How is Your Inner Season : The Little Letter Series: Delights of the Ordinary No. 51 (S2)
it’s a drip-daily kind of scene here, where I live and it will change soon.
#TheLittleLetters is my new series where I send you tiny letters of little learnings as opposed to long-form essays. They may help you gear back or throttle up but I promise most of them will be positively wise.
“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
- Nietzsche
Hi
I write to you my little letter cloistered in my hovel because it’s a drip-daily kind of scene here in Mumbai, where I live.
The earth is so sloppy-seepy-wettish that before it gets a chance to towel dry itself up, clouds start cooing and babbling once more and do their rainfall game again.
But no one complains.
Neither the earth nor the clouds not even the pouring water from the sky. They are all faultlessly familiar with each other. So much so, that each of them - the wind, the cloud, the sea, the rivers; everyone knows how to prance and pace around and still manages to stay unpretentiously gorgeous.
Then suddenly some clouds with warm wind whistle their way and it pours down before you know it, but no one complains! It is such an unmissable experience to behold this familiarity. The much synchronous way of how our nature keeps moving - seasons into seasons!
But no one complains.
Yet, for me, these muggy swamps, moist dankness and forever water-soaked grounds take on my nerves because with this season wood catches moulds quickly; clothes forever feel damp and the other day I found chocolate cookies turned soggy and soft!
It feels like being an ordinary human is sometimes rather mundanely confusing…Summers are too summery, rains are squeamishly dampening and winters are too wintery! No season works well for us. Nothing finds freedom for us. Because, as Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), the famous anthropologist says, “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,… We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”
Thus, what we extraordinarily require is a certain quality of alert attention to give to the world and understand that every season under heaven has a purpose and a time. Even when we opine about how things should have been planned for us and how people should have treated us, it is generally the tumult and chaos of the inside (our hearts) that overshadows the seasons of the outside. As the famous poet Khalil Gibran found his wisdom through seasons,
“In my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.”
But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring.”
Thus, for all of us who are and will be moving from season to season - hating most of it, pleasing in few of them- may we hold our fine attention towards seasons that are forever moving in their cyclical forwardness, and gather some softness of accepting that every season will soon open up into another and though replicating itself every year, it will be off-beat, non-identical from the earlier ones.
And so will be the account of our miraculous lives. Changing and moving.
After all, everything is cloudy and dripping here :)
Whichever season you are in - I wish you oodles of sunshine and gladness of rains.
I will see you next week.
- Anugrah
- The Little Letter SeriesDelights of the Ordinary is for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art, science, and philosophy with our practical 9-5 job space.
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. I write Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone and love for life. My newsletter intersects culture, art, and inner health in our practical 9-5 job space. Feel free to share. You can know more about me here and here.
Delights of the Ordinary currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can :)
Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with The Antidote for Self-Doubt, We Imagine Because We Are Living or read about Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life.
If you ever feel like dropping in a message or a comment, do not hesitate. We all can only thrive in people. We can be those ordinary creative beings who can change the world. You and me.
I once heard someone say 'if you are a realist seasons will come in your life.' This is so true....
Whether inside us or outside in the physical world seasons change...
Anyways....as always awesome read
It rained here and I have my complaints against Gurgaon rains. But as a human it's hard to decide what season we really want to settle for. Peace is internal thing rather than based on our circumstances.