The Idea-smithy

My blog’s god-father tags me to post a photograph taken this year with the instructions that it be,

One photo that you have clicked this year that is special to you. Could be anything…aesthetic, technical or personal. Also, put in a short note why it is special.

So here is the memorable photograph of this year. Quite interestingly, it was probably being short at the same time that I was being tagged. Yes, this was shot yesterday on the beach.

It has been an eventful, difficult year and I’m not sorry to bid it goodbye. On the other hand, among the much betrayal and viciousness I’ve encountered, there have been moments of solace, of rest, of peace. I’ve had things and people I’ve loved ripped away from me and at the end of it, I realise I’m left with the only thing that matters…which no one can steal away from me. I’m at peace with myself.

This is a photograph of a good friend, someone who makes me re-think my XXFactor-attitude of ‘men are such a-holes’. Yesterday while talking about a common friend and her ex-, I asked him,

What is it with men anyway? Why can’t they be more like you? You are so sorted out.

He just smiled in response.

We had a late, leisurely lunch and then strolled down to the beach. There we walked around, talking about nothing in particular. I was thinking of the first time I was at this beach, with my former best friend/love of my life. It is his birthday today and I won’t call him to wish him. In fact I thought of him yesterday at the beach but not remembering his birthday until I saw the reminder on my calendar. I’m at peace with my ghostly memories finally.

I took out the camera I bought earlier this year, dreaming of the wonderful photography that would follow. I didn’t use it, not enough. But it is never too late to start, I guess (and that’s duly noticed I suppose as per Arzan’s comment!). It is a good camera and I’m very proud of it. My first real ‘big buy’ for myself that I bought on my own without anyone else looking over my shoulder.

My companion was walking along slowly near the water, calm and peaceful as always. Even while, being a good friend, I know the inner turmoil that churns inside him. My dear sensitive, serene friend. He was deeply patient as I fussed about with the zoom and the settings until I got an angle I liked. The photographs never turned out the way I wanted. Finally I sighed and just shot without thinking too much. And this is what turned out. The only real memory that I want to carry forward.

I’m very proud of the way this photograph turned out…proud of my camera, proud of my friend and proud of myself for finally capturing what I’ve been seeing inside my head for a long time. This picture stands for the elusive quality that has become most valuable of all..serenity. There is an unposed simplicity in his stance as well as the infinite, boundless promise of hope and potential that the open sea always holds. I can almost feel the sea breeze that is ruffling his hair and hear the subtle wash of waves on sand, rising above the din of voices around me. I particularly like the play of colours in the sky. That perfect twilight moment before the night turns black when the rest of the world looks dark in comparison and the sky holds center-stage. It seems to be asking us to slow down and not get so wrapped up in our little dramas that we lose on the most wonderful experience of all - just being ourselves. Every person is an island…an island of paradise. Why try and conquer another’s piece of land when Paradise itself belongs to you?

It was a memorable evening. And a memorable conversation. A memorable lesson in patience and serenity. A great friend. All worth carrying forward into 2008. Happy new year to all of you!

I tag the following people to pick out their favorite photograph of 2007 and tell me why it is special to them:

Neha Vishwanathan because I’m awestruck by her ability to tell a story from a fragment or a picture.

Akshay Mahajan because his pictures are not just snapshots but entire sagas of their own.

In the Snake Woman issue that I read, Jessica says:

Maybe that’s what growing up is….realizing the things we do don’t mean anything. Things aren’t right or wrong. They’re just impulses. They just are.

Or perhaps in the grander scheme of things, beyond everyday breaths, in an entire lifetime some things cease to matter. Even within one relationship in a few years, it may be forgotten - those details of who spoke first, who made the first move and who ended it. Where then, is there any significance of our mundane emotions and selves in the grand panorama of multiple lifetimes?

Is it possible to live several lifetimes in one? I always liked taking stock at the end, summarizing, taking one key point out of each of the lengthy stories beforehand. What if this lifetime were nothing more than a fast-forward of a thousand others, a recap, a reminder to pick one sentence, one word from each lesson? An executive summary of everything thus far.

Then that’s why there’s so much room for deja vu, familiarity and seemingly-magical connections in my life. No wonder then I’m frequently bored…I’ve seen all of this before. Who’s got the time or the inclination..or the need, to recreate the entire production again? When all I have to do is run through it just to pull out the very essence of it? Ah, no wonder I seem cold and even slightly mad sometimes. I’m running the same tape, but just at a different speed than you are. And I loved you no less than yesterday. Or was it three lifetimes ago? I forget, the order doesn’t matter anyway.

My love, my hate, my passion, my indifference, my callousness, my grief….everything was just a series of impulses. Ha.

