What do they say about life and lemonade?

So here's something I doodled a while ago. Apologies if it doesn't make sense. If it does, just send me a hug...I could do with one right now.


Sometimes I feel I am in the middle of an ocean on a dinghy little raft, holding on to it for my life, while all around me I have roaring waves threatening to overturn the raft any minute. I don’t know swimming, and all I seem capable of doing is to pray for non-existent help. Can only a miracle save me in this situation? I don’t know what to do to better my chances of survival. But surprisingly, I am not all terrified or miserable. Sure, I don’t know what will happen the next minute, but I am doing what I believe is the best I can do at this particular minute...and that is to pray to God for strength! Yes, just for strength so that I hold myself together in this ordeal.

I am no coward, and I took this chance to venture out into the ocean, and now that I face a near-fuck-it-all situation, I am going to be brave and face it with my head held high. Deep down I know I did my best to avoid this fuck-up, and now that I am in here, I confess I don’t know what to do. There doesn’t seem to be any help at hand. I take one minute at a time; I don’t know for how long. If I am sure of one thing, it is this that if I have to go down, that will be with the knowledge that I ain’t a coward.

Back

I am back to the blog after a very long time. Lots happened during this break, the lessons of which I am still trying to understand.
I was going through some of my old folders today, and found this gem of a poem. This has often given me strength in times of despair, and today was no different. So here I am posting it for myself and for anyone else who could do with a little pat on the back. Go on, drink from it...

The Invitation
by Oriaha Mountain Dreamer

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring the moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your sorrow, have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed for fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself, if you can bear accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty everyday, and if you can source your life from it's presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon...YES!

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn't interest me who you are or how you came to be here. I want to know if you can stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me what or where or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in empty moments.

Turning twenty eight on the twenty eighth

I have been tossing and turning in bed over the last hour or so, unable to sleep due to a terrible flu. I decided to get up and write this post as the idea for this suddenly struck me. As my fingers type away on the keyboard, I realize they are shaking slightly, and that I smell of Vicks Vaporub. I pause for a while, and the pitter-patter of raindrops on the window distracts me. But I know I just have to carry on and capture my thoughts into words, but I don’t know why my blog takes precedence over my diary at this particular moment.

Anyway, the thing is just this: in a few months from now, I’ll turn twenty eight on a twenty eighth. For me this is the personal equivalent of the ‘Turning Thirty’ phenomenon. I remember reading Mike Gayle’s novel by the same name about two years back, and it was then that twenty eight became ‘the’ age for me. The novel’s protagonist Matt Beckford’s thoughts on turning thirty are excerpted below from the publisher’s write-up,

Thirty means going to the pub if there's somewhere to sit down. Thirty means owning at least one classical CD, even if it's 'Now That's What I Call Classical Vol 6'. Thirty means calling off the search for the perfect partner because now, after all these years in the wilderness, you've finally found what you've been looking for.

As I had finished reading the book then, I had asked myself, “What do I want for myself when I turn twenty-eight?”, and the first thought that had crossed my mind was this, “I want to be living in a house with a library and a garden” [1]. Over the last two years I have revisited this question many times, and I no doubt have many answers. All of these reflect a part of me, but THE answer which is me in totality has eluded me so far. May be I’ll arrive at the answer in the run-up to my birthday, may be I’ll not, or it is also possible that thirty five or even forty turns out to be “my twenty eight”, but right now I can’t do much except to jot down my foremost thoughts on this. When I turn twenty eight, I would like…

1. …to have moved-on. I have many bitter memories hanging around my neck like the proverbial albatross. I think I have learnt my lessons from those trying times, but the memories still haunt me. I must have learnt to let go of that negativity.
2. …to have acquired the strength to understand that I am what I am and not to compare myself with anybody; and more importantly not to get riled by others’ comparisons.
3. …to have learnt to be at peace with myself.

