Harmonies to Heaven

Love is not overrated. Not by the young, not by the spontaneous, not by the movies. It lives up to all the hype, everything we hoped and more. There exists a space, which, once you've entered it in love, fills you with an undeniable sense of calm. And you know deep down that this is no fleeting inclination. No, this space is permanent. It's yours, forever, come destruction or delight. From this moment on, no matter how fierce the tempest that arises, you'll know without doubt or disbelief, that you have love. Love that will buffer your descent and embrace you tight and make it all right. I like this space…where it's you and me and love and an irrefutable wisdom that nothing could ever be that bad again. 'My heart clicked', as Rita Poowa so fittingly described it, and the harmonies to heaven have been found. And it's all thanks to you…you and your perfection and your bravado and your love.

Don't be Time's Fool

Doing things in small chunks deprives us of the ability to see the complete truth. It conceals time’s bigger picture and this can be a hazardous thing for 2 reasons.

The first reason is wastage - If you have an inclination toward a perceived negative facet of life, say depression for example, then I’m afraid you may never realize how much time is worn out and wasted across your lifetime on feeling depressed.

Say you had your very own “life accountant” (in the form of a little imaginary man in a white suit and top hat) and he tallied up every moment for which you felt depressed, you may be surprised at the results he hands you. Perhaps you’ll find that you spent up to 6 months being depressed non-stop for every moment of every day and every night. And whilst your first reflection may be “what a waste of 6 whole months” you’ll be helpless in regaining any of those moments.

You need to realize that time is being exhausted on something worthless before you’ve completed exhausting it. This isn’t easy to do. At the outset, your emotions will thwart you. But if you succeed, then the quality of your life will improve wholly. And when your life accountant hands you the final tally, the negative fragments will be eclipsed by all the goodness of your life to the point where you may not even be able to pick them out.

The second reason is presumption – When it comes to the good stuff, people presume that time is limitless and take the simple things for granted. This is mostly enabled by our notorious (but VERY necessary) talent for forgetting that we must perish.

As Paul Bowles eloquently described it:

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

Reading at the Seaside - PART 2

In the past 3 weeks, I’ve been to the beach more times than in the past 3 years before that. At first the beach trips sought to provide a milieu for my reading expeditions but it very quickly turned into a midday meeting of lovers and included compact lunches, reclined seats which sank into mini naps, and deep rejuvenating swigs of fresh sea air. I had to find an alternative time to complete reading the book and it took a smidgen too long to finish.

Eat, Pray Love was nice. Not exceptional, but nice. However it’s easy to see how those who identify most with it, and I daresay there are millions of woman who do, would have found it exceptional. And you can’t blame me, I am after all a millennial. What’s those general terms used in a cavalier fashion to describe millennial me and my fellow millennial comrades? Ah yes, “Self-Entitled”, “Willfully Ignorant”, “The Trophy Generation”, “Comatose” , “The generation born expecting entitlement by default to everything Elizabeth Gilbert had to work so hard for”.

No pain certainly doesn’t mean no gain. If more people could believe that, the struggle would melt into the icy distance behind you, dissolved down by the comforting warmth ahead. Stepping into the sun. That said, it’s easy to see how post-Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth can captivate me...she’s charismatic and her idea’s are undeniably absorbing.

And so, Reading at the Seaside has happily evolved into Relaxing at the Seaside and has become a charming ritual, one that is not mine alone.

Easter Eggs

I love easter eggs, a little too much I think.
Do you know what an easter egg is? I don’t mean the painted or candied or chocolate kind. I mean the well concealed exciting kind, placed in movies and games and pictures and books. Like the blue tennis courts which appear instead of grass when you hold down “2” before the match screen loads in Wii Sports. Or the pink bear in the little girl’s bedroom in UP who is later revealed as a major Toy Story 3 character. Or those puzzling pictures which have 50 movies cryptically hidden in a large busy scene that you can somehow happily waste hours of your life solving.

I don’t quite know why, but there is this real excitement attached to unearthing an easter egg. A sense of accomplishment even though you probably would’ve been just as well off if you hadn’t found it. They serve no genuine purpose but somehow add quality to an experience. I think this is mostly to do with the fact that YOU are in some way made to feel like a CHAMPION for discovering them.

So hats off to the clever selfless artists who have taken the time to place easter eggs in the landscape of our lives for us to uncover. They’ve essentially bundled joy in tiny unobvious packages, thrown it out and very quietly said “Fetch”. And I am a happier puppy for it ^_^

Reading at the Seaside - PART 1

Being able to drive down to the beach in less than 5 minutes is a spectacular privilege. If you’ve been favored for all your life with something this remarkable, it’s difficult to readily recognize its virtue unless you deliberately take a moment to acknowledge it.

