One More Step, One More Breath and One More Sip of Love

 All you need to avoid a fall is to take one more step, then another, and then another. You should be bothered about just one more step. Forget about miles and more miles. These are meaningless without the step just about to define your current journey, your present. Being in league with one more step makes you the real journeyman. It means you are right there, still moving, still fighting. The chance of victory is always alive as long as you are ready to take one more step. And the possibility of life is active only and only because of the upcoming breath.

So mind your step on a beautiful dawn. One more day, one more step and the fresh dose of the next breath. These are the basic building blocks of a well-meant life, a purposeful journey. You look too far into the hazy distances, and you lose yourself in the puzzlement that lies scattered around. You mind your next step, and you immediately find yourself. You mind your next breath and instantly you feel the enthusiastic pulse of life throbbing in your veins.

Just like life means one more breath, living means one more step. Life and living are simply a beautiful symphony between the next step and the upcoming breath, laying the foundation for the next and then the next, and on and on. These set up the notes for the beautiful melody that life is.

Each meaningful, mindful step becomes the destination in itself. If you completely mind your step, you then need not look for destinations and their assortment of heartbreaks far away into the distances of time and geography. If you inhale and absorb completely the portion of life provided to you in one breath by the existential forces, you won’t feel the need to explore living in the farfetched quarters of make-believe concepts erected in the hope of a happy, contented life. If you mind your breath, allowing it to give you the most it has to offer, you won’t be running into many decades of longevity to feel the elixir that living is. You get it, right here, in an instant. Life then turns into living and a reward in itself.

One more step and one more breath, taken under tender observation and careful awareness, are the building blocks of life and living. They are the fabrics of your being. Work on them and you get a wonderful framework decorating your mind, body and soul.

Don’t fall, take at least one more step, then another, then another. Only this much! That’s all you have to do for life and living: one more breath, one more step. And your one more step becomes more significant than the endless miles and still more miles. Your step defines miles not vice versa. One more breath, one more step! Seeped in the awareness of this incredible duo, you will first surprise yourself in the effortless ease you have walked on the path of life and living. You create and retain countless chances to reach a point, where you astonish yourself the most in your achievement.

The darkness isn’t completely dark as long as the tiniest of a flicker burns steadily, unsteadily in any corner of the cosmos. It holds the chances of light, of a win, of a fight, sometime when the conditions are more suitable. Hold your light. Hold onto your chances of a full blaze. It can even be the littlest star reflected in your fatigued eyes from the farthest distances across stormy clouds.

Just look back and spot some small-time remark of appreciation, some grateful bow, some serious acknowledgment, some feeble smile, some tiny reward to the tune of INR 500, or some words of praise. Hold them. Cherish them. Pick them up from the dusty corners of your room. They are the treasure. They are the light. They are the breath. They are one more step. One more step is as important as the complete journey. Or even bigger than that! A tiny flicker of light, lost in the darkish wombs of loss, is as big as the big-bang of primordial light and fire that created this universe.

Long before you conquer the world, learn to be happy with the tiny rewards that hold your dreams in piece, which sustain the life of your goals just like one more breath sustains your life. A tiny word of appreciation will one day turn into a massive trophy, a huge applause, with camera lights flashing around and thousands of screaming fans. This little smile on your lips will turn into a broad grin of triumph.

Hold the littles in your life, acknowledge their role like one more step keeps the journey, and one more breath keeps life together. Do only this much and you will naturally find yourself taking your sips of love and kindness, turning you richer on any scale you weigh upon.

Spiritual Practice to be a Loving Person

 The virtue of working hard need not be emphasized any further. It’s already beaten down too much. Practice makes a man perfect. Same applies to love. The things that you most feel like doing are the ones you really love and like. The domain of such likeable things can be increased. Practiced love can definitely subdue hate and anger.

Shakira: “I think love is something that you have to work on, and it develops over experience and time. Love is a practice.”

It's not about being a God incarnation. It's merely about recalling your essential loving self as often as possible. Practiced love spreads too fast; faster than hate. You have to do it to believe me.

Satchel Paige: “Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.”

