That-sticky-post-alerting-thingy
His Story Telling has been revamped. Go, have a look!
Walk.
Walk away or walk towards, but walk. Walk to get somewhere; walk to get away from someplace. Gracefully or awkwardly, but walk. Walk with you two feet or with your mind. Maybe you will drink, maybe you won’t, but Keep Walking.
Go for a morning walk or for an evening walk; walk. Walk for health or walk for hope, but keep walking. Walk over mountains or across seas, but walk. Don’t stay in the same place, walk. Even if you want to be in the same place, walk.
Walk fast or walk slow. Long walks or short walks; walk.
I said something nice yesterday. I liked what I said.
Don’t try to attain perfection, strive for it.
The good thing about wandering is that you never know what you pick up on the way. Especially when you wander without agenda.
On one such wandering I picked up a prayer.
Our default prayers are those that our parents taught us, to acquire all the goodness in this world. It took most of us quite a while to edit that prayer and add our own specifics, clauses and caveats to it. Some of us let go of the prayer altogether.
One word, it’s meaning, has eluded me for a while: intention.
I have used it many times in life; I now feel, I used it loosely. This possibly stems from the lack of proof, in some way. When you intend (for, or to do) something, that is all you do. It is, as it appears to me, an orphan word. Though it is born of a desire or a wish and it dies with the action that makes the intention a reality, it truly belongs nowhere, and to no one when it exists.
Like raw, unharnessed power, perhaps?
This one prayer, I picked up recently caused a mental feud of what an intention is, really and at the same time asking me, if I have ever really wondered what a prayer really is – and what I do when I pray. Enough has been proven about the science of the power of suggestion, and perhaps all prayers are just that. Some prayers, like the one I discovered are elaborate and elegant; some are crude while being beautiful. And whatever their form and quality maybe, they serve the same purpose: statement of an intention.
However, whatever the nature of their composition and presentation, a prayer cannot be a transaction. A transaction has a shelf-life, which ends when the transaction is complete. And a single prayer cannot be reused for another transaction, because then the specifics would change.
So, is a prayer just a statement of intention of a continuous purpose? Compare, “I need to touch an average of 500 page views on my blog in the next three months”, with, “Let there be a continuous abundance of readers on my blog.” This is obviously a bad example, for it sounds frivolous. But, I suppose it serves the purpose of explaining one defining characteristic of a prayer.
But then who is to fulfil the prayer, be it the one about the page views or of the abundance of visitors. Because the prayer is only a message, and without an addressor or an addressee the message is an unmarked envelope gathering dust somewhere.
But there is no addressee.
There isn’t “someone out there” who actually takes up the job of fulfilling your prayers. And it makes sense that no one entity is taking that responsibility, else it would be a conflict management issue — attempting to fulfill prayers from around the world. Our prayers are addressed to ourselves — only a reinforcement of intention then, of dedicating to the action that fulfills the intention.
There was a title and a thought that came to mind when I thought about this post. The title eludes me now; it may come somewhere, as I write this post. I hope.
The first thing I remember, I was lying in my bed
I couldn’t've been no more than one or two
And I remember there was a radio, coming from the room next door
My mother laughed the way some ladies’ do
Well it’s late in the evening, and the music’s seeping through.
It had to do something with posturing: the title. It was a nice word, that now escapes through the fine recesses of the mind.
But it had to do with a wonderful evening I had yesterday night, so let’s talk about that. The evening wasn’t a grand event. It wasn’t planned days in advance and there were no preparations around this evening. It was planned for the three of us and two showed up. Then we called up three others who were potentially perfect companions for the evening, but for various valid reasons, they didnt come, either.
The next thing I remember, I am walking down a street
I’m feeling alright I’m with my boys and with my troops, yeah
Down along the avenue some guys were shootin’ pool
And I heard the sound of acapella groups, yeah
Singin’ late in the evening, and all the girls out on the stoops, yeah.
It was left to the two of us to what we could make of the late evening. With withered thoughts of not having the people we would have liked to have around us, we began a slow start. There was the usual drudgery of daily dole that we could gossip about; we have learnt the heard way, that it quite doesn’t serve any purpose. After dispensing with formal gossip, we were ourselves again.
