The Rainbow

A few days ago, as I was walking to work early in the morning, I saw a colorful rainbow across the just un-clouding sky. It has been raining all night and the whole week had  grey, cloudy mornings. However, that morning was different.  The sun was finally showing from between the vapourizing clouds. And across the sky, a beautiful rainbow was painted.

It made me think, rainbows are delightful and a symbol of hope and to me, it reminded me of my faith. It is not always there, but I have to remember that it is there. I try to keep remembering that one day these clouds will vanish and for a brief instant I will see what really matters, the only real meaning of things. Those moments are rare to capture, just like a rainbow but I need to remember that it is there.

At some moments, I lose my faith in love, in humanity and most sorrowfully in God. Life can get so dark that I don't see the end of the tunnel. The darkest part of night is just before dawn but sometimes I fail to wait anymore. I feel so tired and forget that there are rainbows. I forget about what's important. All I remember is the frustration, the impatience I feel.  

That rainbow made my day, made me remember what was important.


This is what jWoman had to say for today.

P.S. There is a novel by D.H. Lawrence called The Rainbow. I think I will reread it when I finish my current book.

On pain and life

Pain is a very personal experience. I think, it is one of the hardest experience to really share. It's not just physiological pain, but there is also and most importantly, psycological pain. Pain that can't be visualized to the outside world is an even more difficult experience to share.

Pain distorts our characteristics, it dominates our actions and reactions. The more we deny it's presence, the more it dominates us.

Pain, in some of us, is a drive to cause others to suffer from pain. We are so hurting inside and can't express it nor can we really acknowledge it's presence. Thus, we feel compelled to make others suffer. "Why do I suffer alone?" is the dark thought buried so deep inside our subconscious. We never confess we are nursing such a thought, but we do secretly, against our own will.

We all have multiple faces that we show to the world. I believe they are all partially true. A face we show to strangers, a face for acquaintances or colleagues, a face for friends, a face for family and a face for real close loved ones. Some of us may have more or less of these faces. They project what we want to show to the different categories of people. Pain and hurt distorts these faces, distorts our peace of mind and our judgement. We draw a smile and wear the mask that we want people to see but pain drives us to act in an opposing manner. Some people just need to see others hurt, just because they are hurt.


This is what jWoman wants to say, an old note that was left a draft for so long.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

I still discover myself with every passing day. I thought I have known everything but still I have more to discover. It's a fascinating journey into the human depth, especially if it's your own depth you are discovering. Pain is an accompanying factor to discovery. But pain is not always suffering, there is some kinds of pain that do not hurt but change. Pain teach you how to be stronger, if you are alert enough to observe and perceive that.

In this journey, I had to go far and do all the things I feared most and in the end, I discovered, "It isn't as scary as I thought". I was always afraid of living alone, especially since this implied that I will die alone. Now, I don't care. I am not afraid of living alone, I faced it and came into terms with my loneliness. Sometimes, I can even make it a chosen state of aloneness not loneliness.

As for the dying alone thing, this is the part I don't care for. For a start, worrying about that won't make a difference. Second, even if it did happen, it is not bad since I will die anyway. Third, I have made my adjustments to loneliness. It is not scary anymore. I faced it, looked it in the face and found I am ok with it.

I do feel lonely and sad at times but I perceive that and don't let it control myself but just get over it. The main part there is that it is not scary. I have successfully omitted fear from the equation.

I used to think that people are one of two types. People who conform to rules and traditions all the time and people who just broke all of them all the time. People who lived life just like traditions says and people who never does. I have known people and always tried to categorize them into one of the 2 categories. But  as I walked to work the other day, I was thinking of where do I fit, and fit in neither. I am a conformist in many things, I have lived big parts of my life just according to traditions, rules and religion but I did had my rebellion spots, and they were real non-conformists.

As I walk everyday to work, mostly I would follow the paved road but occasionally and purposefully, I would just walk through the rough ground taking shortcuts. I did each purposefully but not with an intent to conform or rebel.

I do like to play according the rules most of the time, but at whims I like to break them and when circumstances ask for, I do what I need to do, like when I am late for a meeting.

A person, I used to know, had this funny idea that you have to be an extremist, that in-between is lame. That you can't have partial characteristics but I always loved fuzzy logic where you are a member of multiple groups. Your membership to each group is what characterises you and your decisions. And the value of this membership change with time and experience. Everything change as you grow older.

And I am a fuzzy person, I think a lot, act differently than the stereotype placed for my likes mostly, but do conform too.

That's a real different blog.

That's what jWoman have to say for today.

My life chapters

Chapter 1 Childhood between home and alienation

Living inside my mind, was the main characteristic of my childhood. I had stories going on inside my head. I made up the drama missing in my life, the adventure and soon the romance, too. Sometimes, I made up stories to cover the drama happening in my young life. I dreamt and dreamt my days away. 

When I got introduced to books at around 11 or 12 years of age, I found my salvation, my solitude. My first real book was David Copperfield and I drowned in his sadness and pain to forget my disappointments.


Chapter 2  First love illusion leading to marriage
Love in eastern societies is a big issue, we think about all the time, talk about privately but never discuss publicly. When discussed publicly, it is always awkward. Searching for love is an etyernal journey in everyone's life. We all look for someone with whom we feel comfortable, we feel like ourselves.

Chapter 3  A revolution 

25 January 2011, the start of a revolution in my homeland. The start of a journey of exploration and enlightenment. No, I think that preparation for this journey started really earlier in 2010.

