eclectika

A Little About A Lot by Nabih Saliba To know a lot about a little Or a little about a lot Is a thing we should consider But in practice often not Know a lot about a little And it’s one thing that you’ve got But your view might be quite narrow Like a cage for every thought Fill your head with many subjects Then an expert you are not As your knowledge can be shallow When a little about a lot Should you aim to be an expert? Try to master just one thing? Then you’d have yourself a focused Special kind of offering. Do you wish to only sample? Try to gather wide but thin? Then when details are required You’ll just offer up a grin. Maybe what one should consider Isn’t what they know or not But what they know together With the friends that they have got For together we are smarter Sharing fact and view and thought On a lot about a little Or a little about a lot

Getting Along By Nabih Saliba To have patience just to listen And really slow things down So when eyes start to glisten You won’t greet them with a frown To listen is to understand Not simply wait to speak So when we lend a helping hand It’s for the thing they seek To share the pain is empathy Past understanding woe So when we offer sympathy They’ll know it’s not for show To carry someone’s burden In more than word or song Is how we’ll stop the fighting And learn to get along.

Connection By Nabih Saliba To reach out in the darkness and think that we’re alone Is very often scary and chills us to the bone Yet in a world of sorrow, deep despair and solitude One simple thing connects us be it clothed or in the nude: That thing which makes us human, the quiet spark that we call life It’s the hope that we keep burning when we’re faced with pain and strife So in our isolation there is something we condone A flicker in the shadow, a thing remembered and well known It’s always all around us–far away and in our home Each friendship, love and partner that we dare to call our own Our lives are short and simple in the larger scheme of things And yet we waste time flirting with all that hatred brings Rise up and shout, “I’ve had it! I will play this game no more!” Then pull back on the curtains and unlock your brave heart’s door To build a real connection with another human soul Could be no truer purpose, or a mission or a goal For w...

“Head down this road until you come to street with a large metal sculpture on the corner,” she said with a comforting sense of certainty in her voice. “Don’t turn there but keep going about two more blocks and you’ll see it on the right,” she finished with a smile. I repeated the directions to her and began driving down the road looking for what turned out to be a three-foot bronze piece obscured by a newspaper box—truly a marker for where not to turn. We’ve all received or even given directions like this at one point or another: clear and simple directions based on what not to do. It got me wondering about all the other types of journeys we convolute in a similar fashion. How does one find their way physically, emotionally and even spiritually in a world where tangents are easier to follow than the road itself? I was headed home from the printer ( Colorstep ) after approving poster designs for Madcap Theater . The air was crisp with Fall and the sun was beginning another glori...

Christmas is often described with many extremes—the happiest time of the year, one of the most emotionally difficult days for many who suffer depression, a controversial affront to the politically correct and even a giant commercial ploy to extract cash from all of the aforementioned. My Christmas day is finally coming to a close and I’m sitting here thinking to myself, “If today isn’t the reason for being…what is?” Perhaps I should elaborate the origins of that last statement before rambling forth with incoherent drivel about The Season, Holiday cheer and other such clichés… As evidenced by my lack of activity here [on this blog], my life has been filled with many competing demands for my time. During the past few months, I’ve become very involved with an Improv comedy club called Madcap Theater , helped my wife design and establish GreatIdeasForKids.com and enjoyed watching my children grow up into precocious little challenges. It has also been a time of soul-searching. I’ve bee...

Life, especially for me, is full of surprises. I’d like to say I was one of those amazing people who have it all figured out. I’d love to say that my life has turned out exactly the way I planned but I can’t. The honest truth is that the closest thing to a plan for my life was the vague and arrogant thought that I was meant for something more than whatever I was currently doing. Looking at it now, I suppose you could simply call it restlessness. While the reasons for my current situation span the gamut from “dumb luck” to “divine providence,” I can only testify to the results—two beautiful children, a wonderful wife and the luxury of being able to spend as much time with them as they’ll tolerate. Most of my life, I’ve managed to just ‘get by’ on the bare minimum of effort. As a result, I also mysteriously managed to reap the bare minimum of success. All my life I have been told by friends, teachers, pastors and parents that I wasn’t living up to my true potential. Somewhere in the ...

So I've spent quite a bit of time away from here. While there is a giant gap in content since my last post, I thought I'd offer up this post as a form of explaination. I've been going through a lot of changes lately. You might say I've been evolving. Yeah, I think evolve is a good word to use here. Now that my children are running the house, I have been forced to re-examine my purpose in life. It turns out, after all, that my function is to wait . To help better explain how rewarding I find the act of waiting, allow me to first define the term— wait: to assume a form of stasis whereby one remains open to additional instruction while maintaining an active queue of established tasks for prompt execution after stasis has been terminated but before anyone notices that nothing was accomplished during the time stasis was being observed. I find it interesting that as primitive beings we were physical creatures of action. Almost as if we were sharks—the ceasing of movemen...

Every once in a while, as I stand in some supermarket checkout line, I’ll glance at the tabloids: The National Enquirer , The Weekly World News or The Star . Often, I’m satisfied to just laugh at the paper right there in the stand. Sometimes, the headlines catch my curiosity enough that I’ll actually purchase the rag and take it home for a few laughs. While there may be some that consider these papers to be the only true news, most (myself included) think of them as comic distractions. Every week it’s some new sensational headline about Elvis, aliens, governments, Nostradamus, the end of the world and Jesus. Sometimes, the headline manages to contain all of these things at the same time. Whatever can be said about the tabloids, no one can deny that the reporting style is designed to wow you into buying their paper. Apparently threatened by the tabloids, news agencies have decided to fight sensationalism with even more sensationalism. News items are now events complete with their o...