I realized yesterday that you can’t control your friendships any more than you can control your love life. I heard someone ask, almost reproachfully,

Since love happens on its own,
Without will or volition,
Why hate someone for loving you,
Or, for not being able to?

I thought long and hard but I never had an answer to that.

You certainly can’t control who you fall in love with. Or who falls in love with you.
You can’t control who to like or not like. Or who places you up on the pedestal of friendship. Or sacrifices you on the alter of love.

All you can do, is turn your back on relationships that you think aren’t right…and hope to heaven that they leave you alone and don’t come knocking on the door of your unconscious every now and then.

J once told me that,

A relationship is like eye-contact. It takes two to maintain it. But only one to look away and it is broken.

I disagree. As long as one person is still looking, the gaze exists, the spotlight, the glare and eventually, the other must come back to look again. It takes one to start and two to end.

In my mind, I effectively killed off those that hurt me and inadvertently created the ghosts of my past. Now, I am done and wish them nothing any more. Not joy, not fear, not hatred, not love. I’ve been the response to their initiation. Each spell of wonder, of lust and of love that was cast on me, I reciprocated with a counter-spell of murky attachment, of resentful longing, of secret guilt.

I wrote this months ago but did not publish it because it didn’t feel real. And now, finally that the impulse has caught up with the truth….like colour filling into the lines of what must come to pass…here it is.

I never did learn how to make a person stay
But it seemed like I learnt how to let them go
And I’ve always known how to make sure I’d be missed

Today, after all the grand entrances and exits,
All the passing throughs and mixed memories
I acknowledge what I’ve done

And to all the people I’ve bound to me,
Without seeming to,
I set you free

I stole my freedom away from you and us
Now I give you back yours, as a parting gift

You have been loved. And hated. And indulged. And denied. And finally absolved.
Your crimes washed away along with mine. And your pain redeemed for my tears.

I don’t have any regrets
And I hope, neither do you

Go in peace.

This is for everybody I’ve had any kind of strong attachment to, especially in the past few years. Friends, lovers, foes, ex-boyfriends, rivals. I’m letting you go. Not with any ulterior motives or from misplaced pride anymore but because…it is the only thing left to do. Please let me go. And let’s just get on with the rest of our lives. And lifetimes.

Had a thought - a few actually - in the last fortnight, that I haven’t had a chance to put down.

I saw this movie and thought,

I see ghosts too. They hurt me sometimes. They talk to me. They walk around like everyone else. They are the ghosts of my past.

And then perhaps, as with Cole, my ghosts wanted to tell me something as well and it might make sense to listen.

Last weekend, I spoke to my best friend about him. Not in anger, not in pain but an unemotional reflective way, ending with,

You know, I think he must be thinking of me.

And then, in another conversation, was ressurected the spirit of someone who was once as dear as no one else has ever been and I ended that remisiniscence as always with,

I’ve never run away from anyone’s love like that. But then again, no one has ever loved me as much. I always wonder if somewhere deep down, even in me, lies the capacity for all-encompassing, womb-like comforting, parasitic, suffocating devotion. I’m a Cancerian as well after all. And I’ve always had a strange relationship with other Cancerians.

And then, during the week, seemingly after deciding in an idle moment to ‘talk’ to my ghosts, they came knocking on my door. His hello comes back like the years in between never happened. And her voice had the same warmth like my goodbye had not ever been said either.

My breath stuck in my throat at both times. And once I learnt to breathe again, I spoke to them. But they’ve both vanished. Odd, isn’t it? Like the only thing each of my ghosts had to say to me was,

Don’t be afraid of me.

Incidently, the most memorable scene in the movie (in my mind) is the one where Cole has his first encounter with a ghost that he doesn’t run away from. Sitting quietly in his little tent, as his breath starts to hang in the air and the clips overhead snap off, his eyes race down to find a little girl sitting in front of him. And in her eyes….there is only pain. So much of it.

How can one run away from someone in even more pain than oneself? And yet, we do.

There’s nothing more disconcerting than encountering a problem that you thought you’d solved a long time ago. Makes you wonder if when they say that life is cylic, they mean it just keeps going around in circles.

Ever wondered if your own life was nothing but the script for a really bad movie…and wanted to throttle the writer’s neck…till you realised you were holding the pen…and writing in a language you didn’t recognize?

Can you fall in love over and over again?

Or it is just waking up to the same love every morning, albeit with a different face and name?

Who are we really having an affair with? Other people? Or with that one frame that we hold up to the world and give it the name of whoever we catch sight of, through it?

Frames need to be polished every now and then, taken down. But we can’t see too clearly without them. Umm…but do we see clearly with them, anyway?

Ever met someone who reminds you strongly, sharply of someone else? Even when they don’t look alike, sound alike or seem to have anything in common? What about situations that seem to keep repeating over and over again? We date the same kind of person, our spouses remind us of our teachers, our friends treat us the way our siblings did.