Friends.
What has become of us, we both wondered, if you allow me the guessing of his mind as I remember mine? One problem that friends face is the lack of topics. When you know everything, what’s the need to talk about anything?
Then I learned to play some lead guitar, I was underage in this funky bar
And I stepped outside to smoke myself a J
When I come back to the room, everybody just seemed to move
And I turned my amp up loud and I began to play
It was late in the evening, and I blew that room away.
We talked of how we have been interacting in the virtual worlds. What would be a good way to interact? What would be a better way to interact? What was the next gadget that would make us believe that our life was worthwhile? One thing led to another and gadgets gave way to the goodness of our lives. It took us a while. Perhaps it was the warm-up.
First thing I remember when you came into my life
I said I wanna get that girl, no matter what I do
Well I guess I’ve been in love before and once or twice have been on the floor
But I’ve never loved no-one the way that I love you
…and I love you
It took us six hours and a whole load of chit-chat to say just that — I love you, without ever uttering those words. Between friends, only three words matter; only three make sense. All the other million words that we use to converse, are pure foreplay or a tease. And a foreplay without the need for the final act. Twitter and Facebook. Email and SMS. Chat and phone-calls. When you reduce them all, all you want to say is — I love you. The Foreplay is the Act.
Richard Bach was perhaps right in saying that after God, Love is the most mangled word in the English language. I say — perhaps — only because, we haven’t stopped saying the word. Our choice of words has changed. The number of words that we use has increased. We now believe that a straight expression of emotion is uncouth; untoward. It has to be tempered. In our heads, love has narrowed in meaning.
The original title I had in mind still eludes me. So I shall title this post the title of the song that Paul Simon sung for me: Late in the Evening. For various reason, which, my dear reader, you are now aware of.
And it was late in the evening, and all the music’s seeping through.
PS: Right-aligned content in italics is a song by Paul Simon. Copyright and such belong to whoever has claimed it and owns it.
The day of the ceremonial post is past. Or, so I think. I had once written about the fancy of well rounded numbers like one, three, five and ten. Unlike four and six. Earlier I had called it the classic rounding-off trap.
There isn’t much to celebrate this year. I have written only fifty-six posts this year, which is quite pathetic by my earlier standards. When you consider all the thoughts I thought were blogworthy, it is really pathetic. Like when I magically reached the five-hundredth post on the day I completed five years of this blog, the average was a hundred posts a year. I have obviously not been maintaining standards.
I could blame it on Twitter, but, Mahendra, wrote recently wrote about “Blogging Highlights of 2009, Challenges & Thoughts for 2010”, in which he puts me in a list of folks who are “fairly regular at blogging as well as online social networking in one form or another.” Notwithstanding what I think, I trust his opinion.
Twitter apart, I have been all over the place doing this mega-yatra of everything Web 2.0. I think that took a lot of time away from me this year. If it was launched, I signed up. Towards the end of the year, the carpenter in me said, “Great, you have all the possible tools a carpenter can have. Where’s the wood?”
If the last month is any indicator, I have not been doing well at any of the social places. But then I was away for a while and my mind has been away for a while longer. Blogging remains the only one thing which makes continues to make sense.
2009 has been a very good year for me. I went through significant turmoil on pretty much everything in my life – in a good way. I found time for myself after a very long time and am quite excited and happy about that.
In summary, not much to celebrate here for the sixth year as such, so head out and do your thing for the long weekend. Ours is 4-day long!
You’ll be seeing me.
He held one end of the long thread in his left hand, between his thumb and his index finger. Tightly. As if his life hung by it.
I have been away for a while. And I have been away in a way that I haven’t been away before. On my return, folks have been impressed, surprised and even suspicious about my being away for twenty days. Mostly, because I did not do what we do before we go away for a while. Social norms are such.
I did not make a big announcement of my absence of my being away. I did not tell anyone where I was going. I did not say why. I did not say how. I left my laptop behind. I left my phones behind. I even left my camera behind. I went alone. I didn’t drive. Apart from single-cell powered wrist-watch, I did not take anything electronic with me. Or anything that could transmit or receive. Except my mind. And I used it mostly as a receiving device.
