I Confess

It is true. I have felt pain. Pain is a deep felt emotion. Not many of us can escape it.  Those that claim not to know it, I am convinced, are either pretending it doesn’t exist or have a couple of “emotional” screws missing. Why the confession? My blog’s theme seems to be centered around the idea of “light”, “love”, “hope” and “self acceptance”. Being a reader, aside from a writer I can see how that may come off as extremely cheesy and oblivious to life’s realities, where no one is capable of always being positive, no matter how hard we try. There seem to be tears for everyone. Some more than others.

I have to admit, no emotion brings people closer to each other than this very emotion that we each of us work so hard to drive away; pain. So why do I write about the things that talk not about pain, but life and light? I write mostly positive things because they are true, just as the pain is true. It is the true contradiction to pain, the ying to the yang. Truth is I started this blog to console myself. So I found all the things that could help Khushbo understand that things would get better, that life is amazing, that life is beautiful and hoped there would be many other souls out there who would need to hear some of the same things. That it would help others as it continued to help me. Channeling the positive side of things is no easy task, especially when you feel a rainbow of emotions you so eagerly desire to express. But you have to stop and wonder, would it help me to continue to feel this way? Am I better for it?

I realize I am still learning this art of re-molding emotions into another form of energy. Choosing one thought over another as it is simply put. (Overly simplified in my opinion).

My message to readers, don’t apologize, don’t feel ashamed of how you feel and when you feel it. It makes us normal these juxtapositions of life in sadness and in happiness.

And if you ever feel completely lost, realize you are not alone! I am with you, lost. Yet I assure you we will both make it farther faster than everyone else!

Smile for me, please 😉

Love,
Khushbo

Where is the Humanity?

Today I was included on a text stream. The subject was Syria. The objective, an April fool’s joke. Someone had the bright idea to propagate a fake tragic event in Syria and ask for prayers for those hurt. In the instance it seemed so painless, forwarding it. A display of care with a press of a button without a second thought. Yet there was no such news.

Another text message followed:
Sorry, this seems to have been an April fool’s joke.

That was no joke. It was sheer callous.

The joke is how undignified we have become in our inability to connect with the pain and destruction that millions of people face everyday simply because we are not directly in contact with any of it. It happens thousands of miles away. Appears to us in the form of petty headlines devoid of emotions which we hurriedly flip and skip through. To carry it further, we willingly mock the destruction because it is not ours. It means nothing more to us than a derogatory tabloid news brief.

Perhaps Syria makes headlines today, tomorrow it will be another so why should we care?

I think we should care because every time we care we ensure our own liberties and freedoms. When has it ever been a solution to look and not care? Every time we take the time to look, the time to care we protect not only the humanity and the civil rights of another we do so for ourselves too. I think this philosophy carries forward globally now more than ever before. We are not protected within nation borders if we cannot help other nations. I cannot think of one instance of revolutions and social changes where there was ever a benefit to looking the other way.

Everyday we make choices, big and small. We make a choice not to help an ailing neighbor, we make a choice to help spread undignified rumors, we make a choice when we choose the path of moral muteness, we make choices every moment. Perhaps some days we should make the effort to make the right choices even if they are not as popular, liked or appreciated. Syria is just an example of what happens when an entire world population sits back and chooses moral muteness. Yes it is indeed very important that major world leaders keep their political affiliations in place even if it means the death of almost 70,000 people during the course of this conflict. The weight of so many lives lost hardly seems a burden to us. Why?

Our humanity lies in our ability to hold the hand of a stranger with the care and affection we would allow our loved ones. At the very least, if we cannot join in the sorrows of another we must not let their pain be mocked.

Procrastinating for Vitamin D

Haplessly I so often find myself at a battle with none other than: myself. It seems when the lists pile up and there is more and more to do I have a “deep breath” moment, where I need to calm down and it is in this essentially important rudimentary need to breath that I tend to slip. Lost in the everglades of escape, trying strenuously not to think about the mountains of things to do. For now.

Endless cycle of convincing myself this is temporary, it will happen. Ya right!

I think my biggest set-back has become my goals list which quite often seems overwhelming for the allotted time. Endlessly I find myself falling into patterns of thinking about things that are on the list, not the ones I am currently doing now, but the ones I am not doing! Its a bottle neck of things to do, paths to follow to achieve them all. Multi-tasking, sorry to say, an epic fail at this point.

I am going to definitely do all that I have set out to do and it will be done by end of 2013 as planned. Right ho!

Fruitless addiction to stumpleupon, facebook and now wordpress is not the most directive way to resolve this “stopping to breath” state of things. Alright, it is not as fruitless as it seems. I do manage to breath and guess what from my station in the house, I get the optimal amount of sunlight. Which means despite the winter, I have oodles of Vitamin D!