As we tend to forget our inherent kindness, it suits the purpose if we simply decide to be aware of it as much as possible. This awareness realigns the neurons in the brain, making goodness almost instinctive habit. If we can make rockets, we are definitely capable of this much self-engineering. 

Mass-produced Anti-love Pills: Bigotry

 

Manufactured, tailored hate is one of the vilest human creations. Caste, creed, class and religion are the evil threads of this fabric of organized hatred. The industry is for mass production of detestation and prejudice under standardized norms. People take sips of hate, anger and disgust and give battle cries for individual and collective salvation.

Bigotry is the biggest challenge against practicing collective compassion. The very air becomes vicious. The sense of reasoning gets blinded. We sleepwalk into the pandering arms of violence and take society away from love, sympathy, care and consideration. Beware!

Intolerance and narrow-mindedness are the symptoms of a sacred disease. Its affliction leads to a peculiar addiction and gives pleasure because it becomes the channel of all the pent up emotions, frustrations and stress. No wonder bigotry dwarfs the individual soul, keeping the rays of truth, and essentially love and compassion in its wake, from one's inner self.

Bigotry simply murders the larger possibilities of an enhanced self, fooling the individual to see virtual ghosts around. Very soon you hit the pinnacle of insecurity. Standing at the height of phantom fears, you drop your loving self to hold onto hate and malice. And mind you, bigotry is no copyright of a particular religion. All of the so called popular faiths have their patent claims to a lesser or greater degree.

Organized efforts promote fear, hatred is just the reaction. Bigotry is nothing but an effort to stifle truth to death. It's in fact the primal seat of the evil in the modern world. Tyranny, aggression, cruelty and injustices are the foot soldiers in its army. They attack the castle of truth where the treasure of love lies. And unfortunately, castles of truth are falling in society after society, unseating compassion from the throne and installing modern day tyranny in the form of racism, fundamentalism, casteism, sectarianism and sexism. No wonder, the world, despite trillions of science and technological conveniences, is as unsafe and dangerous as it was thousands of years back. Then where is the progress that we so proudly proclaim to have achieved?  

So my dear bigot, watch out, there is poison in your plate!

My dear terrorist, the epitome of hate and abyss of love, I have a very simple question for you. Why does killing come so easy to you? Each and every breath of a newborn is literally purchased by its parents and wards in lieu of love, affection and care that go beyond any monetary value. Why then you simply get ready to sniff out lives, the very same lives that have been taken care of tirelessly and unselfishly by parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends.

Killings in the name of religion is what defines we earthlings as of now. Quite surprisingly, the fundamental tenets of every religion aim to make the followers better human beings, better not just for the self, but for others as well. Religious texts seem imploring a person to become an instrument of betterment, a heaver of humanity forward on its march to better days. The core of all religions is meant to be love and compassion. Why then so much of hate and blood-bathing in the name of religion?

The walk between good and evil is very dodgy and testing. Like a rope-walker is inclined to fall, with each step it’s about evading the fall. There is a natural pull for the fall. Only with each careful step and awareness one can move on. Goodness requires practice. It doesn’t come naturally anymore. There has been too deep a wound in Mother Nature. It has set into motion a vicious circle of stress, tension and frustration in the social systems as well.

Malice and cruelty have their own instinctive, convenient outlet through the little channels of ego pervading through our self-consciousness. Hate has its own natural pull. It just shoots off, gathering its own force once let loose, like a boulder rolling downhill. In hate you can do anything; it’s a terrific ignition. In anger you can rant endlessly.

In contrast, in love and peace you have few options. Love is going uphill. You have to hold it in your heart. You have to carry its weight. You pant and perspire. Man, it needs effort, simply because it does no longer come naturally. Thousands of years of struggle to survive has genetically ingrained fear, insecurity and hate almost to the core of our being. We are on the verge of fully losing the essential loving nature of our self forever. At both the individual and collective levels, altruism sounds an absurd concept. Things, situations, people, places, organizations, institutions and governments are on a hair-trigger alert. Slightest trigger and the arrow is shot.

Mention love and how many words you can speak out. Love after all is the single-word language of peace, silence and harmony. Try to make a list of the good deeds to be done around, you will twiddle your hair to find anything good to do around. Now mention hate, anger and destruction. And you have the options scattered around you to carry out the task ranging from verbally abusing somebody, slapping, screaming, breaking heads, throwing bricks to even killings.