I think we start our lives with a list of things to be done. There are relationships to be built, conversations to be started & completed, memories to be revisited, hurts to be forgiven, actions to be completed. It is all unfinished business.

I remember hearing someone define ‘Kalyug’ as the age where nothing would be carried over to the next birth but avenged, paid back and completed in this birth itself. I don’t know whether that is so or not. But it does seem to make good sense to me to finish all that I came to this birth for. The universe provides me endless ways to do it. I discern patterns, some of which I can’t quite explain the logic for but I see them anyway.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence

said my mathematics teacher and those words underline how I receive these impressions.

There are people I feel a strong…I can’t define the feeling, can only feel its intensity…connection to. These connections are usually characterized by a strong awareness of the person when they enter the room (and my life). I am much more sensitive to their words and actions and feelings than to other people, which means that I am more perceptive about them as well as more prone to being disturbed and even hurt by them.

I’ve examined thoroughly what it is I find so familiar in certain people and I find it is often residual feelings or unfinished conversations. Often I’ve had the same person come back into my life….old friendships that just died away for no apparant reason, almost-forgotten-but-really-not-really loves…..people who have impacted me deeply at one point of time and have been ‘cleanly shut away’. And I find I keep running into the person again and again and again until I finally sort it out. And a few times, when I just haven’t been able to, I’ve find other people who remind me of that person, I find myself in familiar situations and having to deal with the same things. It is sort of like life sending me surrogate situations to learn the same lessons.

This is unfinished business coming back to pester me to finish it. These are examples of opportunity knocking more than once, in different bodies this time. And these are only people. There are things I’ve felt I should do, things I’ve felt I was meant to do, some ways of being that I felt I was born for.

Some of them didn’t fit into the way I had envisaged my life…..things like writing and art and music, things like taking leadership, things like being protector instead of protected. Some of them went totally against my beliefs of who I was and wanted to be. But somehow I’ve found I can’t dodge them. Writing and art continue to haunt me, ideas nudging my logical processes gently and then more persistently till I have no peace of mind until I’ve written or painted. Writing threatens to take me over and carry me away like a river. I fell into blogging entirely by mistake and without my realizing it has grown far beyond what I thought. It is like the ideas and words control me and not the other way round.

Invariably I land up in situations where I end up taking charge, regardless of how inadequately prepared I am. I never thought of myself as a strong person, the kind who could protect and lead others but somehow when the situations arise, it is like someone else has taken over my body and mind and is commanding me to go through the actions to take on the role.

I have no clue what happened when my grandfather died, four years ago. One moment I was an average youngster, sniveling over the boyfriend who had dumped me and grousing about the hopelessness of the education system and my life. Another moment I was rock-solid, dry-eyed fortress into which my family could retreat and feel their sorrow. I didn’t cry a tear….and it wasn’t that I was holding back. I just didn’t feel the need to break down at all, I just knew instinctively that I had to be the wall that held against this storm and sheltered my family from the horrendous pain they were feeling.

It hasn’t followed a pattern. I am not innately strong, especially when it comes to letting go of people I’ve loved. I brood and hurt and grieve long after everyone says I should really stop feeling sorry for myself. It is a bad feeling, especially since I feel that this is my real nature and those odd moments of strength came from an outside force that was just using my body as a vehicle at that time.

As I can see it, I am too small to be ever able to comprehend the enormity of the patterns. What I can do is keep noticing more and more and trying somehow to understand. There are enough of clues; the more I look, the more I find. Besides there is comfort in the fact that when I do miss an opportunity, it will come back and knock again.

Also cross-posted on IFSHA.

Happiness has nothing whatsoever to do with what’s happening in your life but at least a little to do with how you feel about it. And in my case, peace of mind too, I think.

My name means harmony and sometimes that thought makes me (and other people laugh). But harmony isn’t a flat line, it is a series of well-balanced highs and lows. It also means music, which is certainly not a single constant note. And yes, it is about dancing, in the moment.

Maybe my lesson in this lifetime is simply to be my name. Strange how simple things can be and yet how complex we make them. I guess all I need to do is remember my name. That’s the answer to every single question I could possibly have.

Where do we look for the truth? And how do we know if the answers we find are the right ones?

Several centuries of mankind and so much to show at the end of it…. science, technology, mathematics, art, culture, religion. Each one is an attempt to explain the universe that we see around us. And there is as yet so much that we have still to understand. So much that we have only the vaguest of ideas about, a faint glimmer of understanding, so much that seems unbelievable and silly even…..and yet the concept of Earth as a sphere seemed ridiculous at a point of time. It would be naive to assume that the things we haven’t found a way to explain don’t exist at all.

