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Contemplation & Affirmations

The lack of recent activity on this journal is not an indication of faltering interest but rather deep contemplation. You would think that for many the point of a journal is to document this kind of activity, but I found it difficult to articulate exactly what I was contemplating about. As scattered as that might sound it is the result of gross disillusionment and slight despondency in my own perceptions of reality. To clarify, most of my belief and values systems were brought into critical questioning. This has the possibility of putting one in a position of some discomfort and insecurity.

I consider a degree of “system shock” as a healthy action as it forces the system to be re-evaluated in order to iron out inefficiencies and reanalyse the plausibility of certain assumptions, although of course, processing this might require some time. Not often does one get the opportunity to realize the need to rebuild some of your own fundamental systems since it was severely shaken at their roots. These moments of profundity were not caused by an introduction of one single foreign agent but rather a sequence of events and thought provoking stimulants.

I hope to share the semantics of all this excitement, but I need to take some time to disassemble, rebuild and clarify my intentions. If I could surmise my current identification of the process I would say it was one of “transforming the mind trap into a tool of expression” and if I am correct in the classification it could take a lifetime to complete. Indeed, I do not intend to await the completion of the process before I continue expressing myself but I do require some amount of conscious resurfacing.

On a completely different note, some idea I would like to share is one related to computer passwords and affirmations. Some companies have very strict password policies such as periodical expiration, multiple character groups (variant case, numerals and non-alphanumeric ASCII characters), non repeating passwords, exclusion of dictionary searchable words etc. Understandably, it is crucial to have so called strong passwords (ideally accompanied by some other physical form of identification) for every user on a network, but many users find them difficult to remember for different access points and tend to use insecure habits like password incrementing (e.g. P@55w0rd1, P@55w0rd2, P@55w0rd3).

I won’t go into why this is very bad as it is already discussed in some detail all over the net (see related links), but it is important to have an easy to remember though hard to guess password. Many modern operating systems allow 128 characters or more for passwords and if you find affirmations useful you could use this as an opportunity to use passwords to your advantage. The idea is that the longer your password the more potential character combinations a hacker (and his tools) have to guess, which makes brute force password cracking more difficult. Instead of using a password of myCatsName123 consider the use of passphrase like “I am an Assertive and Firm Leader” or combine it with the use of special characters like “Ch!ck5 R3@ly d|G |\/|3 !!!”.

If you use your passphrase often, you might experience an increased efficiency in the use of your affirmations (that can, according to policy, change periodically).