Religion in practice is like bamboo in the hands of a rope-walker. It is meant to avoid the fall. It is supposed to prevent your collapse with each step. It does so by making you aware of your goodness, helping you take one step, then another and then another to complete the journey.

The religion in the hands of bigots doesn’t remain religion at all. It’s a poisoned pill. Condemn it in direct terms without fiddling with diplomatic maneuvering and falling in the clutches of impotent concept like secularism. Bigots are just plain murderers of religion. Throw them out of their authoritative seat. Hold them by their neck, kick them on their ass and spit on their version of religion that ordains killing innocent people. Not only they force a fall from the rope of life, they kill the soul as well. They kill the soul by sidelining love and replace it with hate. It imprisons the soul. It is skin deep addiction for some abnormal gratification of the senses. It pampers the evil side of the personality.

There is always a choice to be either good or bad. The evil book of bigotry robs one of this natural choice. Only dark force with its ghosts of hate, jealousy, anger, insecurity and frustration remain in the fray. It grips you and makes you an instrument of the evil, a foot-soldier of chaos. You don’t see the light from within. You are a blinded, crazy robot, ready to strike. And when you strike you just kill, without bothering about who you are killing. The victims are mostly innocents. Here lies the biggest tragedy.

When a child, who understands religion no more than the alphabets in her books, is killed in the unsparing spool of violence, what lines in the book of bigotry can justify the deed? When innocent people out for shopping, going to office and out there on the small stage of life get killed, which God in which heaven is appeased? If He is appeased, then to the hell with such a God!

There are many secular souls around who will point out the correlation between terrorism in the world and Islam. Aren’t most of the acts of terror perpetrated by Muslims, they say. Before we get into the debate, let us take a look at the plight of a Muslim boy. I can spot a few factors that allow the seed of bigotry to grow a bit faster than other societies.

Ever wondered why so many Muslim boys take to the self-destroying path of violence? In my humble opinion, polygamy may be responsible. Multiple wives, many children and family strife mean that children grow beyond the axis of love and affection required to groom a loving and caring persona. Long before you love the world outside, and become responsible to keep things in order, you need to have your own quota of love, your share of affection, your portion of trust within the family.

In polygamy you get tested. You get isolated when you need your near and dear ones the most. You end up competing instead of being loved and love in return. A polygamist family lacks the positives of a cohesive unit, nurtured by the sweet shower of parental and sibling bonhomie and affection. Life becomes a struggle at the home itself, the point you start from, and where things should be stable to groom a healthy personality. Your father abandons your mother at his mere fancy, gets a new wife, your mother either sulks as a secondary object in the same house, or leaves to either rot in poverty, or remarry, and you with your real brothers and sisters, get pushed around the corners. How will a young sapling take roots? Childhood gets uprooted.

All religions have adapted to get attuned to changing times. Religion according to me is just a set of adaptable principles to facilitate life and living as per the changing times. Muslim clerics and theologians should encourage monogamy. It will sow the seeds of trust, love and stability in the family, the point a child begins his journey. Islam means peace and monogamy will help the real spirit of Islam. With peace and trust in families, Islam will become the great religion it is meant to be.

Not that the problem lies within polygamous Muslim households only. It sets the trigger though by pushing young Muslim boys into the corridors of hate because they grew up beyond love and affection. The powers that be, the developed countries and those who nurture the wish to rule the world, set their geostrategic boats rapidly sailing in the fast paced currents of Islamophobia.

Women are the spring source of the fountain of love in the household. Women-centric reforms in Islam, giving females more free space on the open stage of life, will let loose the cool waters of love and affection that will surely douse the fire and fury of anger and hate.   

Fragrance of Love in Small, Sweet Stories

 

There are too many news stories going around with the alarming buzz of stinging bees. They strike, bite in fact, and spellbind our senses. Having pushed us into a spell of craziness, these unfortunately become the stories directing, misdirecting most of the time, the course of our lives.

