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
Saturday, May 16, 2020
 
Suck it up, buttercup!

That’s what I said to myself today. After a few terribly busy weeks I finally decided to take a break today but as usually happens with me… my empty mind became the devil’s workshop. I started thinking about how my prospects looked pretty bleak with the virus making all this mayhem, then I thought about how everything I had planned for this year was only going to get harder and harder to achieve, then I worried about how I was going to get through the challenges without any support…then I started thinking about why God had to wreak all this havoc now of all times… why is it that just when I feel like I am about to find my footing the ground beneath my feet is shaken…Why, God?!

Well, you get the drift of my thoughts… and before it got wilder, I had to pull myself up short and say to myself… don’t wallow, don’t let anxiety overwhelm you, don’t beat yourself up, don’t think that the world is coming to an end, don’t give up on your dreams, on yourself… accept it as a challenge, accept it as one more steep bend on the mountain, accept it as one more test from God… It is funny that when I find myself in the middle of this sort of thought whirlpool I take the existence of God as a given… God is also a synonym for destiny, for fate…. a belief in destiny or fate is not that different from a belief or faith in God because both suggest that we are not random things… both are beyond human comprehension… both equally belong to the realm of ideas and idealistic thinking…

Now that we are on the subject, I have to admit, if it hasn’t been apparent to my sharp readers, that I am not a thoroughgoing rationalistic person… by that I mean I am not one who thinks that nothing but what I can see, hear, smell etc. exists… I do believe in the possibilities beyond that which my human senses can decipher…and I find myself contemplating about them…  accessing my intuition to hear what it might have to say… but I don’t let these tendencies run away with me in a practical sense…the best analogy I can think of is that even if I allow my head to waft among the clouds I try to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground ;)… not because I wouldn’t love to go live among the clouds but because the needs of practical life in the current world force you to come back to earth…

Looks like I digressed quite a bit from my original topic! …I didn’t have anything much to say in any case except capture this vague uncomfortable feeling I have been having since I went into this downward negative spiral in the morning… I guess the idea of destiny/fate comes up because it gives me some sort of reassurance which I feel like I need right now… when I look back on my life, even though at various points events or things didn’t make sense, in retrospect they do...they come together in a meaningful way even if not in a way I had anticipated or a way I would have expressly wanted…what I like about that though is that if the past or the events in the past have come to make sense in the overall scheme of my life, then the present or the events in the present which seem rather scattered or stupid or unintelligible or unfair right now…might also make sense when I look back on them some day? What sense they would make I don’t know but what I do know deep down is that for it to make sense it is important that I do not lay down my guns or quit… if it has to be a story that presents some meaning to me in the future then at least that much is a given… whether I win or not I must fight on… against the odds… so guess it’s quite correct if I say to myself…suck it up, buttercup… there’s work to be done! ;)

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 2:32 am 0 comments
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