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
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
 
What I would not give

What I would not give to see you
And yet it’s probably best
Not to
Too many days have passed
Schooling my mind and my heart
Mastering my will
Teaching my eyes
To not show tell-tale signs
Of what I would not give to tell you
And yet it’s probably best
Not to
The chasm is too wide
For either to cross
Why take tortuous steps
Forward then backward
Rather dream dreams
Of what it would be like
In another world
Where I might have had you
What I would not give to have you
And yet it’s probably best
Not to
For what is not to be seems sweet
But maybe it’s better as it were
to just revel in thoughts of what could be
But never is…
And yet
What I would not give
To make them true.
 
~Me

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 1:49 am 0 comments
Thursday, July 11, 2019
 

(Not) Making hay…while the sun shines!

Readers who have been frequenting this blog for some time now must surely know about my rather complicated relationship with all things medical, be it doctors, hospitals, ailments, injuries, blood, or anything remotely connected with the wide area. Whenever I write on a remotely health-related topic, my tone is more often than not jocular probably as some sort of mechanism to disguise the very serious almost morbid view I take on the subject in general no matter how trivial to the not-so-prejudiced mind.
Well, coming to the heart of this post, I prided myself on not falling ill since coming to the UK which is more than 2.5 years now. Truth be told, I wasn’t so much pleased about the not falling ill as about the not having to visit a doctor or not having to acquaint myself with anything connected to the medical profession. In Mumbai, it’s not that I had any major issues but the minor ones like colds and allergies happened so often that one was almost in and out of a clinic for want of a remedy to rid oneself of one thing or the other. One almost lacked the patience to ride the thing out whatever one was suffering from, even after hearing from self-proclaimed experts that colds were supposed to get better on their own, because after all the patience with one thing the next thing would be at its tail. So one kind of got used to getting medicines and what not just to be in running condition. It was quite a pleasant surprise for me to find myself not attracting any of those minor ailments here and even if I did they would disappear as soon as they presented themselves; I am pretty convinced that as everyone said it was the pollution that really got to one in Mumbai.
Now, imagine after having had this really great run for this long a time, enjoying my ice-creams in the winter and the summer with perfect nonchalance, and mentioning to all and sundry with insufferable arrogance am sure that I was never falling ill here… that I should suddenly find myself sneezing like my nose would burst one fine morning a few weeks ago… and finding that the sneezes only kept getting worse. At first I thought it was a cold but something told me it wasn’t like any of my regular colds. The sneezing would occur in long bouts and my eyes would water badly; taking some cold-related medicines (which I kept because you never know) didn’t seem to help much. For some weird reason it struck me that what I might be down with could be Hay Fever! I had heard mention of people suffering from hay fever in the summers but I did not know what the symptoms were nor had I suffered from anything unusual the past two summers. I did what anyone sensible would do in a similar situation… googled all about it. And as you might have guessed, I really couldn’t have been in any doubt that what I was down with was indeed hay fever. From the runny nose to the watery eyes to the general sense of having a cold…I seemed to have it all. The worst part was unlike a cold which went away in a bit…the hay fever could be around as long as the sun shone or till the end of summer…I was a bit paranoid to read that some people never seemed to shake it off at all…which is what am hoping isn’t the case with me… well, now you know why the medical side and I don’t mix...
The funny thing is that I am now a bit more respectful of our healthcare system in India. I decided that it might be better to go to the doctor after all—like I would have done in India—rather than sit out the hay fever with medicines and advice from the pharmacist but it seemed that hay fever wasn’t something you got an appointment with the doctor for; I would simply have to stick with the pharmacist and the medicines. It seemed to me that in India I wouldn’t have had a problem getting an appointment with the doctor even if I wasn’t suffering from anything at all and the doctor would also have given me blue, green, yellow tablets even if I wasn’t really suffering from anything, because, well, I would need to be given something for what I was paying… and I would likely get better too with the placebo effect of the process if not the product… but here, I have to admit this brought on another minor panic attack for me… till now I was happy that I had never visited a doctor as if doctors were ready at my door to see me if only I made a motion… now it seemed to me that I had more to be concerned rather than happy… what if I was suffering from something really major, something really dramatic, something that was as yet hidden in the hay fever mayhem… and what if I never really managed to even get to a doctor… what if… well, let’s just say there’s another reason I was happy when I wasn’t ill…
If this train of thought wasn’t bad enough for me, an article popped up on my Facebook timeline yesterday as I was scrolling casually… it said that there was a strong link between allergies such as hay fever and conditions such as anxiety and depression… therefore there was a link between those who suffered from allergies such as hay fever and those who committed suicide (yes, my reaction too!)… And there was a connection with why most suicides occurred in certain seasons (the horror, yes!). What shocks me really is that if we are talking depression and suicide in the same breath as we are talking hay fever, how can this be taken so lightly as not to merit a visit to the doctor?! Well, probably means it’s not something so worrying after all… at least that’s my best hope… apart from cloudy skies of course! 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 9:35 pm 0 comments
Sunday, July 07, 2019
 

