One

Anti-racism week on Thoughts Translated. Let's all blend into one color and be One. 

What is love?

Let me tell you what I think love is. Love is your mum saving you a portion of her "paratha" because she knows how much you wouldn't otherwise have it if she made you a full one. Love is your son sending his first ever email to you. Love is the coffee shop attendant grilling your sandwich for you even when her other customers are waiting. Love is your domestic helper vacuuming your bedroom twice in one day, so you won't suffer from your dust allergies. Love is you learning how to box stitch from a YouTube video just so you can make the perfect bracelet for your daughter. Love is being called fatty all your life and fighting about it too. Love is hanging up on your mum and calling her back. Love is saying very mean things and later apologizing. Love is smiling, then crying and then smiling again. Love is you calling your husband up to ask where he is and he's just walked through the door. Love is your best friend giving you a postcard with a bicycle and a heart on it.. Because she knows. Love is saying those three words without really saying them, but showing them. 

Love is everywhere, anywhere, here, there and in all of us. Why do we need a day especially to celebrate this extraordinarily ordinary phenomenon? Well why not? If we celebrated love everyday, like the cynics put it, how would we value love? Do you want it to be your birthday everyday? 

Valentines Day is commercial, tacky, corny, cliched and yes it's also made up. Nevertheless I believe it addresses a very fundamental energy that we all survive on. If we were to say "well don't love, you might get hurt". We may as well say "don't live, you might die."

Love is pure, real, full of pain and pleasure. It's bitter sweet, salty and can be poisonous too.  Love is something people are willing to die for ... Literally. Don't underestimate it's power and celebrate it, for we are all lovers on this earth.

As my daughter put it to me this afternoon, "Valemtimes day is when we must give everyone lots of hugs and kisses and tell them how much we love them". Are you going to argue with that? No, I didn't think so :)

Happy Valemtimes Day readers. Love from Thoughts Translated xoxo

Happiness

It was a busy café with only a couple of empty tables. I picked up my tea and occupied one of the vacant ones. As I undressed the many layers of clothing that shielded me from the bitter outdoors, I felt a magnetic pull from the table of strangers that was directly in front of me. There was something uniquely different about their demeanor. 

He must have been in his mid eighties, slouching and not completely in control of his gestures. His eyes delivered fatigue, yet a sparkling glint of enthusiasm that was accompanied by a shy smile, welcoming me to watch their table. He peeled off the layers of his croissant with his misshapen knotty fingers, utterly unaffected by the mess he was making with the crumbs. He chewed on the pastry and every so often would dip a piece in his frothy café con leche. She had a dancing thing going on and was busy bobbing up and down with her own moves to the background music, which apparently only she could hear through the noisy outbursts in the café. She teased him with her hands and giggled every time he attempted to grab them. His lack of precision made her giggle, by which he felt rather proud. She was a bouncing ball of energy, also oblivious to her surroundings, high on her own adrenalin. They mutually fed off each other’s attention, effortlessly entertaining each other.

A flaming tangerine fluff stained her unblemished upper lip as she was helped to drink from the largest glass of fresh orange juice I had ever seen. Between her skits and stunts she was wiped and fed by the final member of this moving picture. Patiently she explained to him what the cackle was all about, whilst being smothered with kisses by her precious princess. He nodded back with the brightest smile, again talking to me with his shimmering eyes. As she divided her attention between her sun and moon, I noticed her own coffee was left untouched and turned cold. Unaffected, she sipped her now frozen coffee and instinctively searched for warmth by seizing her back with a tight bear hug. 

My time here was up and I had to leave. If I'd had one wish that evening, it would have been to replay and repeat. 

Let's Chat About Death

I have written about this subject before and that was a long time ago, I suppose in a way it’s a nice thing to know I don’t have to address this issue too often in my life. I have always said love and death are two uninvited guests and most of the time love enters your life and produces unimaginable pleasure and death; well quite the opposite, grief and pain, which you are never, prepared for. I have

also come to believe over the years that there are moments when those that love you the most also hurt you the most. So in fact we are basically living in this circle of pleasure and pain. How you choose to handle it and who you feel is worth suffering for is really a personal thing, which only you can answer.

