After a tiring day …(x2)

While on the subject of Helen Exley giftbooks, here are lines from another one of her books. This one’s about love, for those who like fairytales! Er, forgot the name of the book though….saved these lines on my fone! :)

Read on folks:

1. My husband is humble… and when he says, “Why do you love me? I am so ordinary,” it hurts, because I can never find the words to tell him he is my whole world.

2. When you are away too long, I put on your ancient gardening jacket and sit wrapped round in you. (Pam Brown)

3. One of the oldest human needs is having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.

4. A husband is a man who when someone tells him he is hen-pecked, answers, yes, but I am pecked by a good hen. (Heheh….)

5. The story of a love is not important. What is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

After a tiring day….

 

 

Don’t know what a book called A Special Gift of Peace & Calm was doing on the bottom rack of the Crime & Mystery section at Crossword last Sunday. But I’m glad I chanced upon it. It’s a thin, pocket-size Helen Exley giftbook, which led me to check out more such books at the store.

Here I reproduce some enchanting lines I got from that book:

1. And silence… like a poultice…. comes to heal the blows of sound.

2. There are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

3. I wish you quiet sleep, dreams of meadows deep in flowers and grass, of oceans calm and flecked with silver, of islands hushed by gentle waves, of countries of your own invention, of easy talk with friends…of roads leading to a reunion…of sorrow comforted. Of hope restored. 

4. LET peace enfold you: Shed the day’s anxieties, one by one. No need to hurry. Let the body drowse. Unwind….little by little. Still the mind. Breathe slow…until at last the busy world retreats, and leaves you in a gentleness, a stillness, a refuge of peace and calm.

5. Nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength. 

6. May peace and peace and peace be everywhere. (From The Upanishads)

7. What life can compare to this? Sitting quietly by the window, I watch the leaves fall and the flowers bloom, as the seasons come and go.

8. I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty. You don’t grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house; and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look! (Kabir)

9. Calm is a clear well that you may draw from whenever you have need.

10. Nothing is worth more than this day. We tend to be alive in the future, not now. We say, “Wait until I finish school and get my Ph.D degree, and then I will be really alive.” When we have it and it’s not easy to get, we say to ourselves, “I have to wait until I have a job in order to be really alive.” And then, after a job, a car. After the car, a house. We are not capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don’t know when. Now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive at all in our entire life. 

11. QUIET NIGHT: Lie gently in the dark, and listen to the rain pattering against the glass, the swish of passing cars, the hush of leaves. Renounce decisions, speculation, the tug of time. The world beyond the window….enfolds your silence, holds you softly. Sleep.

As you ro shall u weep

Okay. So I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but here goes: I’m not particularly against crying. Before you go ‘phchht’, here’s another truth. Crying is not limited to the following: a weapon to end arguments, manipulation, overtly emotional people or ‘crybabies’, or hell, even a sign of weakness.

To me, crying is a release like no other. But mind you, I hate PDAs (Public Display of Affliction….here: bawling ur eyes out sabke saamne). Umm…. find a washroom and cry privately. My policy. In my case, it works like this. I have just received a private shock. I’m in office. Can’t tell anyone. Can’t cry openly. One foot in front of the other. Walk. There’s the loo. C’mon, it’s easy. Open the door. Step in. Lock. Look at yourself in the mirror and clutch the sink.

I watch my face…my eyes welling up, those tears threatening to spill over…sometimes, I remind myself of the hurtful story/person/happenstance, just so that I can strip the layers and feel the rawness. That usually does it. No holding back. Shhhh….there, there. Quietly. Privately. Till I feel drained.

Drained. But better.

A splash of cool water on my face, a tissue, and poof! I walk out, like nothing happened. And just like I drowned myself in tears, I drown me in work then. There’s salvation in both.

I hate people who cry at the drop of a hat (whatever that means) though. Er, wait till 258 hats fall, at least.

Ahem…seriously, keeping it in is never a good idea. But should you command an audience? Nah. Some rainshowers do more good on barren lands.

You may be very rational, very level-headed, but trust you me, every human worth his salt (yeah, salty tears actually) has given in to the floodgates every once in a while. It’s okay to let go of that preciously clutched self-control. Sometimes.

Tears are precious…but generosity’s better. Do some good to yourself the next time you’re feeling like a crushed cola can in a dustbin.

Cry.

Hushhh now………

It’s only words…

I like very few self-help books; give me fiction anyday. People who hate being told what to do would probably agree with me! ;)

Having said that, I must add that I have seen cases of self-help books actually helping people. Yes, some have even helped me just when I needed it the most. No, you don’t miraculously develop self esteem, you don’t suddenly win friends and influence people, and you certainly don’t turn into a perfect little zombie living in a perfect little world. SHBs don’t provide you with the miracles you need to make everything okay in 101 steps. What some of them probably do is help you realise what’s already inside of you. Introspection to the nth power, so to speak.

No, SHBs are not supposed to be for the weak; they are for humans who need improving. Basically, every one of us, eh? ;)) If you’ve read one such book and found it to be so incredibly boring that it has turned you off SHBs for good, I’ll urge you to think again. Not every SHB is preachy (and the good Lord knows I hate that variety). I particularly like those that are actually written by human beings, and not idealistic wire-brains who categorise everything, & have the guts to tell you how you should feel!!!

Sometimes, wise words need to be dollopped with experiences to make their meaning come true. And those are the words that truly make sense to me.

One such SHB that I chanced upon a few weeks ago is ‘Slow Down’ by David Essel. What pulled me towards this one was the little tagline on the cover that went, ‘The fastest way to get everything you want’. What a lovely antithesis to the title!!! Here, I will reproduce an excerpt I’m particularly impressed with:

‘Many of us give away our personal power to others by withholding our true feelings. Some of us have even watched relationships with close friends and lovers crumble because we’re too afraid to let them know how we really feel. In fact, some people find it easier to give an inconsiderate stranger a piece of their mind than to tell someone close to them that they consider their actions thoughtless. And on the other side of the coin, we also diminish our personal power by not giving someone a compliment when they deserve it.

Slow down, look deeply into the situations where you give your power away, and then ask yourself why you do so. In relationships, you may give away your power to others by not being honest with them about what you want out of the partnership. Maybe you don’t want to rock the boat and let someone know that you don’t agree with him/her.

And what about how you act in your professional life? I’ve worked with clients who gave their power away to co-workers and bosses so many times that they ended up feeling unworthy of the greatness that truly resided within them. In accepting responsibility for mistakes that weren’t theirs, or taking consistent criticism despite work that was well done, or feeling that they weren’t strong enough to stand up to injustice in the workplace, they all eventually suffered a lack of self-esteem and a diminishing sense of personal power.

If you find yourself in the mind-set of ‘Who am I to stand up to the bullies of the world?’, then it’s time to step back and remember all the people before you who have reclaimed their power and gone on to feel free and full of energy. Go watch Erin Brockovich’.