5 Bites Friday (#24)

 


Hello and Good morning. It is September 25th, 2020 today - the last week of this month. Next Friday, we'd be talking in October, a new month, and the start of 2020's last Quarter. It's been a long and difficult year.

 

Anyways, this is this week's 5BF - I hope you find the collection resourceful!

 

1: What I watched

Close-Up (1990) This is a twentieth century Iranian movie based on a real-life event where a poor yet passionate admirer of the arts, who when the opportunity comes, pretends to be a famous director of Iranian cinemas of those times. Arrested, and later put on a trial, which is most of this movie, the man is accused of fooling the family whom he promised to cast in his next film as the famous director, taking advantage of them, and possibly a future burglary attempt. But why did he really do it? The cast of the movie are the same people involved in the real-life event, who play themselves. Raw, beautiful. and touching, this movie affirmed my love for the Iranian cinema, and their brilliance at bringing to live the most ordinary yet profound of stories. A must watch!

 

2: What I read

Shoe Dog (Phil Knight) “…That’s where memoirs come in. They show the all-making, all-important, and all-lost beginnings of the now seemingly flashy, effortless, and illusional endings. Beginnings indeed tend to lose themselves in the endings, because the overwhelming success is all we want to see. Definitely not the difficult, real, and honest stories of how these successes actually came to be. Phil’s honest storytelling lets the readers into the brutal lives of him, his team, and Nikes throughout all those years as they fought one challenge after another, while never giving up, and despite it all, growing.” Read full review ‘here’.

 

3: This week’s articles

I Thought I Would Have Accomplished a Lot More Today andAlso by the Time I Was Thirty-Five – this funny, honest, and perspective rich blog by Alex Baia beautifully captures the slipperiness of time, especially when we are looking back at it. Everyone in their 20s and 30s should give this article a read!

What LoveReally Is – and Why It Matters – @ theschooloflife.com ‘At this point, we need to hope that there will be a few people around who still remember what true love is, someone who will undertake the heroic effort of not giving us what we deserve, who will recall that there must be a sweet and distinctly blameless child beneath the horrible and difficult adult we have become, someone who can bypass the jeering mob and offer us counsel and reassurance, knowing that every human has a claim upon forgiveness and imagination.’ 

This saintly article from ‘The School of Life’ beautifully brings forth the lost meaning of why we love and why it matters. This isn’t selfish romanticism; this here is love for the humans, the defeated, ugly, and lost ones of us.

 

4: TED Talk

How to get better at the things you care about | Eduardo Briceño

A pragmatic, applicable, and – honestly – life-changing talk if taken into consideration and applied. Eduardo’s insights of the two zones in our lives ‘Performing’ and ‘Learning’ and how to oscillate between them to obtain ‘continuous growth’ hardly needs further emphasis. Watch this talk in Eduardo’s own beautiful and richly sourced presentation 'here'.

 

5: This week’s Quote

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, for to understand is to be free.” 

– Baruch Spinoza