Respect? Do I?

All relationships emanate from the first feel of appreciation and through the corridors of mutual respect towards understanding and acceptance and love leading to happiness and all its synonymic feelings. The pertinent question hanging on me for quite some time is whether in normal parlance we do unto ourselves what we do unto others when in love. Do we really appreciate ourselves (without being complacent); do we respect ourselves as much as we expect from others; do we understand and love ourselves (without being vain and egoist)?

Honestly, I have struggled in answering these questions positively.

Have for long been unforgiving and un-oblivious of rejections (according to me) that have hurt me over the passage of time, complaining quite unreasonably and what-they-say-quite-often ‘indulged’ myself in luxury of brooding and self-pity quite unwittingly though. The other day, a friendly plain speaking: ‘The day you accept yourself, with all your frailties, generously and lovingly, sixty percent of these complaints will vanish’ hit me hard like a thud and I stumbled and fumbled with words but beat a retreat accepting in totality that true, I have not accepted myself as respectfully as I deserve.

No gainsaying the fact that the citadel of a relationship stands on load bearing columns and beams of respect and appreciation, love and understanding-all these have the portent potential of questionability, questionable stability and minus any of these columns, the fate of the structure of relationship quite imaginably is shaky, uncertain, collapsible anytime.

But that’s in relation to ‘the other’ factor. What about our own selves respecting our own privacy, judgment, freedom, choice and right to be, speak, live? When vociferous and confident counterparts demand explanations then the meek, super-hyper-sensitive inside us finds easy escape route in self-condemnation, rejection and sometimes even total denial. As we sow so do we reap: when we choose to show dis-respect to ourselves why we should expect to be respected and accepted? Unable to appreciate our own idiosyncrasies, we really cannot command respect from others-there being such a thin thread between command and a demand.

If only we could learn to sing to ourselves what we love others to hear-be it ‘Chiquitita’, ‘We shall overcome’, ‘Arziyan’ or ‘Chal mere saath hi chal, ay meri jaan e ghazal’.

Words

Words
Bearers of hope
Torch of light
Rays of moon or
Sunshine
In hopefuls
'coming'
'Reaching'
'About  to be'
' With you'...

Words
Can slow or stop
with
'Going'
'Leaving'
Going back'
'Goodbye'
'Okay,take care'
'See you'
'Wait outside'...

Words
Harbingers of
Hope or despair
Transparent
True
Pure
Un-hiding
Speaking
Words
All welcome
For they never can hurt
As much as
The worn silence.

The Rain Down The Memory Lane

The sky is overcast and so is inside with clouds of different kind with all the possibility of rain, too.

Its quite un-understandable why we cling on to the memories of days gone by, never ever living really in present only, hardly ever able to forget the dates, events of joys or more often of grief and sorrow. So much so that the shadows of such dates are cast before and sometimes we dread and sometimes we plain let go the trail of events of the distant past as a film vivid, crystal clear and get ourselves in the mould that generally steals all words, speech. Silence envelops and we haplessly watch ourselves indulge in the luxury of brooding.

For sure, 'missing' has great ability to slow us down, stop us like a treadmill coming to emergency halt with power failure; missing someone snatches precious today and its treasurable moments and forces us to live, re-live what we belonged to or long for the time we can never be sure about; missing bogs us down, douses the spirit to carry on, eclipses our own resilience and still we miss. There is no way we can deny that past and future are integral part of our very being as anything or any person.

Why don't we have a child like memory that does not allow him to remember beyond a split second what transpired, how it made him cry; easeful forgetfulness of a child evades us, the grown ups. Is this the price we pay for growing?

The fading memory of the elders is something not easily palatable to themselves or to people around as sometimes (as in dementia) their concentration gets fixed on any point of time in childhood, youth and they live the same moments over and over again much to chagrin of the listeners who are hardly endowed with patience with which the old people love narrating.

There is a 'calendar' in all of us with circles, asterisks, scribbles all intact and unwittingly we renew it year by year-such colossal memory which can beat all i -pads and i- pods, cards and hard discs !

Sometimes we miss with stoic acceptance; it does not make things any easier. But when we miss without a hope- near or distant- it’s hard, indeed.

The tiny droplets have started trickling down. Oh! It’s raining.