I Hold my Key to Happiness

There are days when everything feels dull. Even rain fails to raise your spirit and mile long traffic jams make resistance futile even for the most resilient among us.

By afternoon you are angst-ridden, irritated and wondering, why did you even get out of the bed in the morning? 

Often, such questions defy answers - especially if it is a Monday like today! 

So, I try going existential and ask myself questions like, 'Can a whole life be lived in a single Monday? Or Can one evening of your life be the most important and most exciting of your life?

The answer I feel is, yes.

These moments that pass us by at breakneck speed are ours to either fill with happiness and laughter so that they become framed in our memories as happy events.

Why else would I hold on to a memory from age three, where my ma after dressing me in a yellow T shirt with a couple of dancing foxes embossed on it and dousing me in baby talc, gives me a hug calling me "shonamoni"?

Or when at age 5 I had to clean up all the toys after my toddling sister who declared very grandly, "I know how to play, but not how to clean up." I was not angry. Mildly irritated but, immensely tickled by her attitude. She had just learnt to speak.

   

I keep getting these flashes from far away summer vacations when we had stolen sweets from my grandmom's larder and hidden them in the coal cellar. We were of course caught red handed eating the exposed sweets and told, 'now you have eaten what all the cockroaches and bacteria has already tasted..." We thought, we were going to die!

I also remember how someone from Delhi upon looking at the Juhu sea for the first time from the double Decker bus in Bombay exclaimed, "Look. I never knew there was a desert in Bombay!"

I had looked around wondering, "did anyone else in here hear what was just said?"

Life is nothing but memories. I firmly believe that they should be happy rather than sad.

I have always taken a mental broom and cleaned out bad memories from my mind. It is easy, just clean up and throw inside a mental strong box and lock it up.

Keep the key safe. Ensure that only you should be able to open it and  no one else.

And coming back to Mondays, I have a similar strong box of happy moments where I have lived an entire short life. I just open the box and let it rain happy memories when stuck in a jam, facing a hard-to-please client or almost dozing off in a boring meeting or something much worse. Happy memories and happy times make you feel life's easy.

Also, when you look up in a bad situation and smile at another miserable soul, you make that person happy as well.

I try making happy memories in even the worst of times. I keep one eye out for that silver lining that most of us miss because we are busy being miserable. You never know when you'll need to open this treasure chest and cheer yourself up because nothing seems to be going your way at all. So, keep this key handy.

It is easy to do. Just smile and look around and everything will change around you. You are free to look away from the reasons that are causing you heartburn, ignore them even. After all, it is your life. You need to call the shots not anyone else.

When Music and Lyrics Found me Once More

In the house of lovers, the music never stops, the walls are made of songs and the floor dances.
~ Rumi

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour!
~ Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

All the poets, mystics and bards cannot be wrong. Music relaxes, soothes and rejuvenates. Right? Yesssss... but only if it is healing and not hurting you. I have been now trying for months to write this piece but, did not know what to say. I know now that I was staring at it from the wrong end. So, I'll write here about not only how I was lost to music and lyrics for years together but also the joy and gratitude when I was found.

There were these close to ten years of my life when I hated music - something I had loved from the time I was a kid - but it did happen - all because it seemed to be a thing my tormentor (seemed to) love and enjoy. It was a reflex that I failed to either understand or acknowledge. I acted delusional, thinking I had outgrown music and poetry. I know. Foolish woman! Right? I agree. But, you have to understand that I was trying too hard.

And then, freedom happened. It took them (music and lyrics) no time at all to return to their rightful places - in my ears, heart and mind.

Those few years when music of any kind gave me headaches and made me want to shout out aloud were strange. I label them weird because it was not music's fault but mine for trying too hard to fit like a square peg in a round hole. It was also the fault of other people in my life for mocking and laughing at my sensibilities and shocking me with their attitude not to mention their 'affected and bad taste' in music or let me be sweet and say 'different,' that was thrust on my face day in and day out. Hammering at my senses, eroding my taste till I thought  all music was noise and poetry was stupid too. Blasphemy? Agreed. But, the raw truth.

Music and lyrics, my dear friend for ages, my companions through adolescence and early adulthood, had not deserted me then even though I had closed my ears and eyes to them and packed them off on an unknown journey. I heard snatches in my mind while travelling or working and more than snatches when cooking and even when reading a good book. But, for years I turned off music and lyrics only listening by mistake an odd Bollywood release quickly turning it off before it got too loud for my senses to bear. Not even Sufi music would sooth me. I sometimes heard music just to blend in. Not really listening but, nursing a headache behind a polite smile. It was a strange phase. It will remain in my mind the phase when I tried to conform. 

Music, I have realized, goes with freedom. If you are free to be happy, free to be sad, free to think your own thoughts, it will become your constant companion but, if someone was laughing at your choices, mocking your valor and I call it valor because it takes guts to try, anything and everything, music flees from the region around your ears. It also flees when trying too hard to be someone else just to make people around happy. They also become alien when you know you cannot love nor are being loved. When life becomes a pyramid of making the 'right choices' to survive - music and lyrics stop making any sense in that world.

But, I don't want to dwell on the time when music had fled my world. No. I want to celebrate the fact that now, we are back together once more and it's been a good two years! Time to clink crystal and say, "Cheers!" to two years of freedom.

Just one word of caution to whoever is reading this: Please take it as a very serious sign when you turn your back to music and start thinking it is noise because it is perhaps the first alarm set off together by your head and heart that things are wrong. Very wrong. Just run from the situation and back to music and lyrics because therein lies your salvation.

Be happy always and dance when you are cooking or walking on a lonely road because you are never alone with music and lyrics playing in your head. 

With my heartfelt thanks to Tagore who put me to sleep with his wonderful music every night throughout my crazy and difficult adolescent years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6srT3VWSzRk