Artificial Needs.

Traversing EDSA on a common weekend, I saw billboards on my hindsight - beauty products, shoe brands and go to restaurants were among them. Businesses thrive from its customers and from this arise the challenge on how to attract and maintain its customers. They need to highlight their product and differentiate it against its competitors, they impose fear to create artificial needs in order to gain customers. They create consumerism. They create the illusion that we need those items. They ask us to buy more, to earn more money, to chase money in order to have those artificial needs. Those artificial needs were superbly and strategically advertised in our daily lives - commercials, billboards, online advertisements that it successfully penetrated our mind that we feel unsatisfied and inferior if we haven't bought them because we think its a need. Think deeply of those fears they have made - retirement with no money, death with no insurance, being late because of traffic, living uncomfortably, staying up-to-date and connected. Think of the needs it makes - insurance, car, condominium, cellphones. Sometimes, we are chasing money to afford those that we made ourselves blind of the big picture - living in harmony with our planet and saving it from the long term effect of consumerism.

Every Little Thing Needs Love.

We often end our day feeling unsatisfied. We drift away our minds and think of the future - of what we want to be, what we should be doing next, of what to buy next, to satisfy that hole within us. We dig the past and felt unsatisfied for what we could have done, what might we been. But what if instead of living our lives digging the past we cannot change and drifting to the future that is uncertain to happen, we live in the present? A life mindful of the present, feeling the air we breathe in and out, giving our attention and love to little things that needs it - to the house needing cleaning, to the pet that longs for a touch, to the plant begging for a taste of water, to a stranger passing by our life. We need not to be on top of our company, a superstar,  search for that next big volunteering activity nor save up big digits in our savings account to help. In our everyday living, there are little things that needs our love and extra time. We become less bitter to the life we are living in if the satisfaction comes from us giving love to those little things and at the same time, a less bitter world if those little things received love.

Above all, send the bees love. Every little things wants to be loved. - Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees