I am in love with words. Few things excite me as much as a well expressed idea. There is a romance to a thought expressed with perfect clarity - precise and enticing. Language and style is the first instance of attraction. An idea might excite me, yet shabbily expressed it would a thorough turn off. I might as well give up on it.

When did I become this creature, caught up in the delight of words? I cannot empathize with people who can read anything. If reading is something I do voluntarily, then a beautiful play of words is a per-requisite. Of necessity, I would wade through articles, piles of writing, trying to understand concepts and ideas.

Today  I stopped by to read a blog written by someone who passed away quite young. She talked about her struggle with cancer and then I knew that the cancer had taken her. It struck some chord deep within me. Not her courage in the face of this adversary, no. It struck a chord in the face of my own cowardice - because being diagnosed with cancer is my deepest fear.

Just thinking about the possibility of it paralyzes me. I don't know what the odds are, but I do know my own fear, one so strong that it could drive me to melacholia bordering on depression.  If not, it brings forth the other me, the one that wants to start doing pious acts in the hope that God will spare me from this particular travail. 

I am moved today by her words. For one moment I considered the possibility of being sick and wondered what it is that I would love to be doing today if I were. It gave me a different perspective. Truth be told a lot of things you thought were important become utterly meaningless from that viewpoint. There are only a few things that hold meaning and ultimately life is all about meaning, is it not?

Frankl had it right -'he has a why to live for will certainly strive to survive almost anyhow. And if we are very lucky, God might grant us the grace to touch other lives and come out of it on the other side, a stronger and truer human being.

Reasons for disenchantment

If I were to be with you, I would rather I be kind to you. I know I am cruel, unintentionally maybe, still you bring out the worst part of me: the cruel, neurotic, unhappy face of me. I am happy with a lot of people. I make them happy too, even without trying.  A lot of them make me happy, even when I don't crave their company.

Your company I crave....yet, I am cruel and unhappy with you.

How then can I be with you? I don't want to be that person you know. I don't love you, that's true. Still wouldn't it be good if I could be happy with you, happy for you - happy that you are you and I am me, and we are together. I think about trying. I try.

Shouldn't happiness be effortless? Should it be effortless? Does it even matter!

I say goodbye now. You see,  I would rather I be kind to you - one good reason for disenchantment. 

To do list.

Here's an article I found rather inspiring. Indeed, a strange thing to be inspired by. Nevertheless... 

 http://www.planetgary.com/sunscreen.htm

Wear Sunscreen

By Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '98: Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blind side you at 4 PM on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium.

Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good.

Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.

Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

Nicholson Baker - a snippet

           “ If your life is like my life, there are within it brief stretches, usually a week to ten days long, when your mind achieves a polished and freestanding coherence. The chanting tape-loops of poetry anthologies, the crumbly pieces of philosophy, the unsmelted barbarisms, the litter torn from huge collisions of abandoned theories - all this nomadic sub-orbital junk suddenly, like a milling street crowd in a movie-musical, re-forms itself into a proud, pinstriped, top-hatted commonwealth. Your opinions become neat and unruffleable. Every new toy design, ever abuse of privilege or gesture of philanthropy, every witnessed squabble at the supermarket checkout counter, is smoothly remade into evidence for five or six sociological truths. Puffed up enough to be charitable, you stop urging your point with twisting jabs of your fork; you happily concede winnable arguments to avoid injuring the feelings of your friends; your stock of proverbs from Samuel Johnson seems elegant and apt in every context; you are firm, you think fast, you offer delicately phrased advice.
          Then one Thursday, out on a minor errand, you inexplicably come to a new conclusion (“Keynesian economics is spent”), and it - like the fetching plastic egg that cruel experimenters have discovered will cause a mother bird to thrust her own warm, speckled ones from the nest - upsets your equilibrium. The community of convictions flies apart, you sense unguessed contradictions, there are disavowals, frictions, second thoughts, please for further study; you stare in renewed perplexity out the laundromat’s plate-glass window, while your pulped library card dries in a tumbling shirt pocket behind you.
             Such alert intermissions happen only infrequently: most of the time we are in some inconclusive phases of changing our minds about many, if not all, things. We have no choice. Our opinions, gently nudged by circumstance, revise themselves under cover of inattention. We tell them, in a steady voice, No, I’m not interested in a change at present. But there is no stopping opinions. They don’t care about whether we want to hold them or not; they do what they have to do."

—

Nicholson Baker, Changes of Mind

Thought stew

  I have become obsessed with the work of Elizabeth Barett Browning and Oscar Wilde. How are such radically different people, able to influence me at the same. The life and work of both litterateurs are in no way converging. I could almost call them parallel lines traversing the universe of thought, never to meet. Yet by influencing my thought almost simultaneously, uncannily enough, both theirs worlds seems to have converged in me.

It reminds me of that poem. The mosquito that holds my blood and his blood; and in the most unlikely place, within the mosquito, our blood become one - we become one. I am the mosquito within whom Wilde and Browning combine. With me will perishe the thought stew of them in me combined.  Strange, very strange indeed.

'Produce'. That is my new golden rule.
It comes right after my other golden rule, 'no matter what you do (whether you love it or not), do it well'.

I have been fumbling around in search of inspiration because I have been dissatisfied with my life as it is. Dissatisfaction is a corrosive thing. It digs into the well spring of your being,  slowly eating away at the things that are true of you. At some point it reaches the core of you and you start feeling that you don't know yourself anymore. Other things that made sense before start irritating you, or you try to spurn the good things in your life. Yes! dissatisfaction can be highly corrosive and mostly ends with waste.

(to be contd...)