Death can be a guest that arrives with prior warning too, so if you have a sick old relative who is in final stages of cancer, it’s pretty much a transparent warning of mental preparation to be ready for the ultimate result. We usually allow our minds to adjust to the knowledge and imagine how life will be if that person is no longer with us, we even become less selfish and want them to just be out of their suffering. In the end death seems like the best possible solution to this treacherous disease your dear one is going through. 

What happens when death announces itself completely uninformed and worse of all, it takes the life of a young healthy person. I believe there is no clear answer to this question. It’s Gods Will as we have read and heard time and time again. Can we honestly let God off the hook every time such a case is heard of? Excuse my inappropriate insinuation, I do have faith in Him and also pray for forgiveness. Nevertheless, it’s very difficult to accept death when those left behind are spouses, young children, unborn babies and parents. The rest of the world will mourn and make peace with the demise of this young person, but what about the immediate nucleus who have lost a key piece to their puzzle of life? A collapse occurs in the life of these individuals and the science of karma is questioned yet again. 

I agree that the person who passes away has completed his karmas in life and once their account is settled, it is time for them to go home. I believe in this spiritual scientific theory. I also believe good young people leave us far earlier than others and apparently the explanation for this is simply that God has sent pure souls down to earth in order to clear away darkness (which He has also created himself) and once these “pure” souls have completed their duties and cleansed enough on earth, they are called back to join God. I honestly try very hard to understand this theory and some days it makes perfect sense. Then there are days when I am just devastated and none of the spiritual seeps through and all I can think of to comfort myself is how our body and flesh also get tired and simply want to give up.

Can you control the mechanics of your body? I don’t think you can and what you really can never know is when the heart will stop beating and the rest of your organs just put their hands up. Medical science and spiritual science are forever playing a game of right and wrong. What one needs to understand is that even if a soul can live on, in the real world we cannot live without the physical body. We will miss the person in it’s entirety and the wife will miss her husbands body and his warmth that makes her feel safe at night, the child will miss the man who plays football with him, a mother will miss the conversations with her son and so on. 

Accepting death was never easy and it will continue to be the hardest truth of our lives. Are we ever prepared for death, well not at all? 

It may be true that the purpose for which the person who dies has been accomplished, and he / she has achieved all they desired on earth, but what remains unchanged is the contract they signed up for is still unfinished. God may have put a disclaimer on the contract, but there is never a waiver in the terms and conditions to say that one can leave as and when they please and no penalties will be incurred. There is always a loss and this is the loss I find exceedingly difficult to fathom. What wrong has the unborn child done, to come into this world and have a mother who is in grief and no father altogether. Is that the karma of an unborn child or is it the karma of the mother who is bearing the child in her womb? 

It is a great mystery we will never know in our living days and when we finally do discover our answers, well we are no longer able to share them with our loved ones.

From all this morbid talk I have learnt that life is indeed too short, far more beautiful than we think, you have no idea what’s waiting you at the end of the road and if we are unable to actually understand death in it’s result, should we not say all the things we cannot say if death has taken over?

I may die tomorrow, this is a fact and no one can question me on this statement. However, if I am alive today I wish to think that people will one day remember me as a good person. It’s funny how when we are alive, we are tirelessly trying to bring together all those people that will not shake hands on something, just because they choose not to get along. At my funeral though, you can bet anything that all those people and many more will be there and most probably be making heavy-hearted conversation at the cost of my death. So we come back in a circle once again. Love and Death are uninvited guests to a party of some sort, and bring people together on earth to celebrate or mourn. 

Don’t let your death be the celebration to bring your loved ones together. If God has a plan and he does bring good souls on earth to make them eliminate darkness from others lives, be that light and spread the love you may not be able to spread tomorrow; for who knows what’s in the offing! I do not wish to speak of you in past tense; I prefer to love you in the now. 

Opposites