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, June 16, 2020
 
Grief. For some strange reason this word kept circling in my head off and on yesterday. Not an overwhelming sense of grief, overpowering, forceful, disruptive... more like a dull ache, something sad, something poignant, something like when a wisdom tooth is taken out and the painkiller wears off… there’s something missing where the tooth once was and in its place is a lingering pain reminding you of the thing that used to be…sometimes you are too conscious of it and sometimes it’s there somewhere in the background.

I guess in a way the loss that I feel this grief for is as minor as a tooth that won’t grow back but whose use cannot outlast its time or at least I hope not… I am grieving for what could have been this time of the year but isn’t… I am grieving for all the plans I made to achieve what I wanted to achieve and which are now made doubly, even triply hard… I am grieving for the little things and big things that never came to fruition because of the pandemic... I also feel grief just looking around the world today… as if nothing is tranquil, nothing is at peace, nothing is warm, nothing is comfortable, nothing is reassuring… sometimes when we lose hope it helps to look around the world and find some hope in it… but there is no such hope reflected back from the world today… and your personal grief joins with a grief for the world… you can only look upwards…

Recently someone asked this question that what is the one thing on which you have come back full circle… as in you started off thinking one thing, then thought something else, and then came back to what you thought at first. For some reason I thought about God but then realised that I haven’t come back full circle on this topic. I mean I never really started off with a faith in God because going to church or praying in a mechanical your-parents-told-you-so sort of way doesn’t really count for having any kind of faith. And then I never really stopped having faith because I never really had faith in the first place. When I consciously started thinking about God it was with an inquisitive and questioning stance, that is, that I don’t know whether God exists because I don’t really know but I am interested in exploring further. I neither believed nor disbelieved. And now, I am very hesitant to say that I have “faith” because the word suggests a blind fanatical sort of belief which is not at all what I feel though I could use the same word in the sense that I do not have any evidence or logic to back up how I do feel. It’s not a full circle because I have never been at this stage before but it could be called an evolution from where I was… I now trust my intuition a lot more (I need to talk about why I have come to trust my intuition in a separate blog)… now when I ask myself how in the whole wide world am I going to achieve a particular goal… this intuitive voice just tells me to trust that I will… this is not to tell me to not work hard but to do my best and not worry about how things will materialise… the way will appear when I walk on it, as Rumi said…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:50 am 0 comments
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