Blends and mixes

“Everyone has a purpose in life and a unique talent to give to others. And when we blend this unique talent with service to others, we experience the ecstasy and exultation of own spirit, which is the ultimate goal of all goals.” Kallam Anji Reddy

I’ve been to a management course recently which really was a rather unusual thing for me to do but surprisingly after my initial shock related to its jargon, I started warming up to it and in the end I really enjoyed it. There was one particular thought or phrase within the language of management that really stuck to my mind and I thought I’ll share it with you here. This phrase, to my mind, is a wonderful alternative to the culture of ‘not-enoughness’ that is so typical of the world that we live in and I think can successfully guide us through life. That phrase was nothing else but ‘Realise the benefits’. You may not get as ecstatic about it but it really spoke to me. We do have an awful lot in our lives, our backgrounds, our cultures, our languages, our experiences, talents, and energy and it is our responsibility to realise for ourselves and others the benefits of it all. To mix it, to blend it into our personal concoction of magic-making potion.

Walking

“Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy.
There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors…disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The sweet cloud

There is a very old poem written by a Polish author Julian Tuwim called ‘Dyzio Marzyciel’ – ‘Dyzio, the dreamer’. It is about a boy who imagines that clouds are different types of sweets and that he is able to reach for them while lying down on the grass. While I was reading it to my son the other day, he enthusistically exclaimed: ‘Mummy, I want to get inside this book!’ I laughed and I agreed with him that this would indeed be a pleasant state of affairs. I then forgot about this little conversation until I came across this thought put together by Barbara Kingsolver:

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

I really like this idea of ‘living inside our hope… under its roof’, about being surrounded with it. Perhaps, just like Dyzio was dreaming of clouds of sweets, we could imagine the clouds of hope that we could reach to just when the going gets a bit too hard. I know that clouds tend to signify oncoming gloom, but maybe they shouldn’t? Maybe next time when we look outside the window, when it will get darker, and cloudier, we could say ‘hope is coming.’

Hope is coming.