I have had many such thoughts competing for my "Turning Twenty Eight Manifesto", but may be you get the idea from the three above…it’s all just on the lines of becoming a better person. And these could well be passed off as new year/any birthday resolutions…but these are not what I am looking for. Hell, I had even created an account on 43things.com about an year ago just for fun, to see if that helped, but it turned out to be an utter waste of time. All I ended up doing there was to think of things that I wanted to do before twenty-eight (I remember one amusing entry that I created then; it was to throw away my blanket after I read an article on the BBC about deaths caused by mite-infested blankets. But no, I still haven’t discarded that blanket, because it was one of the first things I had bought with my first salary. Emotional bonding to material things, that’s the characteristic that I wish to get rid of).

So there you now see my thoughts on turning twenty eight. I am uncertain to a great extent. I have the bits and pieces that make up the jig-saw, but turns out that, it is one of those humongous thousand piece puzzles. I need time, and I definitely need patience to get it right.

[1]. A library with my own books, and a garden that I would have created. And I was pretty sure that the house in question would be a rented one…striking gold in the profession would take a few more years :).

The day that was...

It has been an unusual day. Not the calendar day, but the duration from 7.00 pm yesterday to 7.00 pm today. This time period has brought me experiences that have truly made me happy, along with an inexplicable sense of satisfaction.

My day began with a phone call to R. He is about six years younger to me, and our families have known each other for over fifteen years. But since we have been moving around quite a bit, it was only in the last year or so that I have really gotten to know the real wonderful person that R is. This was just an ordinary phone call, no special reason, and we talked. Well, it was more like he talked, and I listened. Conversation is not really my forte, and this guy R, he is an excellent conversationalist; a laughter-riot. May be that wise someone was thinking of R, when he coined the ‘capable-of-selling-ice-to-an-Eskimo’ bit. Despite this lopsided long distance talk, our banter and camaraderie has left a smile on my face, that is making me feel so happy within.

I know R will be the guy who will secretly count the number of ‘right’-s in my conversation (I use the word right quite often), and will gladly tell me the same just to irk me. But that’s fine with me because both of us know that I think of him as the brother I never had!

(There, now I feel my faint smile widening into a big grin:)

After this phone call, which must have lasted about three hours, I looked into some job related stuff, which I have been procrastinating for a long time now. I knew this would take up a lot of my time, and I needed it this way, because I wanted to stay awake to wish my mother early in the morning of 26^th January for her birthday.

After the telephonic talk with my parents, I resumed my work, only to be interrupted by someone on Gtalk. Turned out that he was my mate from University days. We had fallen out of touch, and it was good catching up with him after around four years.

I returned back to my work-stuff after this, only to find that I was unable to make sense of what I was reading. After much coaxing and I-can-do-it talks, I decided to watch The Italian Job. This was recommended to me by R over the phone, and I don’t regret spending time over it. Infact I loved the movie. By the time the movie ran into the credits, it was 5.30 am, and I got back to my work with a happy state of mind. And surprise! I had a minor breakthrough in my work! Yes, it’s minor, but I know if I use this ‘window’ properly, it could lead me to my aim.

So to celebrate this, and to ease my aching back, I decided to make myself a cup of ginger tea (my favourite beverage ever). It was close to 7.00 am now, and I was excited that I actually could see the sun rise in a short time. I love sunrises, but I am a late-riser, so you can figure how often I grant myself this simple joy. Having made the tea, I walked with my cup to the window beside my writing table, all eager to combine two of my loves in a single moment – ginger tea and sunrise. But, I think it wasn’t meant to be so, as it was still quite dark outside. All I could see from the window was the city skyline with the occasional patches of yellow and white lights piercing through the blanket of darkness. It was beautiful, but not what I was looking for. So I decided to return back to my desk, to savour my drink before it got cold. I took a sip, and it was as usual refreshing. And like the many hundred times, I involuntarily told myself that that was the best cup of tea I had ever made.

