Thoughts over tea

Have been meeting some different types recently, due to some new developments in life. Quite a few of them work in NGOs and research organizations -- the horrors that well-heeled corporates shudder at. Low pay! Humanitarian aid! Run! :)

One of these is a tiny young woman who's currently involved in community rehabilitation in Jaffna. She sat across us at the table in that ragged canteen as we, a motley group of 20-somethings from weird and wonderful walks of life, discussed life, love and, well, boys, over hot tea and helapa. I freaking love helapa. She told us about her work in the North and about how words can barely express how beautiful the land is, and how interesting and open the people are. She's wiry and energetic and as she spoke with her hands flying and her eyes glittering (seriously), you could see how excited she was about it, how enthralled by the sheer awesomeness of the life she's living.

While a part of me was truly envious that you could be so in love with what you do, a part of me was fascinated -- what is it like to be so passionate about something? 

Fresh-faced

Still hope there
Still dreams allowed,
Seems a while since
That was a thing
To be.

I am cuckoo alone.

These few days...I have been feeling mildly psychotic. Psychotic not in terms of actual psychosis but in the sense that I feel my being is being slowly pulled in two dozen different directions at the same time, each requiring a specific, measured, and urgent amount of energy and success to be achieved. This feels like some noxious by-product of growing up and turning adult, and doing all the things "you're supposed to do."

Through it all, however, I have come to the happy conclusion that not only can you please everybody, including, very much, yourself, you also cannot count on everyone being as understanding about your not meeting expectations as YOU would be, were they in the same circumstances. All that 'be kind because everyone is fighting a harder plan' biz seems to be a bunkum in real life. I suppose it's more difficult to acclimatize to the fact when you generally make an effort to be "the understanding friend."

Also, success has suddenly become an internally-measured factor. Yes, let's just all open up about it -- for the greater part of our lives, success is as how the world sees you --parents, teachers, peers. If they are successful enough in inculcating their well-meaning ideas of how successful you should be, soon you absorb it in to your world view..and voila! Le stress!

Sometimes I wonder how some people balance. Especially those super mom types with irritating husbands and crying children and nagging in-laws and let's-meet-up-for-high-tea-at-Galle-Face-Hotel lady friends. I suppose they have learned the lesson of how to achieve enough inner peace and calm to manage life and all its madness. To think I used to laugh at folk who used that cliched phrase, "24 hours in not enough." Now I don't know if I wish there were more than 24 hours or if I'm glad because the requisite hours of rest allow everyone to shut their traps, including my inner psycho goddess. Who I'm sure is gorgeous and well-educated, but can turn in to a raving lunatic in constant PMS mood sometimes.

"My friend, thou art good and cautious and wise; nay, thou art perfect, and I, too, speak with with thee wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone."

The Madman, Khalil Gibran.

Ispot on, old chap.

A long post by an indecisive individual

Decisions -- they make us. They take us to where we are going. And often if we have a real problem with the way Life has turned out, or the hand Life has dealt us, or the way People possibly view us, it's good to just look at decisions, because there you'll find your answers and an admonishment for blaming Life and Other People. I admire people who are decisive. They seem to be the type of individuals who go through life with so much grit, always knowing which way they are going (though not always sure if that is the right way). They make choices fully aware that these may screw them up -- but they don't, because they make them with real conviction. Never half-baked ideas or "OK let's try it like this this time." They waver, but momentarily; purpose follows them like a puppy with an affection complex "pant, pant, here I am, I'm cute, pick me up." :P

How do these people do it? I find myself floundering over the slightest thing, and worst of all, making decisions and then thinking "well, I'm sure that was for the best anyway," when the choice seems like the easy way out, the path already trodden by a million different others, the boring choice, the safe choice that's completely normal and expected. You see, there's nothing wrong with the choice, but it's just so not-happening. In The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, a book that got under my skin in several ways and made me think about my life (not in the most pleasant way), the protagonist Tony Webster talks about how he had lived a perfectly acceptable and "peaceable" life-time...but how little he had made happen in his life. The whole narrative seemed to me like a eulogy for settling, ordinary decisions, and mediocrity more than anything else.

How decisions mould us, though. Makes you think about the series of events that has led to this point of life and time, and what could have been (to be avoided at all costs), who is in your life and who has had to leave it, who you have cut out for various reasons. But that's change, and another story all together. But I do, I do admire people who can make spot decisions, who do not think that OK is all right, and that maybe that could be done next week...because the thing we do not realise is that this particular moment in time is never, ever coming back again. This chance is critical in that the ripples this stone's-throw cause can be caused by no other stone thrown at any other angle. I wish I was like that. Instead, life for me seems to be a series of "maybe-next-times", something that can get tiresome when you're not tired enough to think of nothing.

“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?"

All these thoughts, however, come on the back of a really good day, so the vagaries of life is another thing to think about. Brings to mind what my mother had recently said to a friend who had hinted at the futility of life; that, in the words of Lord Buddha, nothing is permanent -- not the good times, nor the bad.

Feel good

Feel good about yourself, I say. Revel in your achievements, no matter how small. Because every little success you achieve on your own is something that no one can take away :)

Setback, or sign?

Pop culture - and Fabebook bumper stickers - tell us that setbacks are to be ignored. That these are stepping stones to those elusive "dreams" we're to follow to comlpete our lives. On the other hand, you have The Sign Theory, which states, quite emphatically, that "maybe he left you for a reason...," and "...failure is the lord's way of giving you another chance...," penning setbacks as a cosmic signal for the need to change something. This is confusing, I feel.
These people need to choose and make a damned informed decision.
Because surely, the way you view a roadblock, or a failure, or an FML moment, can change your consequent steps and the way you continue to deal with it.
I personally feel pressured by pop psychology. It has defined me, like most of my peers have been defined by it. We are the generation of beginning-to-love-your-curves and share-your-patriotism-on-Facebook.
But pop psychology is referred to as that for a very good, very literal reason - it's popular and that's about all. Nothing and no one ratifies it or controls it and it grows like a sprawling, colourful, mauling monster of silly ideas culled from average fiction and teenage movies.

It does not give good advice, I feel. 

Thoughts on thoughtfulness

It feels like thoughtfulness has become such a rarity that when it does pop up in real life, it's looked askance at, and even vilified. Most people cannot IMAGINE that a thoughtful word or gesture can be possible without a lurking, evil ulterior motive. This is a likely a reflection of society (thu. I spit on you) perceives the concepts of give and take. You can't possibly give something without wanting something, or someone, in return.
Social analysis  aside, I've come across very  very few thoughtful people. There are kinds people, nice people, people who are fun to be around, etc., but very few genuinely thoughtful folk. Having spent the major part of my life surrounded by family friends who were great in every way, all that is good, and kind and supportive, but no necessarily thoughtful  I was surprised when I went to college. I met K, the kind of person who bakes for elders' homes and brings you flowers on a random days, just because. It was lovely. And it inspired me, not a particularly thoughtful person, to try and be a bit more thoughtful toward people.
But I realised that it's the sort of trait that is best seen in people in whom it is inborn. Else, your gestures feel stupid, look a little stilted and are soon discontinued.

But, by the by in life, I have the luck to come across such people in unexpected places. It never fails to surprise me, or to make me smile. It always make me realise, also, that sweetness, and its appreciation, is an essential for a content life.