Essentially, never be disappointed by your procrastination abilities, at least you wished your friend a happy birthday on facebook and stumbled upon some amazing poetry by Hafez, was it really such a loss? (Sorry forgot the Vitamin D, very important). No, no, not as much a loss as you may think it. Stop to breath, its not always procrastination, its a vitamin, a medicine too.

Be gone with the conformist defamers of procrastination.

Alright now I am going to leave the house…….

Madness

There are two sides to every story, or so it is said. Maybe there are just as many stories as there are people to interpret it. Truth is everyone interprets a story based on their personal experiences and individual moral indignation. Nothing is fixed or fully interpretative.  There are so many layers to the human psyche and perhaps just as many layers to every human behavior and interaction. There is no right or wrong, or is there? What is it that compels us to look for the sanity in this world? With so many people, so many observances, what makes us think we can control what we call “reality”?

What could be more near absolute madness than looking for the sanity in a mad mad world! Everything around is a lot of chaos that we tend to file in components and sections within our minds trying to make sense of it. Sections for everything, family, work, bills, duties, the law and love. Somehow we keep it all together, watching, observing and copying those before us and those around us. It’s a copy paste scheme, this sanity business. As long as we seem just the same we can get away with our inner madness. Templated forms of existence are the sanity that we aspire to.

What is it that we truly hide behind the closed doors of our minds, behind the veils of conformity? Why is it that so often the raving reality in our minds is nothing more than insanity to the world? The oft-repeated rituals within our communication, our lives, our celebrations and our mourning seen as sane. Would it be utter madness if my inner interpretation of mourning was completely different from that of the rest of the world?

Sanity is nothing more than a group of people unanimously agreeing to something to be correct and sane. It will be their sanity, if someone within said group deviates, they are insane. Another group not in sync with their interpretation would likely not think their interpretation as madness of course and vice a versa. It is nothing more than organized madness, mob theory. So why is it that we need conformity, to keep the sanity, create distances or to just because we are afraid of the depths and craziness of our own minds? Lest we actually be “seen”. We wear veils everyday of our lives, to hide the true beings within us.

We hide our inner beings because we know no one will accept this inner being, not because the world and its stark sanity cannot endure it but because we are surrounded by a swarm of crazies who work hard to keep it sane, which is in actuality the biggest insanity in the world. Pretending to be sane, in a chaotic world, what could be more insane?

So keep hiding my fellow crazies, the world is too insane to understand our madness!

Kindness

I always appreciate the smile of a stranger and the cheer it brings about in my heart. Sometimes affection and appreciation can be just as contagious as anger. I say donate your simple smiles, acknowledge random people with kindness. Aren’t we all connected in our woes and in our happiness in some manner or another.

Dreams

Dreams. Dreaming big it seems is a modern day sin. I am an avid day dreamer or at least I used to be. It seems that all my day dreaming abilities have been renewed of late. I love going far and wide, doing the impossible and sometimes the craziest things, and catch myself smiling, “Thank God I did not actually do that!”

Some of us dare to dream big. I think that is where the danger lies. We need to trust ourselves and our ability to make magic in this world with those very dreams. What actually happens is, we second guess ourselves and hold a stronger belief in the roads too often taken. In essence we kill our own dreams if only to save them from the world. Almost as if a buried dream is safer then one out in the open for all to openly butcher. What if we do not succeed? How will we face ourselves and those that sought to “warn” us?

Then there are the few revolutionaries, leaders and philosophers that manage to keep it alive. I believe everyone in this world comes with an in-built package for absolute greatness because God does not make mistakes.  Then we are set free in the world as it consumes us and moulds us to the required specifications. At some point we start working so hard to fit in that we start erasing that in-built package, bit by bit until there is nothing left. Is it a survival instinct or just a ego boost seeking the appreciation of those around us?

It is often sad to see that a mere child has higher morals than most adults. We lose our creativity, our morals, and our dreams all in the pursuit to gain this perceived appearance of community. Which community are we really making such large sacrifices for? The same community that then gives us brackets to live within? Dividing God’s creation by race, religion and culture. I believe that these aspects of this world that were meant to make us stronger are what we have caused to veer us into the dangerous direction of stagnation and conformity. We have reached a point where following is so important that any direction outside our pre-set, over used and perhaps abused directions for career, marriage, and even happiness is simply wrong.

I have a soulful connection with everyone and anyone who has dealt with the murder of their hopes and dreams. I am guilty of this sin and I am guilty of conforming and passionately seeking the approval of a society that disposed of me at the drop of a hat for finally having the tenacity to say “no more”. I buried these dreams before they even had the chance to bloom, and now I find myself at a loss, I need them, I have to revive them. They seem to be long lost memories where only fragments seem to remain. I will find them. I will live them. I trust them. Start today, trust yourself and your higher in-built powers!

When you come looking for sugar,
your bag will be examined
to see how much it can hold;
it will be filled accordingly.

~ Rumi ❤

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