I finished the tea, and decided to listen to this song Aao Na from Kyon Ho Gaya Na. I had loved this song even when the movie was new, but ever since I catched it on YouTube a week back, it has been continually playing in my mind. I took a look at the window to see if the sun had decided to rise, but that wasn’t the case. So I sank back into my chair, stretched my legs, put on my head-set, closed my eyes and played the song. As before, I enjoyed the song for its lovely music and good lyrics; particularly the line - Sun sako dhadkanein, itne pass aao na. “This is beautiful,” I mused to myself and opened my eyes. But something looked different now. It took me a couple of seconds to realise that it was not just my table lamp that was illuminating my desk, but there was sunlight falling on to my monitor from the adjacent window. The sun had long been up!

Disappointed, I walked up to the window and saw that the street lamps were switched off. The Opel showroom a few kilometers away still had the light on on the huge O-P-E-L sign. Closer home, I looked down and found a man walking his big dog; cars were parked in a neat line along the road-side; lots of swaying bare tree-tops; a single nest, probably an empty one; the tall building with the grotesque yellow-violet exterior that stood out among the other sober ones. That was what I saw: my new surroundings. The missed sunrise was out of my mind by then, and I found myself looking at the scene from my window with joy; for this was the first time since I moved into this apartment about twenty days back, that I had consciously taken note of my surroundings. I had known this place for the past three years, so when the place came up for rent I just moved in without much thought. But that moment at the window was like forging a tryst with my future in this house.

The rest of the day was quite uneventful, except that when I woke up from my sleep around 4.00 pm, the first thing that I did was to walk up to the window and let myself soak in the view that lay ahead. A new day had just begun…

Edited to add: Looks like the 'good' streak is still running. I logged into my blogger account and found the first ever (well, two actually) comment(s) on this blog. :) The reason for the extra happiness is that these are from Tharini, whose writing and thoughts I have come to admire over the last couple of months.

Thanks, Tharini! I couldn't have had a more 'welcome' welcome to the blog world! :)

Words

I read somewhere that when you are confused about what to write, the best option is to write of the thing closest to your heart. Taking up on this advice, I have decided to write about WORDS. So this post deals with words that have touched me in some way or the other. The list is not by any means complete, but may be I’ll just jot down the words that are screaming oh-so-loudly for my attention.

1. brook (n)

This is my favourite word in the English vocabulary. I am not sure if I have seen a brook in real life, but I sure have been captivated by many a photograph depicting this natural wonder. I think I am in love with the vivid imagery of a brook that arises in my mind when I as much as think of it…a small stream of water running over stone-laden earth under a canopy of lush green ferns; the gurgling sound of the flowing water; the ripples creating a layered texture on it with a view of the pebbles and stones underneath with the sporadic green mat of lichen on them…this is exquisite beauty to my mind’s eyes!

For the same reason, I like the word rivulet as well, and I think the word has a sexy ring to it.

2. nice

This is a word that I do not like at all. To me, it appears devoid of life and soul. I try my best not to use this word in my writing and conversations, and am learning to overlook the chasm between ‘fine’ and ‘good’.

3. rendition and the phrase like a house on fire

Both the word and the phrase appear utterly artificial to me. Any write-up with the words his rendition of ….. steers me away from the piece. It’s not like the word is too jarring on the ear, but there is something obnoxious about it, which I haven’t figured out till date. And ditto for like a house on fire. When you talk to me of two people who get on with each other like a house on fire, something makes me run miles away from them and you. Nothing to do with the destructive overtone here; there is something that I just don’t ‘get’ with the phrase. Hell, I love similies. Even a like a fart in thin air is fine with me, but just not this!

A new beginning

I have been toying with the idea of having a blog for quite some time now. So here I am marking my foray into the blogosphere, with a site of my own.

Over the last couple of years, my life experiences have made me believe that there actually is a reason and a season for everything in life. I am not exactly espousing fatalism here, let's just say that I am learning not to be too critical of myself, as has been my wont. And this phrase on the top on this site is to remind me not to take myself too seriously, and to enjoy things while they last.

And yes, I absolutely love writing. I suspect I am just plain bored of my 'Dear-Diary' type journal entries, and hence this gnawing need for something new. And you dear reader, if you wanna say hello or anything that you read here catches your attention, do drop in a comment.

Shall be back with more soon!

Geeta.