Category: Life Ordinary

  • Live Empty

    old tree and new tree stories

    (via)

    Such is the pace of life now that I can easily identify with the opening paragraph here. As I read on, I completely loved the part about the graveyard being the most valuable land in the world, “because with all of those people are buried unfulfilled dreams, unwritten novels, masterpieces not created, businesses not started, relationships not reconciled.” The rest of the article is about dying empty – to complete every task, thought, action, to leave nothing unspoken, uncreated, unwritten. 

    Later, I read on Brain Picking, “Henry Miller on Creative Death“, in which Henry Miller, defining art, says, “Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem. No why or wherefore, no direction, no goal, no striving, no evolving…. This is the sublime, the a-moral state of the artist, he who lives only in the moment, the visionary moment of utter, far-seeing lucidity…. in the sense that any moment, every moment, may be the all; for the artist there is nothing but the present, the eternal here and now, the expanding infinite moment which is flame and song.” And later in the article “On the contrary, his zest for life is so powerful, so voracious that it forces him to kill himself over and over. He dies many times in order to live innumerable lives.“

    I read a pattern in these. Of dying every day and being reborn the next day. A new life. I faintly understand and relate to this, but within me is another side that plans, that likes stability, and saves for a rainy day. I am unsure of how these two can co-exist. And I can’t help but be drawn to the lines at the beginning of the Miller post ““One aspect of our nature cannot be exalted above another, except and the expense of one or the other.” 

    If so, I already know the winner, and as the first post points out, that would create an angst, or a perpetual state of discontent. It would seem as though the opposite of ‘die empty’ can only be ‘live empty’. There can be no middle path, and that’s scary and sad.

    until next time, empty vessels and a lot of noise

  • Often, these days…

    10b

    From a shared computer at office in 2003 and posts written over the weekend, to a shared computer at home and posts written over the weekend and scheduled for days far ahead in 2013,  it’s been one awesome journey. Thank you for reading.  🙂

    until next time, tenacious

  • Food for the soul

    Thanks to Zomato, I got to spend some bak bak time with Mayur back in February. Along with Rocky, this guy gets to do the two things I’d rather do always – eat and travel. While it was a fun meet up, it was impossible to agree on the subject of meat. Most of the others around were fanatical carnivores – like myself (and I was wearing a tee with the message above) – so we traded insults with him for the first few minutes before the man silenced us with “food is like religion, and you should not piss on other people’s temples”.

    After that the conversation quickly moved to life philosophy. I (along with at least one other person) was curious to know how he kept himself interested in the food + travel routine. Wouldn’t it get monotonous? We talked of retaining child-like levels of curiosity and wonder, an openness to experiences, of starting the day asking what newness can be done today and realised that as we grow older, we look for reasons not to do things, as opposed to the reverse.

    After taking my trip with a food quote, (and underlining his instant wit) he went off to talk to other folks, and the rest of discussed how this also translates to how we interact with other people. Earlier, we used to trust others until they gave us a reason not to, and these days, it’s exactly the reverse. I wondered if this is probably related to the ‘openness to experiences’ we had talked of earlier.  (more…)

  • Friendship grants

    In Rediff’s review of Kai Po Che, there’s a line that goes “Quoting from Bollywood, impromptu excursions and taking each other for granted without guilt is the prerogative of buddy-dom,…” That’s probably arguable, but if it is right, I now understand why my buddy count has been low since inception.

    The first – excursions – I think, can be handled. That’s despite my obsession with planning. 🙂 The second is a completely different story though. I hate taking people for granted and if I end up doing it and realising it later, I get guilt pangs even after apologising. It probably comes from the premise that I hate being taken for granted and thus the “Do unto others as you would have them do to you” gets applied. (more…)

  • Happy Wholly

    There are 2 versions of this post! If you’re reading this version, pretty much nothing has changed for you, especially if you’ve subscribed to the blog. If you’re a visitor, you’ll see a little more content – things that have thus far resided at the Work blog. I decided to unify the two blogs after a lot of thought. Lots of aspects were considered, since the other blog is a pretty opinionated 6 year old! But in the end, there’s only one me, and while I might have more identities across the web, the unified blog will represent most of what I have to say!

    I’ll be removing the Networked Blogs app soon, and integrating better with the Facebook Page I created a long time back, but never really used! Will have that up and running by next week, so do ‘Like’ 🙂 I have already changed the feed urls, so those on an RSS diet don’t need to do a thing. I will be creating a combined feed, and options for individual categories as well in the next few weeks.

    And of course, what shift without renovation? So we’ll have a new design coming up – nothing drastic, but a little better connected to www.manuprasad.com, which will continue to be the identity aggregator, but in a different avatar! Soon!

    until next time, over and in 🙂