I’m not much of a reader. I used to be, but of late it has become increasingly difficult for a book to hold my attention. A good while back, I started reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir called Eat, Pray, Love to see what all the hype was about. 2 days and 40 pages later, I quit reading it.

I found it flavorless and could neither identify with nor tolerate the author and her excessive complaints, baggage and all-round unhappiness. My hasty verdict was that this was yet another book about another unhappy woman on another endless quest of self discovery and true love. The cliché was unbearable and what peeved me the most was how excessively true it was of real woman. And so, I renounced it for what I thought was going to be perpetuity.

Yesterday, during lunch, I drove to the beach, sat there, and started reading Eat, Pray, Love…for the second time.
I did the same today...I think I’m going to make a habit of this beach trip…Its too wonderful not to do.

Now there’s 2 reasons why I picked up this book again, the 1^st being less influential than the 2^nd.
1... A movie based on the book has been made and too much of the world has waited with bated breath for the release. ..They’ve roped me in.

2... Last year I watched a TED Talk presented by Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity and it was one of the most memorable of the many, many TED Talks that I have watched. (If you don’t know what a TED Talk is or you haven’t watched her one, go, find it now, else you will miss out on something great my friend) She offered up fascinating concepts in a nearly stand-up comedic style and I was genuinely impressed. I’m not sure if she realized it, but from the essence of her talk sprang the very divine genius which she spoke of and revealed itself through her, making the performance poetic in its completeness. The resounding response from her audience must certainly have hinted at it. So now, fortified with a newfound reverence for a misjudged artist, I will endeavor to read Eat, Pray, Love once more, this time with added effect from several breath-taking beach trips and an open mind. I’ll let you know how it went.

The Worker's Reward

There are some things in life that will take your breath away. And in the moments they do, divinity is yours. And time will pass and the elation will hypnotically doze off until a new moment arrives…and the joy will once again surge forward, jolting from within you.

And once more, divinity is yours.

I love these moments, everyone does. In fact, most of our life’s work is in the pursuit of these moments...a climactic end to a great challenge, the worker’s reward.

The delight of stepping into your ideal home.
The euphoria of meeting your ultimate match.
The thrill of getting behind the wheel of your perfect car.

And by God let me tell you, with my hand to my heart, that it is VERY necessary for that feeling to lose color, else you wouldn’t work toward anything bigger and better...you’d be perfectly happy in your exact state for all of your life to come. I haven’t decided yet whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Ah, and here’s an obvious but mostly ignored truth…the quicker you reach the present goal, the quicker you can move on to the next one, on to the next*
And you can literally hurl yourself into a rapid exponential growth vortex that can take you where you wana be quicker than you imagined possible. I don’t believe in The Secret. Life can surprise you…and it’s great when it does. Nobody can prove that it's some culmination of an expansive eddy of thoughts and universal motions all whirling together to create some flawlessly planned subconscious desire…that’s an airy fairy notion.
You yearn, you react, you receive. Its simple.

Go get what you want. If not now, then when?

*Hold up, freeze, hey, somebody bring me back some money please

Cheers to Perfection

The world wants us to be extroverts. I had a hard time growing up as an introvert. People don’t let you BE if you’re an introvert, they bang on the door continuously, trying to coax you out of your shell, as if you’re inept and need saving. As if extroverts are more valuable to the world. The banging leaves you with nothing but a headache.

I’m not sure that a person who is fundamentally introverted can be re-molded into an extrovert. They can pretend to be one with immense effort, but doing that can lead to immense unhappiness. Extroverted, organized, logical thinkers are prized in society over introverted, free-rolling creative thinkers. And here’s the problem: if you’re inherently introverted and you witness the world in praise of extroverts all through your life, it’s instilled in you that THEY ARE BETTER and you should seriously consider changing.

And so I did change. And now, if you meet me, you’ll find it difficult to classify me as either an introvert or an extrovert. I’m trapped dead in the middle between these two. It feels uncomfortable at times.
There are moments when the introvert in me is listening to myself speaking as a third person. My voice sounds unnaturally loud, my hands should be at my side rather than flailing around making gestures in front of me, my attitude should be less arrogant.
And the extrovert that’s now a part of me is disappointed if I don’t react quickly and cleverly enough in conversations, nods in disapproval when I’m the fly on the wall rather than the life of the party and pities me when I don’t forcefully own an idea that was originally mine.

I've been reading some blogs and articles on this topic and there are surprisingly many who are stuck in-between and can’t categorize themselves as either introverted or extroverted.
To these people I say cheers... Don’t be confused, I think the category you’re seeking is PERFECTION.