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We all need help maintaining our personal spiritual practice. We hope that these Daily Meditations, prayers and mindful awareness exercises can be part of bringing spirituality alive in your life.

Today's meditation features a composition by Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan. "The Legend of the Moon" is a moody, enchanting tune to help us dream more daring dreams.

"The question that they usually ask me is: How can a 30-year-old artist, being young, be so fascinated by the aging and wrinkles that mark each person's face?" artist Antonio Finelli explained in an email to The Huffington Post. Indeed, judging by his works, the Italian artist does seem to possess an uncanny fascination with the ways of wrinkles, furrows and creases. The way skin thins and folds over time.




Finelli channels this interest into wildly intricate hyperrealist drawings, zoomed-in encounters with strangers who display time's wear on their flesh in beautiful and wholly unique ways. In Finelli's meticulous renderings, cheeks begin to rumple, chins double over and skin turn a shade at once spotted and translucent. However, throughout the intense physical shifts taking place, his subjects' eyes remain as glittering and keen as ever.

"I am continuously obsessed by the sloughing of the body through time," Finelli continued. "In fact, I don't like to represent in a drawing the oldness itself but rather the passage of time that ends necessarily in this human state. I am deeply in love with the human body, with the skin -- its most external layer, that absorbs and records all the experiences of our life -- but most of all I am interested in a body's evolution, its transformation, throughout the years. I am intrigued by the signs, lines, points, which enrich our cutis year after year and testify all the changes of our lives."



With the help of some well-sharpened pencils, rubbers and magnifiers, Finelli creates intimate portraits so realistic one feels, upon looking at them, like they're face to face with a complete stranger. Save for the fact that the artist leaves moments of his process incomplete, a deeper reminder of the transformation we all undergo.

"With my portrayals I want to bring a specific thought into the viewer's mind: the body suffers a metamorphosis through the slow passage of time. With this, comes aging, that sooner or later arrives in each and everyone's lives. There is nothing we can do. The only possible way of redemption from this status is death."

Discover the beauty of our imminent mortality in the images below. Be warned, some of the drawings are nude and may not be suitable for work.

How would you respond to the fact that 21,000 children die every day around the world, equivalent to one dying every 4 seconds, and just under 7.6 million children dying every year? Behind these deaths are the silent killers poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases, and other related causes. Such death of children is just single instance of crisis among myriad global crises like unemployment, the energy crisis, and conflict.

As for global unemployment, we see records broken every year. According to the International Labor Organization, almost 202 million people were unemployed in 2013, an increase of almost 5 million from the year before. Composing more than 45% of additional jobseekers, the bulk of the increase in global unemployment crises threatens the East Asia and South Asian region (like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan). If the current trends continue, global unemployment is set to worsen, albeit gradually, exceeding 215 million jobseekers by 2018. To mitigate the effects of the aforementioned crises, the situation requires sustainable solutions, reducing mortality rates from causes like hunger and disease, and at the same time creating a sufficient number of jobs addressing extra 2.6 million laborers in the market every year.

As a result, present examples and situations suggest that social entrepreneurship can be the most revolutionary and enduring solution to these problems. Social entrepreneurs act as agents of positive change in their communities, rendering opportunities to others by inventing and disseminating new approaches. They initiate sustainable solutions that create sets of social values. Unlike traditional business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs primarily seek to generate 'social value,' rather than profits solely. And unlike the majority of non-profit organizations, their work targets not only immediate and small-scale strategies, but largely emphasizes sweeping and long-term changes.

According to European Commission in its Communication to the European Parliament on the new €90m Social Business Initiative:

"A social enterprise is an operator in the social economy whose main objective is to have a social impact rather than make a profit for their owners or shareholders. It operates by providing goods and services for the market in an entrepreneurial and innovative fashion and uses its profits primarily to achieve social objectives."

Recognizing the vital impact that a social enterprise can have, entrepreneur Ahmad Ashkar founded the Hult Prize, a start-up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs emerging from universities around the world. Referred to as one of the top 5 ideas changing the world by President Bill Clinton in TIME Magazine, the annual competition for the Hult Prize aims at identifying and launching the most compelling social business ideas -- start-up enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people around the world.

This fall, the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) was one of several universities selected to host a quarter final round of the Hult Prize. It is the beginning of a joint journey of Hult Prize and BUET, a top university in Bangladesh and in Asia. BUET plays a significant role in sustainable development of technical sectors in the country and South Asia, and the distinguished scholars of the university conduct a range of result-oriented technical research, as well as diverse development projects.

Acting as Campus Director of Hult Prize at BUET was one of the most challenging jobs for me in recent years, and spreading the concept of social entrepreneurship and business among technical students was a challenging task for our organizing team. However, our expectations couldn't have imagined the enthusiasm met by the students of BUET. This year's challenge, the lack of early childhood education in urban slums, is relevant and significant to students here. The 3-5 age group of the population of Bangladesh is projected to be 9.2m in 2015, up from 8.7m in 2010.

Among them, 3.41 million children are not enrolled in pre-primary school, a great threat to our progressive economy. Maybe this is what drew the attention of huge number of students to compete in the Hult Prize, to find a solution despite being the tech institute students. Around 500 students in over 115 teams joined the campus event, and our judges selected a winning team, "HALCYON." An interdisciplinary team of 5 members, Muntaseer Bunian, MD.Moinul Islam, MD. Arif Ishtiaque Khan, Prattay Deepta Kairy and Rajat Ghosh, they will now head to the regional finals, along with another BUET team, "Bioscope."

Social entrepreneurship has been a buzzword for few years in Bangladesh, a land full of opportunities and influential minds, such as Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, Sir FazleHasan Abed, and many others who have been shaping the world for years. Bangladesh is also viewed as a great place to start new ventures, with a large supply of labor and a favorable business environment.

In the World Economic Forum's 'Global Risks-2015' report, unemployment, water, and spread of infectious disease crowd at the top of the list of risk of occurring, and highest impact. Now, we need more people to become social entrepreneurs, driving positive change in society and the world. Perhaps no better option exists to get out of the present crises this world is facing.