Love, Destiny and Effort..

Of  all the clichés about love, the one that I find most abhorrent is “Love happens”.. It brings to mind various metaphors like an illness or an accident or  disaster that happens and yet people say it all the time. Perhaps,  they say it because it is true, that Love mostly catches one unaware and unprepared.

But the opposite could also be true and I believe that is the reason for all the angst and heartbreak associated with love. We suffer from a sense of being outcast or misplaced right from the time that we are taken out from the womb of the mother and the umbilical cord is cut. And it is in some measure the safety of that tie that we yearn for, knowing that there is another in this world who will nurture and care for all our needs. So most human beings are essentially seeking to find a love that makes them feel as if they belong and completes them.

In this quest, we often, mistakenly cast people into the role of  a lover. So strong, at times, is the feeling of loneliness and a desire to know that elusive emotion called ‘Love’ that we simply delude ourselves into its existence in the form of a person who may or may not qualify or be worthy of it. For True love is like a spontaneous combustion, it is a spark that ignites of its own volition on recognizing one’s other half and it is a self sustaining fire. As Rumi said ‘Love is like a fire burning in the soul of the lover’ and that fire, once lit, does not die. Shams may have passed on but he lived eternally in Rumi’s heart and does so even today in all of his poetry on love.

But does that mean that if love is a walk-in customer, it need not be gratified, that it will continue to be with us even if we do not exert ourselves in any measure to make it stay? This is where heartbreak and betrayal enter. For if there is no effort, love cannot be chained, it has freedom at its very root and will take flight like the summer breeze…Even the most undying love needs reciprocation, two souls can dance together only if they hear a common music and for that one needs to be a creator as much as a participant.

Love happens…But it lasts only if one is willing to pour one’s soul into it and erase the narrow confines of boundaries, whether they be of the mind or those laid down by society or even one’s own life…Love is like the water of life and one must learn to be the flow, only then will the fire in two hearts, that beat to the same symphony of Love, be a blaze that will meld their souls into one, beyond space and lifetimes…



#love happens
#Love is a myth
#Lucky in love
#Rumi's poems

When Did I Stop being Whole?

Of late I have this strange feeling that I have disintegrated from a whole person into various disjointed parts (and not just mentally)... Most people who know me generally open conversations with questions like, “How is the head” or “How is the stomach”, “How is the back” ? And my identity now seems to rest in my  various body parts , one or more of which are, mostly dysfunctional. It's like the days of the week when people ask , ‘what day is it today’, I am asked which body part I am being on a particular day. 

And,  of course, there is my husband who sees me in a ‘mood’, which he used to earlier ascribe to my phases of madness has now made great progress. When he sees me being quiet or ‘difficult’ as he would like to say and getting no particular ailment described, he has the ubiquitous description – “It must be menopause!”.

My daughter is the only one who is different from the lot; having migrated to study in the west a couple of years back, now inured in the comfortable and relatively easy going lives of a student in that part of the world, she tells me “Mom, you are an unrelenting To-Do list.” So She has turned me into an inanimate object, whether that is better or worse, I am yet to decide. Thankfully though it doesn’t just end there, she knows she has a very talented mother, she acknowledges that the grey cells are transmitted genetically. So every single time that I have a conversation with her, even if it is to ask her whether she is eating properly (Indian mothers!) she tells me “Mom, Please stop stressing out, calm down” and I look around me and wonder where the storm is because I have been talking in the perfectly normal “Indian” tone…It doesn’t help that she is studying to be a psychologist because all the new disorders that she is taught about, seem to be pre-existent in her mother to a certain degree and now I have lost count of the number. I only feel blessed to have such a multi-faceted (distorted) personality.

All this leads me to wonder “When did I stop being a whole person?” How am I the sum total of all physical ailments that plague me or the imaginary mental disorders which traumatize others? What happened to the ‘I’ who was capable of thinking and being an individual , not easily ignored..Have I let myself disintegrate or is it life which is doing this? Have I become lazy or laid back or maybe simply indifferent? These questions trouble my mind and I think I need to gather myself back , part by unhealthy part, put it all together again (Unlike the king’s men) and start being whole again…Until then I will abstain from sitting on any walls or fences, simply retreat and heal…