|
A few random thoughts that flit across the radar of my mind on a lazy weekend ... urchin thoughts that often raise their head during the week but are quelled and pushed away for lack of time during the week ...
... Like dwelling on this dull ache, thudding deep in my abdomen that I am sure everyone experiences. It's a tightly curled ball of anxiety akin to the sudden butterflies you feel in the tummy when the bus you are travelling in takes a dip from a high slope into the valley of a curve. It is about the thousand and one things I had to do but didn't - not just chores, but small things such as a song that I wanted to remember, but couldn't recall, a deep desire to climb a mountain or go trekking that has been pushed far behind the teeming commitments waiting to be fulfilled, the cake I wanted to bake, the unfinished piece of cross-stitch that I was learning to do on a readymade patch, the piece of crumpled paper where I wrote a few lines of a poem ... there are a zillion things that lie incomplete, unfulfilled, unconsummated in the closets of my conscience and they niggle and prod me.
Boring
... Why is it that we obsess with negativity more than positivity? Being good is boring but turning bad into good will always remain the greatest challenge of our life. A writer once said that all the joys put together can never equal the pain and suffering of Auschwitz. We are fascinated by evil, by negativity. Look at literature, the most unforgettable characters are those that personified evil - Macbeth, Heathcliff, Ebenezer, Scrooge. Perhaps we remember them because in the end they were redeemed. The book of Celtic Wisdom explains it all. "Negativity" says John O' Donahue in the book, "is an addiction to the black shadow that lingers around every human form. You can transfigure it by turning it towards the light of your soul".
Woken up
... Riots have broken out over food the world over. The world leaders have suddenly woken up to the fact that crop is being harvested for bio fuel. Obviously the process that pushed these riots and upped the inflation curve, did not happen overnight. But no one wants to go into the details of when the deals were signed, maybe two years ago, the seeds were planted, maybe a year ago to deny many hungry mouths food that is now being converted into bio fuel.
It brings to my mind the simple lifestyle things our parents taught us. One was to share what we had with everyone, never waste a morsel of food, look at alternative foods such as samo, amaranth, water chestnut flour at least one day a week, when most of us gave a rest to the taste-buds and fasted. If every individual in the entire world could consider the need of at least one human being before his own, we could manage food without these riots perhaps. You could blame me for being a simpleton who is dumbing down a complicated issue. But very often the key to solving the most convoluted conundrum lies in the simplest clue.
I think we all need to pause and take cognizance of that curled up anxiety ball within us. There are a zillion things we know about and we are overlooking. We need to find time to pause and look at those seemingly "inconsequential" things that when fulfilled will make us more human and more sensitised to the pains of the earth we inhabit. There is a Scrooge, a Heathcliff and a Macbeth in each one of us, waiting to be redeemed.
|