He knew the thread was red, before he slowly closed his eyes. With the index and the thumb of his right hand, he held the thread, leaving just about an inch of the red thread between what he held in his left and right hands. The left hand still tightly holding one end, he started moving his right hand away, along the thread.
It is not that I was sorely missed during these twenty days. I mean, I know I have been missed by some, but nothing in this world came to an earth-shattering stop while I was away. In my world, their world, or the world. But curiosity was apparently increasing with amoebic complexity. Information and knowledge is so over-rated, we think we might actually devolve into Neanderthals, if we didn’t know. Like the commonly used, Oh-if-you-were-on-Facebook/Twitter/RSS-you-would-know statements that we often make.
When I came back, one question prevailed. Where did you go?
I answered: various places. The most disappointing answer I ever gave, I felt, looking at their expressions.
As he ran his pinch along the thread, he felt the texture of the weave of the thread. After a while, the texture and the pull made tunnelled grooves between his fingers, the friction giving way and the thread passing through without resistance.
Most of them were not happy with my answer. The destination — a geographical lock of a latitude and longitude that has been named something, is what we are all used to knowing. That creates a map, an image and a story; instantly in our heads. Maldives, for example. Or Las Vegas. Goa? Varanasi. Phuket, even. These are pre-packaged impressions of the nature and characteristics of “where”. It is often this clarity that we seek when we talk of travel. The destination has to be a tangible surface in this world. All travel experiences thereafter, use this destination as a point of reference.
The feeling of the thread passing through his fingers was an experience that he sought. He didn’t seek the other end of the thread. Though he knew he would eventually reach the end of the thread, that was only an indicator of the end of the experience. Nothing more.
Good morning, dear readers, but this post is not for you.
Blogging has been an amazing journey for me. It will continue to be. After a few flings with everything social as social can be, I returned to blogging. In my heart, i.e., as you may have noticed, not so much in fact – given the frequency of my posts.
As you read this post – I am elsewhere. Far from the madding crowd, as one would say. Really far. Where I am, what I am doing, how I am however, is something that I cannot tell you. The keyword is cannot, not won’t.
In these few years of blogging, I have met you (if you are still reading this post after the opening statement) a million times because I have thought of you in every post. Yes, there is that paradigm that every writer is supposed to follow — about writing for one’s own self.
But, indulge me.
What is a writer without a reader?
I have chosen conversation over everything else: with you. And in that selfish conversation I have discovered myself. Over and over again. Because of you.
But this post – this one post – is not for you. This one post is for me. Today, the world that we live in is a fascinating one. It allows a person to be in two places at the same time. Even as you read this post (which, as you would recall, is for me) I am somewhere else — living in a different world.
I write this post, for myself.
Because it fulfils my long dream of being at two places at the same time. Whenever I had imagined it, I always considered it impossible because I imagined physical representation of my self in two places — aware of my existence in both the locations.
Today, I am aware and oblivious, at the same time, that I can be aware and oblivious at the same place. It seems I have struggled for very wrong things in my life.
I am a sucker for miracles — not because I believe in magic, but because I believe in people. Only people cause magic and miracles. Oftentimes, I have seen no miracles. I could easily say that people have let me down. But, I resist. It is not that people have ceased to cause miracles; it is that I have ceased to see right.
I am, finally, the Wandering Monk. What a moment of glee!
It will be a while, till my meandering brings me back to where I was.
The greater gift to humankind is the ability to remember. But, the greatest gift to humankind is the ability forget.
We live our life surrounded by memories. Good ones, bad ones, and some really ugly ones.
There is something about the melancholy nature in us that often denies us the forgetting of bad memories. We somehow become slave to them. They keep popping up at the most inopportune times, moving us from a state of low-spirits to dejection.
At that precise moment however, the good memories that will alleviate the feeling of despair, never seem to surface. They remain submerged, blurred, like under the uniform blue of a deep ocean.
Maybe it is a lesson for us in life, we have to be able to string together the good ones, on a very short string too, and keep them on the top of the stack. Keep them accesible. Because the more bad and ugly things that you remember about someone or something or someplace, the more concrete your perception about it. In recent time I have found it amusing, how we use the negative memories as evidence in our arguments that are against. They are almost like facts. Memories aren’t algebraic in that, a good memory does not cancel a bad one. Even if you assume that you have equal number of good and bad memories, the bad ones seem to float better.
