is YES. There is happiness in giving up. Five or six years ago, I had a ‘thing’ with someone. He was a married guy. No, I did not know it from the start. I found out about it when something happened that triggered our break up. He told me that he was separated and that he did not want me to know about it because he loved me. And that he just saw his ex-wife, had a one night ‘something’ with her, got her pregnant. Duh. I did not believe him but my traitorous heart continued loving him despite what I found out. But I gave him up. It was a bad set up from the very beginning. I was just blind to all of it.

Oh yes, I cried buckets. But at the end of the day, all I can think of was, was he really worth it?

I gave him up and something in me broke free. I kept the relationship, you see. Only my close friends knew about him. I kept it from my family. And breaking up with him had set me free. I was free from lying to my family’s face.

Freedom meant happiness in being true to my family. Being true to myself.

So, is there happiness in giving up? If what you are giving up is something that is eating you, emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually… then yes.

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Whenever I will come across an entry by another blogger and it inspires me, you will see the Blogger Inspired logo above. And my very first one is from Vera. Thanks, girl!

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