Science and religion have waged a war for years. Various ways of understanding life and predicting the future have held popularity and died away. Some of them continue to conflict and co-exist. All over the world, people are trying to find answers to questions that have persisted….Who am I? What am I doing here? What is the meaning of life? Is there an after-life? Is there God? Where are we going?

I don’t claim to have any of the answers. But I’ve been looking for them for a long time and I think I might find them by listening to voices that have been speaking for years….the voices of intuition. I see some common reactions when I discuss this with others. There is the all out skepticism, the retorts about ‘mumbo-jumbo’. There are also those who fear the ‘dark arts’ and things that don’t fit into their daily frame of reference. However there is almost always a strong interest, a fascination with that which is not directly visible to our eyes. The Celestine Prophecy predicts a world-wide awakening to things hithero unexplained by science or any of the ‘rational’ thought-processes. I can see that happening all around me.

I like to think of a nice metaphor to illustrate this. Think of a house with 5 people in it. These five people live in it, interact with each other and take decisions on how to run the house. Each of them has a way of looking at things, unique strengths and shortcomings. Four of these people have had the power divided among themselves for a long time and have allotted roles in decision-making. The fifth one has just a voice but no one hears it.

These five people are:
My mind: Intelligence, logic, intellect, rationale
My heart: Emotions, feelings, attachments
My body: Physical sensations, whatever can be touched and felt
My people: Family, friends and anybody who had an influence on me.
My intuition

The first four have their say in some way or the other. In a lot of people one of those is a dominant factor and overshadows the others. Intuition barely has a say for most people or when it does, it is attributed to the emotions. I am making a distinction here between emotions and intuitions. One is what we feel for the world around us…it is expression….of love, hate, anger, surprise, betrayal, fondness etc. The other is what is internalized from the world outside us…it is impression…messages that come into our being, which we don’t listen to because we are conditioned to believe only in what comes in through our eyes and ears.

Since I’ve started listening, I find my awareness of my intuition has increased. I cannot say my intuition has improved because it has always been there. It is like I suddenly realize that the voice has been there all my life, only I never chose to listen to it or acknowledge its presence. It is akin to tuning into radio frequencies and stopping at one point and realizing that what you’d written off as white noise so far is actually music.

I’ll take the metaphor furthur. Someone I know says that she never experiences intuition and she always wonders whether what she hears inside her head are her own fears and/or her wants. I know that feeling, I used to experience that too. It is like the heart sometimes speaks the words of intution in her voice…..so what we think are our emotions are actually our intuitions. I look back at the people I gravitate to and now I’m able to see which of those are people I chose because I liked them and which of those I was compelled to meet to fulfil a higher pattern.

The mind and body play these games as well. Fear itself is a joint effort of intuition, mind and body. Science has broken down the fear instinct and explained how it is a legacy of our animal ancestors to sense danger and be physically prepared to run, defend or attack. In a lot of ways the distinction between mind and intuition blurs and I really can’t say which is which.

I’ll end this by saying that we are incomplete until every force inside us finds a voice. If you give a person a chance to speak, he will eventually say something. It is just upto each of us to figure out whether we really do want to listen to what our intuition is telling us.

Also cross-posted on IFSHA.

I never understood the meaning of the phrase

Existential Angst

till I met someone who was devoid of it.

Existential Angst. The angst of existance. The agony of being.

How is it possible to live without it? I mean, how can one be a part of the crowd, the universe, creation itself and still stand apart? You may stand out but can you stand apart? How can you not influence and be influenced by the forces around you? Even the mountain is shaped by the lashing of waves, the skies are coloured blue because of the interaction of light with air particles, the sea looks blue because of the sky. The hardest substance known to mankind, a diamond, is nothing more than common carbon that just has been shut away from the impact and influence of the universe for a very, very long time.

Everything else, everyone else is touched and altered by those around them. Everyone bears the taint, the burden, the injury of being alive. The scars are what we call existential angst.

Or perhaps not. Apparantly some people are rejuvenated enough for the scars to disappear…by plain air itself. Or something else altogether. What?

I carry the cross of the existential angst of not knowing who I am and why I’m here. I don’t belong, then I do. I don’t understand, but sometimes I do. And it pains me, it hurts me. How can it not?

Existential angst defines me. It is my restlessness, which brings forth my pondering, my thinking, my analysing, my understanding, my wisdom, my pride, my foolishness, my mistakes, my pain, my memories, my regrets, my desires, my dreams, my hopes, my annoyances…Me.

Existential angst or the pain of being makes one ponder. We think and therefore we are. And yet, there are those who don’t suffer existential angst. Those who exist, those who are. How??

They must be part of the universe too. We fit, like question and answer.