Pain, caused by a bad memory, possibly leaves a deeper and pronounced scar that is difficult to ignore. Perhaps it is about letting go, perhaps it is about forgiving. I do not know. But I know this: it is definitely about forgetting – the bad ones.
The greater gift to humankind is the ability to remember. But, the greatest gift to humankind is the ability forget.
We need to remember to forget, to live a better life.
The idea was to crunch every month in a claustrophobic post. Last time I did it, it was in May. And I have done only one before the one in May this year.
There’s a problem.
If you try hard, use a magnifying glass to see the divider between two months, you may not find any.
And in any case, if that’s the idea, these posts should be called Remains of the Month. But, I have often being accused of being a rebel against structure. I have never known how to react to that accusation; for often I have been accused of being a slave to structure.
It amuses me to no end.
A nagging thought has been clawing the inside walls of my head, but scratchy-scribbles on the inside of your skull don’t make for good posts.
An ancient conversation has been slashing and struggling its way up from a grave covered by dry and rotting leaves of time. It is vying to be alive again. The concluding question of that conversation was: if (theoretically speaking) you attain perfection, will anything ever inspire you?
Years have passed, since.
Perfection, however, or even trying to get an inch closer to it, is démodé. Mediocrity has been a silent virus that has become an epidemic of sorts. And like the liquid glass that wraps Neo in The Matrix, mediocrity covers you completely, leaving no scope to wash it away, to deny it; unless you are inspired.
Then, I find this Blog Challenge by Lorelle: Where Do You Consistently Find Inspiration? As I was reading the challenge, almost instantly, WordPress and the Automattic Team came to mind. They inspire. I shall elaborate in the remainder of the post.
Which does bring us to a rather difficult question that have been hurling at a few folks last few days: What is the opposite of inspiration?
It has stumped quite a few, though I was especially impressed by this comment on this post. While it seems to be right on target, I am still looking for the word that does the exact opposite of inspiring. Perhaps, a definition of what I mean by inspiration will help.
For me, an external trigger that causes you to change your own standard to improve or create something new, is inspiring. This is just the base of what it means, however. There are further characteristics that define an inspiration:
- That which inspires has to awaken a “romantic” quality within, to improve your own standards, in your own mind and soul. To copy the one who has revised the standard is not to be inspired: that’s following. Having been with WordPress for a few years now, I have seen this service from its basic form to what it is today. So what is about this team that inspires? Is it the platform that they have created? Yes, but not quite. The platform is super, but not rocket science, and if you ask me, does not have high entry barriers. Looking at WordPress does not make me feel like creating a blogging platform like WordPress. What inspires is how the team thinks and nurtures the platform and the people who use their platform. I follow nearly every Automattician blog, and it gives a great insight about how these people care for things and how creative they are.
- That which inspires has to have a long-term vision, big or small. And importantly, stay true to the vision. If you have been with WordPress for a while, you will have noticed the changes they have made to the platform. They don’t really need to. A year ago, WordPress was quite amazing. Their diligence and commitment to what they have built is beyond the ordinary. If you see their about page, their vision is simplest yet grandest of them all:
“…a handful of people passionate about making the web a better place.”
And in making the web a better place, you have to experience their support. Seldom required, but when you get support from these folks, it changes your expectations about how support should be handled.
- That which inspires has a dynamic standard And it seems almost ingrained in the ethic of WordPress folks as the very basis of what defines them. One good reason of not setting a target is to ensure that there is never any complacency in what you do. The question always is: why stop here? Why stop anywhere?
And while it may come across as irritating to a few worshippers of mediocrity, there has to be some amount of enforcement of your standards.
There you have it. That’s how much I am able to define what inspiration is. But it’s annoying that I haven’t yet found an antonym for inspiration, as I see it. And that word is important, because it needs an identity; because we need to be able to identify it when we encounter it.
And while I have yet to find that word, I know what causes it (opposite of inspiration).
Complacency, casualness, and carelessness.
