What Life is Not ...

A neat wooden desk with all stationary organized in right angles.

A blue sky with a white cloud and a smiling yellow sun.

A 50-50 in relationships.

Your favourite people living forever.

Your innocence untouched.

A scroll that can spell out your life or your future.

A reasonable, rational journey where the people you meet are reasonable, rational people.

Missed calls on your cell phone from the people you want them to be from.

Home cooked food, 24/7.

Certainty of God or some power.

Mutual affection.

Internet connection.

All even numbers.

Nor is it continual thunder storms and rain,

Or monsters under your bed.

It's not mediocrity.

Bad grades and bad recommendations,

Or leaking roofs and insect infestations.

It's not heartburn and helplessness,

It's not gray-blue relationships.

It's not hatred and parting and wilting flowers

It's not all poverty and calamity.

Dumped or turned down or forgotten.

It's not let downs and evasive treasures.

Loneliness.

All odd numbers.

There's more to it.

I don't know what it really is,

But I know what it isn't,

And that's better than not knowing at all.

Tagore

“… O poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away, logic and reason are slow to penetrate. We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart’s blood; until, regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again”.

~Extract from Rabindranath Tagore's "The Postmaster"

Of Pillars and Roofs

It's not just about fighting the huge battles. It's about getting through the little stuff, day by day by day. It’s about the little things that stop mattering (who does the dishes, who does laundry, who takes out the trash) and the little ones that start mattering more and more (post-it notes, love SMS’s, catnaps and snooze alarms together).

We don’t stand strong alone or by ourselves, we seek strength – it’s not a single pillar, it’s a whole roof held up by pillars, and that’s how we stand steady. There are several others holding us up, even when we don’t know it. When one pillar weakens, the rest toughen up.

Being lonely and being alone might be two different things, and we learn to deal with both – perhaps that strengthens us as individual pillars. But you gotta know where to look to find another one standing. We crumble when we cast our hopeful little glances in the wrong direction. We’re more careful thereon, but then we’re never quite done building foundations, are we?

It’s all very romantic to say "I stand alone and I am strong" – you will, because survival is instinct. That’s courage, and we all have times in our lives when we use it because we have the will to live and be happy.

Real strength is a network. There is a power in togetherness that no distance or space can defeat.

For the sake of a single poem

~ by Rilke

"...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences.

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else – ); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, - and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises.

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”