Chapter 4  Rebels go far
August 2013 marked the start of this chapter. It was the change that I most needed. The change that made me see things from a new perspective. I got the chance to look from outside, from far away. It was time to explore new grounds, to grow up by leaving home. I know I have left my parents home a long while ago but still I was living within my comfort zone. I was still living among my familiar environment. I had to start getting away, and being partially independent. This step would lead to a further movement and a more independent approach in the very near future. I could have never imagined, not in my wildest dreams that this decision will be the start of a whole new life.
  

Chapter 5 The new land

Welcome to the new land!!!

21 February 2016 , I set my feet on this new land and there I started a new chapter of life. I am hopeful because starting over and getting second chances is an opportunity not all people get. Here, I' m granted this chance to start over and be what I want to be. So I'm really grateful. 
It's a choice I made sometime ago. I choose aloneness. Aloness is getting sever with every step I take.

Farewells

I have said my farewell to the city of love. And at that instance I wrote the end of a chapter of my life, signalling the end of an era. Now, I m in transit waiting the start of what is to come.

The nice quiet city where I have discovered myself and a definition of love that suits me. I had the time and space there to contemplate and learn. In this city, there was no reason to rush and so much time to engage with yourself. I have loved the silence there. And I have rediscovered friendship and pure love. 

As I contemplate the last three years, it looks amazing and really fulfilling. I have gone through depths of life inside of me I never trodden into before. I feel amazed at the discoveries I made. 

The strength I discovered in me is amazing. I have learned to appreciate my aloneness. I m no more afraid of being on my own. Before, afraid of being alone was the main reason for my staying where I was. I made sacrifices that was unnecessary just because I was sure that I can't live and be on my own. I was attaching my existence and security to people, places and things. This is a big mistake which wasted 7 years of my life.

Now, I see life and myself so much better and I m ready to take things one more step further. I have hope and confidence. 

Life is full of surprises and experiences with good and bad included. And I have learnt not to regret. I have learnt to grow stronger from the bad and enjoy the good and in both keep smiling because everything will pass.

This is what jWoman had to say two weeks ago.

My Readings: The Conquest of Happiness By Bertrand Russell

A simple, easy to read book it was, with a profound journey through the depth of our life. The modern man faces a lot of disappointment and struggles with himself first then with the outside world which makes him continuously. This book helps you look around and spot what you were doing wrong everyday. It makes you re-evaluate your actions and see the true reasons why you do what you do.

To me this final section of the last chapter "The Happy Man" sums a lot up.

"All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is disintegration within the self through lack of co-ordination between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society, where the two are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does

not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found."

There are so many parts I wanna share, I dunno where to start but something I liked so much and it reminded me of my blog on Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf

"If you see a child drowning and save it as the result of a direct impulse to bring help, you will emerge none the worse morally. If, on the other hand, you say to yourself, "It is the part of virtue to succour the helpless, and I wish to be a virtuous man, therefore I must save this child", you will be an even worse man afterwards than you were before."

This paragraph reminds of what I hated most about Mrs. Dalloway as I called her the good atheist. Doing actions just to be called God, while deep inside I don't care whether the boy drowned or the whole of the humanity.

Russell discussed Selfishness too. 

"The traditional moralist, for example, will say that love should be unselfish. In a certain sense he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point, but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one's own happiness is bound up in its success. If a man were to invite a lady to marry him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities of self-abnegation, I think it may be doubted whether she would be altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. "

He discussed too the virtue of boredom and the importance to let children have time and space doing nothing to cultivate skills and talents and interest in the world around them. He doesn't recommend filling up all the time of a child with activities or devices as we do nowadays. It's good for everyone to deal with something of a boredom in life. To have the time to look around and have interest in various subjects is an advice he gives to get away from self-centric problems and be happy.

"We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom"

"A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony."

"For all these reasons a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase."

One of the parts that really intrigued me , as I always had questions related to it, is the parent-child relationship and where do sacrifice fit in such a relation.

His argument agreed with my instincts that giving birth to a child does not put on him a burden to satisfy you or make you happy. Any sacrifice you make for him/her is your choice and no burden on him. He discussed how this can be a source of happiness to both and where balance is needed.

There is much more to the book. I hope everyone reads it.

This is what jWoman has to say for today. 

The dark space

I know I am growing old. And for sometime now, I have been aware that I am coming to the age, where it is normal to lose those people that you once thought will be there forever. As I grow old, they grow older and I have to be prepared.

Can anyone be prepared to lose a parent, an aunt or an uncle or a close older relative who have always been there in your life?

Whatever are the distances, they are there. You had it as a fact of life, that you have them. Days and month and maybe years pass without saying a word but you know they are there. And suddenly, the dark space inside becomes bigger as it engulfs another one of the family. And you are waiting for, who is next.

One day, you will wait no more, because you will be next.

Today I lost one. I lost my uncle Benjamin. And it scares me again. He is not there anymore. I am becoming more alone in this world. Even if, I didn't see him everyday, I knew he was there.

Can I prepare myself for such loss? No, I can't. Isolating myself from family, won't make it more bearable. Memories of them are engraved in my brain and can't be erased. It won't make the pain any less.

What scares me more is thinking that I am waiting for the next.
I wish I have shown him more love and care. I wish I said, I love you, uncle or I miss you.

No more memories to create with you, just memories to remember and a dark space inside of me.

Pray for us, my dear uncle.

That's what jWoman has to say today.