To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
 
Back from my weekend trip to London!
 
It might sound odd to London fanatics but I noticed something different about my feelings with regard to London this time. I don’t think it’s just this time… every time I have been there I have almost started to have this feeling but guess I didn’t really think about it too much at those times or probably couldn’t quite put my finger on it… this time I was a bit shocked at the realisation… that I actually feel more comfortable and at one with myself in Lancaster rather than in London… at one level it’s not quite surprising because I am a creature of habit and tend to develop a love for the familiar… so Lancaster might be dearer to me purely for that reason which means that if I lived in London long enough I’ll probably grow used to it and love it as much as Lancaster… but on another level I am not quite sure it’s just a personal matter of habit and familiarity… I think it’s also something to do with the cities/towns themselves… London makes me feel insignificant or less of a person somehow …a bit lost in the sea of nameless faceless people… the rush and push of the tubes also makes me feel like a bystander watching the circus of life (not unlike in Mumbai)… the general character of people one comes across from the very prim and posh who seem to exist in an entirely different London to the very shabby and awkward making you wonder about the vagaries and disparities of life in general… also something of a niggling sense of anxiety as if one is missing out on something that the general crowd seems to be onto and one must make haste to get there, get somewhere… overall, I start craving for peace, calm, solitude, quiet, wholesomeness… I guess I crave for Lancaster….with its massive greens as far as the eye could see, simple people dotted here and there but none too many, quiet pace, intellectual stimulation if one needed them at the uni, a general sense of solitude and contemplation… a place where one could wander in the world of nature and in the world of the mind but more as a means to find oneself rather than lose oneself, if you know what I mean… a feeling of contentment that is difficult to extract from artificial surroundings no matter how dynamic and exciting…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:07 pm 0 comments
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
 

A Smile
 
If a smile could speak
Mine would volumes
But no matter… as it meets its mark as surely and precisely
More in fact than a heavy tome
Devoted to the purpose
Saying what words cannot say
As eloquently as what they could
Reaching the heart sharply and swiftly
With no shy or awkward detours
In this much better suited to the task
That language and verbiage make arduous


~Me

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:11 pm 0 comments
Monday, June 10, 2019
 

My family will be here to visit me this week! I am excited, thrilled, overjoyed… basically I don’t know what to do with myself for now! :) It is also my niece’s birthday this week and the idea is to celebrate it together in London… as if I needed an icing on this already scrumptious cake… but there it is! :)
I don’t know if my blog posts will become more frequent or less… remains to be seen… I am not much of a ‘travel’ writer… it just doesn’t seem to come naturally to me… and I’m going to have fewer abstract thoughts now when the concrete ones are so delightful, that’s for sure ;)
I chanced upon a quote today that captures my feelings very well on some unexpected but positive developments that occurred in the last 2-3 weeks:
“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred…. Unforeseen incidents, meetings, and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.” ~ Goethe
I was grappling with a certain situation over the last two or more years that was severely hindering me and was also making me wonder if I had chosen the right path after all. I was trying my best to remain positive through it all and persevere at my goals without letting the shadow of this situation affect me too much (which was difficult to say the least because I couldn’t see myself moving out of this shadow). I had almost lost hope of things getting better when lo and behold! almost magically or out of the blue the situation got fixed for me in a way that I could never have engineered myself and it occurring all on its own seems like a gift from providence…almost like a reward for my determination to plod on in spite of the thorns thrown in my path.
There have been many times in my life when I have felt like providence was watching over me… observing if I really wanted something badly enough to work very hard for it… throwing challenges my way to see how I rose up to them… and only when it seemed like I had proved myself enough… it would swoop in and bless me in a way that I did not have to prove myself any more… it was smooth sailing then on… I have to admit that having intuited these patterns before I harboured a hope that something unexpectedly good would happen when I least expected it… because I had been working hard enough…I had been put through many trials by fire… but it was so long in the coming that I almost lost hope…I lost faith that providence really does come to one’s aid in the end… and now when it did… I was surprised but not surprised, if you know what I mean? Hmm… well, let’s hope the smooth sailing bit also holds ;) Shall keep you, my dear readers, posted of course!

