Life is a Gift - with a catch....

Yep..Life is a gift! Beautifully wrapped...we hold it, cherish it and embellish it with more accessories - But scared to surprise ourselves we add more wrappers, more external decorations.But really very very few of us have the guts to open the gift. To see whats inside. I've taken a few peeks and I am getting a hint of whats inside...its nothing - Its just plain, dark, empty vacuum - something you cant control, something so intense that once opened you get sucked in..When you've been gutsy enough to do that, the experience is a transformation - to a more individualistic, more at peace, more self-contented living that seeks no other external validation for being. Nirvana.

As one more year wraps up, lets unwrap our gift of life....lets find peace within.

PS: Ha ha...am starting to sound like the Robin Sharma's and Deepak Chopra's of the world...Age I suppose :P

Of Endings and beginnings...

I watched the last Harry Potter Movie yesterday...I delayed watching it, but I eventually had to get to it. I am not the movie-review type, so that's not what I am going to do...but I am going to analyse the unexpected impact it left on the Wundergal world, rather than the Hogwart's world...

I have now been following HP for almost 10 years, waiting for each book and each movie...suddenly its over. Its done. With Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint - I have grown too. Its not a bad thing - its just unsettling. Call me a late bloomer or whatever fancy term u want to use, the hardest thing I have had to come to terms with (which explains some of my previous posts) is the fact that, there is NO control over life. You can dream, you can believe, you can worry, you can cry, you can laugh, you can enjoy, you can hope - every single thing is transitory and what comes next is NOT IN ANYONE'S HANDS....What happens, happens - mostly with no rhyme or reason.

In retrospect, being the story tellers we are designed to be, we attach meanings and cohesively link events as "good" or "bad"...but hey, I am sorry to break the news.. but things (shit and non-shit) happens at its random will. However, inspite of the bleak outlook, there is something I have salvaged of my optimistic myself - borrowing from Viktor Frankl

Life Dearest,
"The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance."

Thats a new outlook...replacing my everything happens for good and what goes around comes around theory. Ha ha....Feeling smug. (let me for a while...) Which leads me to something Albus Dumbledore says in this HP movie..

Harry: Professor, Is this real or is it all in my head?
Dumbledore; " Obviously Harry, it all in your head - but that does not mean it is NOT real"

It is so unbelievably true, how sometimes life in the head is more perceivable and more real than the reality around!!!!

Disappearing Acts....

Part of the super powers conferred as part of being w.u.n.d.e.r.g.a.l...Read God's Debris by the Dilbert fame, scott adams.. its ancient - i just got to read it.. a thought from the book that was severely cool! (yes, I happened to watch Kung fu panda 2 and loved it)

“We like to believe that other people have the same level of urges as we do, despite all evidence to the contrary. We convince ourselves that people differ only in their degree of morality or willpower, or a combination of the two. But urges are real, and they differ wildly for every individual.Morality and willpower are illusions. For any human being,the highest urge always wins and willpower never enters into it. Willpower is a delusion.”

Sometimes too many thoughts go criss-cross, whishing-whooshing - like fireworks - does anyone remember fireworks after the show? - no right?!....Going through a thought firework in my head...let my brain tranquilize. Then I'll write. ZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzeeeeeeeeeeeeNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!

First love...A Sequel

Shakthi, my little doll - not even all of 6 years has started reading.... its so gratifying to see her stutter through the words, trying to familiarize herself and making up pronunciations with the little she knows. Its lovely to see her take so much interest. Of course, the effort now is only to read and not to understand - but its beautiful, to watch someone falling in love the same way you did and someone as cute as a five year old kid...

I dunno, if she'll take to books like I did, but sometimes I cant help but hope. Cant help but wish she builds, imagines, experiences and see the fascinating worlds the books let me see. I hope that inspite of all the fun stuff on TV and computers...books last into her life. I want her to be elated, when I bequeath my most precious book collection to her when I cant read anymore...

Way to go girl...Amma loves you, reader or not!

My first love...Books!

From: http://themonicabird.com/post/3273155431/date-a-girl-who-reads-date-a-girl-who-spends-her

I dont know about guys, but every girl who is a bookworm, will identify with this one. I am and I do. Could'nt be written better! - WG. The post follows.

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

Rosemarie Urquico (via kblitz)

(via conversationslips)

Rosemarie no longer has an active blog, but she can be found on Facebook here:http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=585211028

To see the post about how she was found, please go here. Thanks, Jonathan (who should eventually get a website that I can link to, yes) for searching!

Countdown...

Savoring the last 15 minutes of the twenties....Its must be a plateau out there, not a downhill slope!!!

Take it as it comes or fight it and try changing its course...do whatever you may, LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL!!

Zen.....from within. Loving it.

Over the hill...

