Repetitive Yet Restorative Reminders: The Little Letter Series: Delights of the Ordinary No. 56 (S2)
We feel stuck and stagnant because we are not learning to pause.
#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.
Note: I wished to write something else to you this week but in the wake of the news of a young 26 year old E&Y employee collapsing and losing her precious life to work stress I feel responsible to keep sending these reminders to all of you even if they feel repatative.
Hi there!
I hope you are keeping well under the blue skies of your tiny ordinary world, and reading little-letters at this cusp of the year, when summers are mutating their ruddy-orangey-flaming fierceness into the softer amber sun of the autumn.
And I hope that this becomes utterly gentle to your sight and music to your mind!
We are all on our drip-soaking arduous journeys, hustling away to the urgent quick calls of responsibilities, mixing and managing our days until midnight, living over caffeine junk to beat our load.
And I suppose, in such moments of transition - seasonal or lifesize- we have all the reasons to embalm our hearts from every drubbing defeats and flop episodes of this year.
Seasons are a sort of cardinal direction to life, like the guiding star of Bethlehem, like a change of margins. And to me, autumn reminds to stop for a breath, to look at how the land lies and watch the grass grow or the leaves fall!
Just two years back the pandemic became a trilogy (2020-2022) when we all were closet-confined in our coops, holding tightly to our optimism as much as we could, still shrinking and expanding the stretchmarks of our hopes for the uncertain future ahead. Considering those noxiously sharp wounding times, it feels we have come a long way with vaccines around (even they are not trustworthy now); passing all COVID symptoms as the common cold. But what we faced was brutal.
It is good to reanalyse that, unlike milder autumns, life and timelines turns to throw most murderous arrows towards us, forcing us to stop.
Renowned philosopher and psychologist John Dewey (1859–1952) says, “As long as our activity glides smoothly along from one thing to another, or as long as we permit our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no call for reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way… brings us, however, to a pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another.”
And hence, take some moment to reconsider multiple reasons to be a thinking, feeling, and breathing human being, away from the burgeoning world of hustle culture that harps the Insta-worthy quotes: “Grind now, shine later” or "hustle until your haters ask if you're hiring. "
If you can move away, even slightly, from ageing your heart so soon, please do so.
Just be. As of now just be.
"Bats can hear shapes.
Plants can eat light.
Bees can dance maps.
We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all."
— Jarod K. Anderson
I hope that every weekend when my little letters hit your online postbox, among many thousands of other posts, these letters will be redemptive versions of life. The version of salvation from the life performances which are heavily buried under the materialist tradition of our world.
I also want to extend my gratitude to all of you fabulous readers, who write to me telling that my letters are awaited. I am highly thankful for all your love :)
To watch: The Important Places (link) is a 9-minute beautiful film, hoping to pull us towards other important things in life.
And below is the poem narrated in the film:
Child of mine
Come as you grow
In youth you will learn the secret places
The cave behind the waterfall
The arms of the oak that hold you high
The stars so near on a desert ledge
The important places
And as with age you choose your own way among the many faces of a busy world
May you always remember the path that leads you back
Back to the important places- From the movie "The Important Places"
Have a relaxing week and cherish the slant sunrays filtering through your window.
- Anugrah
Delights 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 am a nutritionist turned writer. 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.