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 6:50 am 0 comments
Thursday, June 06, 2019
 

I was interacting with this person in some temporary work context for the third time in about two weeks. At some point during the interaction I realised that he did not remember me from the previous interactions because he was explaining certain things like he hadn’t explained them before. Now, I myself have this problem of forgetting faces and names. It’s one thing to forget a name but quite another to forget a face. Knowing this tendency, I generally smile in return when people smile at me knowingly, being quite sure I must have had some interaction with them at some point. Many a times I have a vague sense that I know them from earlier but can’t quite remember in what context… this sense guides me to act in a slightly more personal way till something goes click in my head and I remember. Even in the light of my own failings, I found this particular person’s complete lack of recollection quite extreme.
Funnily, I was somehow reminded of the movie ‘50 First Dates’. I watched it so many moons ago that I don’t remember anything other than the general contour of the movie and even that might not be exactly right. The essence of the movie from what I vaguely remember is that the heroine has Alzheimer’s (or something similar) where she can’t remember one day to the next and the guy who is her husband or fiancé takes her out on a date every day as if it’s a new date because in her mind at least there is no memory of a previous one. I guess this movie was brought home to me when I sensed something surreal and uncomfortable in my interaction with this person who I thought I ‘knew’ in some way but who interacted with me like I was a completely new person; I couldn’t help thinking about how significant “shared memory” is in building a relationship, any relationship.
It seems to me that every moment that is spent with a person be it in silence or in communication sort of adds up in some way to a shared history that is the accumulating backdrop against which all successive encounters or interactions occur. Whatever is said or understood in a future interaction is against this backdrop which gives the future interactions their own specific meanings and those meanings in their turn keep building onto the backdrop. Imagine meeting a person with whom you share history but there is no common backdrop at all because of loss of memory and you have to carry out the emotional labour of creating the history or backdrop all over again! But there would be no point in a way of doing it because the backdrop must be supported by the shared memory, however imperfect, of both parties. You might as well simply approach the encounter as a temporary or transient one building every communication message with independent (as opposed to contextual) meaning like strangers meeting on a train with whom you have some passing pleasantries or animated discussions that you might remember or forget as a personal memory rather than a shared one (if you meet this stranger again and remember the personal memory it might make way for a shared memory I guess).
Makes me wonder why people seek the excitement of new relationships in place of old comfortable ones with strong shared memories and enduring backdrops? Nothing to say that you can’t develop strong shared memories or enduring backdrops with new people but isn’t it too arduous an emotional task? Also, I would imagine the more the number of people you have to support this shared memory with the more superficial the shared memories must be? I guess many people might actually find the exercise of creating new backdrops however flimsy exhilarating and exciting as opposed to the rather mundane task of supporting or in some cases revitalising an existing edifice. To me the mundane task appears more emotionally fulfilling though…but that should be no surprise to my readers :)

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:29 am 2 comments
Sunday, June 02, 2019
 

I was reflecting to myself, because I seem to be writing in verse form far often these days than for some years past, what it is that makes me capture some thoughts in verse and certain others in prose. The conclusion that I came to is that when it comes to a “feeling” or “feelings” in general, I seem to be able to express them more freely in verse (express to my satisfaction, I mean). I am unable to capture emotions or feelings in prose because their beauty is their vagueness, their ephemeral nature, their non-specificity, and by putting them in prose I might almost kill the very thing I want to give life to. Verse allows me to capture them in a sense as they are... fluid and intangible even to myself. I find the exercise though quite difficult and excruciating because my natural tendency is to clarify, to examine, to analyse, to get to the heart of things, to lay the idea threadbare by unravelling it bit by bit… but I find that not every subject lends itself to this treatment… some thoughts or rather feelings have to be given their own rein and allowed to lead us how they will… that can be as much a process of discovery as when we lead an idea by the horns…probably speaks to the fact that one can be master of one’s head but the heart heeds its own bidding!

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 2:53 am 1 comments
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