And the overwhelming themes are,

Purposelessness. So what? How much more? . Where to? Positive disintegration? Existentialism? Identity crisis?

So much to do – so little to do it with, always. Straddling two worlds that are fast drifting in opposite directions is exhausting....Balance is a theoretical concept. Happiness is elusive, relative and momentary

Life’s a charade – I am a terrible actor. The “con” in consumed, concern, conduct is not coincidental and correspond to consequences, conformation (to expectations) and contrived respectively.

Search for meaning is pointless – the answer is 42 (for those unenlightened, read Hitchhiker’s guide). Life’s a joke – I need to learn to laugh with it.

Life really (really, really) never stops....it goes on with no respect for an individual’s state of mind. The drama in life is only in the human mind – the hell should freeze over, the earth should swallow me, I will die without you, injustice will be punished are all logically modeled outcomes sitting on the flawed assumptions that life is fair.

But life is in moments. Moments of utter fulfillment, love, pain, beauty. In the intensity of moments, is where the meaning of life is. It took me all this while to understand this – now that I know it – I guess the next phase is internalizing it, by facing the fact that moments ARE momentary, there are no “everafters” and memories are the only things you leave behind, To reconcile my idealistic Piscean self to the pragmatism of reality. I guess, the following lyrics from ARR's latest album "changing seasons" summarizes it all,

oru pillai ezhuthum kirukal dan vaazhkaiyo
athil artham thedi alaivathe vetkaiya

Is life like the scribblings of a child?

Why this quest to find some meaning to it?

artham puriyum poothu vazhuvu maaruthe
Vazhvu kazhiyum pothu artham konjam maaruthe

When I think I have it figured life changes,

And as life moves on, the meaning I attach to it also changes!!!

Cheers!

PS: I know lately, my posts have been vacillating between seemingly depressive and hopeful thoughts. However, in reality, it is a rational mind which heretofore had oversimplified the enormity of life now realizing the need to grasp the dimensions of this immensely complex conundrum before embarking on solving it (if at all it gets there).

Sometimes,

All it takes is a thought...

Whose warmth

Can wrap your day in happiness!

And Tapasya, added something to this, that I made my day even better. I am adding in the main post, so that none of you miss it...

And on days like these
Make sure you bottle up that thought,
So you can snuggle into it
In the winters that follow...

A rare insight...

At the most unexpected moment, for a seemingly frivolous question...you realise something interesting about yourself and the world....one such thing that I realised yesterday

Butterflies fascinate me - If you do take the time to stop and notice, butterflies can be a source of joy, just with their seemingly aimless flight patterns and bright colours....the way the flit from flower to flower, like a connoisseur trying to find the best food outlet...In short, butterflies are fun on the outside..But they're interesting too because butterflies don't start of as butterflies. They've been foodaholics and overweight, they've been single mindedly focussed (on eating, but focus it is !!), they've been imprisoned by themselves before learning to fly and to let go..

The contrasts of all the stages in the metamorphosis of a butterfly are so much more, than say, that of a frog....Human beings metamorphose too...from children to teenage to adult to middle aged to old age...just that some of us are frogs - who don't really seek much more than convenience (learn to live without always having to swim and shed that tail that's so out of fashion) whereas as some of us are more curious minded and seek a lot many more experiences that could change us fundamentally during the metamorphosis.... The effort always pays off.

So butterfly it is!!!

If that was cryptic...I am sorry

Crisis.

I should sue Disney – for all the princess stories and their “good always prevails over bad” preaching animation movies and for disproportionately popularising the “happily everafter” concept. They’ve been selling lies to generations of children and no one’s gotten to them yet. I am afflicted. I cant stop hoping. I therefore sue Disney for damages of disillusionment that my life is becoming!

The pragmatic me says:

I’ve understood life is more of Tom and Jerry – each one does their own thing, no winners and losers, no good and bad, no beginning and no end – it is all a matter of time and context...

The idealist me says:

Yeah right, like hell, I am going to accept that....I am too sold on the Disney “ideals” – there is a karma and it always gets to you – in a good way or a bad way....truth (in the form of love or affection or righteousness or whatever be it) should essentially triumph.

Its an ongoing battle. But the idealist is losing hands down to the rationale and empirical evidence called life that the pragmatist lives. Denial seems like a route to take. But for how long?

Tell me really, is there a bloody point to this existence if you cant find what really anchors you to this life? What I have found so far are driftwoods that sail me a while...Is there a destination? Is there some point to this? – I dont know..All I know is that soul searching is an addictive form of escapism pushing you deeper and deeper in the search for the elusive and it definitely must be injurious to mental health!!!!

PS: I am NOT depressed. I am not going insane. In fact I am more stable than I have been in a long while. I’m just thinking my way out of mid-life crisis maybe!