I remarked in a previous post how I felt more at home in Lancaster than in London and that it might have to do with my familiarity with Lancaster or it could be the quiet and serenity of Lancaster with the opportunity for mental stimulation and contemplation as opposed to the hustle and bustle of London with its distractions and diversions.
I realised something about myself during another trip, this time to Scotland, which was far closer in its aspects to Lancaster. It had nothing to do with the trip itself but more to do with myself… and perhaps to do with this older version of myself (I can’t be certain of that though). I feel that though I think of myself as someone who likes to travel and explore towns and cultures, I probably don’t mean ‘travel’ as most people do. I guess to me the enjoyable part of the travel is not so much in the actual ‘travelling’ but in the settling in enough to find some sort of comfortable rhythm and routine in new surroundings with new things to get used to that gradually slip into my new albeit temporary way of life. Obviously sooner or later one must move from this new place if it is to count as ‘travel’ but that time doesn’t come so soon that one is ‘travelling’ all the time or living out of a suitcase so to speak. In this sense, perhaps I don’t really like what people mean by ‘travelling’ because it is akin to simply observing at a distance whether it is a place or a culture and not getting immersed in it or absorbed by it or transformed through it in any way at all. The ‘travel’ that I find interesting and enjoyable happens at the point where it loses its novelty and becomes an everyday experience that one actually ‘lives’…an everyday experience that has opportunities galore for stimulation and edification… be it the local markets, the language, the forms of address, the accidental conversations, the by-lanes, the shops, the smells… any number of things that are never revealed through the process of merely ‘travelling’ or passing by.
This perhaps explains why the places I have enjoyed ‘travelling’ to the most are the ones that I have spent at least some amount of time in. It’s as if I got to know them well rather than merely made a passing acquaintance and while one can say one might have liked an acquaintance better if only one knew them better, it is difficult to like them more than those you do know well and like well. It also explains something I find difficult to explain many a times, the fact that when I go home for the holidays, whether it is India or now Dubai (if home is where the family is), I prefer to be gone for at least a month. I like to have enough time to wear off the novelty and to settle into a routine. It is only when I have settled into the rhythm of a routine, almost forgotten my former one, do I start enjoying the ‘travel’ or enjoying the feeling of being ‘at home’. If I were to be home for a week, I would only feel like I was ‘travelling’… and as I have come to realise, I do not really enjoy ‘travelling’… I enjoy and find it exciting to be ‘at home’… and it takes a little time to get there when one has just arrived… 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 1:56 am 0 comments
Tuesday, July 02, 2019
 
Scotland
 
Vast mountains, gorgeous greens,
Winding roads, lustrous streams,
Sun at our back, lake beckoning ahead
Driving at our own speed
Charmed by 'Inverness'
 
Nature glorious abounds in these parts
Bounties and treasures cannot invoke its arts
Blessed must I be to revel in these joys
Or maybe something good done in a past life
 
The dark, deep, and cold waters of Loch Ness
May well hide monsters and dragons in its depths
Stuff of legend or nature's many mysteries
Who can tell where belief meets make-believe
 
As we drive onward leaving these mighty highlands behind
Travellers tied by blood and now tied to these shrines
Of memories and moments spent in each other's warm hold
May our journey into the future lead us here again as of old...
 
~Me

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 5:04 pm 0 comments
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