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
Monday, August 03, 2020
 
Do you ever realise that there is only one person in the whole world who loves you unconditionally... who is invested in you in a way no one else is or can be...and whose investment doesn't demand any return? I am referring to mother. I am not in a position to know if one would feel the same way about one's child; that seems the closest relationship that replicates the bond one could have with one's mother. I do think I am invested in my mother like I am in no other but perhaps it's not as unconditional... I do have expectations from her...even her emotional investment in me that I am taking for granted is an expectation. I am not saying that there are no other equally strong relationships in one's life, if one is lucky that is, but it's just that there is something about a mother and child bond that seems to be unique. It might be too dramatic but for want of a better analogy it's like the love you expect an ideal God to have for you... you might not be worthy of love and might do everything to forfeit it but you don't expect God to love you any less because God is God. It's not like mortal loves that are fickle, changeable, fluid, temperamental, lacking depth, so on... Of course, I don't mean to say mothers are perfect beings who love perfectly, far from it. But just that the quality of their love for their own children is far more natural and fixed because it inheres in the fact that you are her child and nothing else whatever. And nothing you do can make you less of or not her child.

These thoughts actually come to my mind when I think of how one's world would be if one did not have a mother. It's perhaps even worse than a world in which one did not believe there was a God because one might never have felt God's presence so may not notice his absence but to feel and know and live in the shade of a mother's love...and then to not have that shade anymore... how must it feel? I'd rather not think about it... life is full of suffering for those who think or feel deeply...but some forms of suffering seem too much for any human to bear.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 9:09 pm 0 comments
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