Catching onto some good news is as good as maintaining hope and redeeming truth. Catch it, pamper it, and spread its soft message. Not just for truth but for a more loving self. We only get what we have been looking for and working for. Try to salvage good from the reams and reams of falsehood and propagandas. Pick it up. It may not be too shiny but its essential value is worth gold. Then please allow it to glitter a bit so that it imparts hope to some fading struggle somewhere.

Shallow, inconsequential earth-shaking impacts hardly bring fundamental changes. They rake up lot of dust though, which again gives you watery eyes. Slow, gentle warmth of almost intangible steps lets out the breezy pace of far deeper, effective changes than you think.

Anne Frank: “Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”

The real stories are very soft and small, beyond the big-staged melodrama. They lie buried under the shitty garbage dumps of bigger issues driven by hate, malice, discrimination, oppression and tyranny. And these real stories, having the morale of the story of creation, have love and harmony at the core. We just need to sieve these nuggets from the tons of useless sand to have our shining inspiration to lead a life of caring and compassion.

In anything around you, you won't find life's lessons put up on a hoarding as big-lettered scientific principles. These are the peanut seeds hidden in little stories and happenings around. You have to crack the story and eat the message. Lessons of hope and redemptions are packaged in tiny instances.

Massive occurrences have an earthquake type impact. They too have their messages, like war has message for peace. But it is indirect by showing the tragedy of blood and death. Here you learn your lessons from the fatality that has already taken its toll.

Small stories have a direct message of love and empathy. These even give clues to build up your tiny path of redemption. These are the songs of freedom and liberty. These guide you in searching your life's goal, help you in subduing your false fears and take to the stage of life with a bigger character than you are doing presently. These tiny morals ensure safe passage for the voice of your soul.

Jenova Chen: “I would say 'Flower' had a story. It is told through the environment.”

There is a fence separating the lesser us from the most exquisite version of us. The barrier comprises the posts and barbs of insecurities, fear, prejudices and anxieties. These small wire-cutters help you in cutting through the barbed fencing and help you in meeting the best version of yourself. These small lessons help you on the path of seeking truth. And mind you, no path to truth bypasses the garden of loving kindness. Each step dispels some rigidity, taking you closer and closer to your true self.

Ram Charan: “Life is one big love story with hundreds of little love stories within it.”

Forget about rockets, nukes, missiles, bombastic egos, skyrocketing sensex, high rises, malls, fashion, militaries, cars, bla bla bla. To me the tiniest story of love and compassion is bigger than any other story on earth.

I vividly recall the story of a stork with a plastic ring on its beak, an apt testimony to our crimes on Mother Nature. Among huge deluge of jingoistic battles of egos and power-aspiring super-species, this tiny story of our crimes against Mother Nature was unassumedly tucked in a corner. But then a run for redemption with still left out love and care in human heart made it up the best story. To me at least!

There are people who aren’t looking too high. They just look around for simple things. But their eyes are special. They have love and kindness. So this good soul clicks a two-and-half year old, male black-necked stork at Basai wasteland, some 34 kms from Delhi. On zooming the picture, the birder found a plastic ring stuck around the bird’s beak. The poor bird appeared on the brink of starvation, not being able to open its beak to eat or drink.

The Wildlife department set up three teams involving their own officials and people from Bombay Natural History Society. Apart from this, nature and bird lovers from Delhi and Haryana also volunteered. Hundreds of compassionate souls actually roamed around hundreds of kilometers in sweltering heat to undo a portion of our plasticized sins. It took these soldiers of love 5 days to save the bird.

In the last leg of the search, two young boys from Haryana, Rakesh Ahlawat and Sonu Dalal, ran for 4 kms to catch the bird just before the jaws of death waiting nearby in the form of hunger and thirst. Aren’t they and the others involved in the search real heroes? They didn’t do it for a small news item in the newspapers. They did it for love. To them a bird’s life matters. As long as there are such people, hope remains. And symbolism of such acts of love lays substantial foundations of collective efforts at long-delayed redemption of our conscience.    

I remember the two pictures: one with the stork having plastic ring around its beak and the other where it’s safely sheltered in a spacious cage with a tub of water and eatables in front. The transition from tragedy to motherly care. This, to me, is the real story.

Guys, high time we start undoing some of our collective sins. Imagine the pictures: the ring of death and the cradle of life. The first, our own doing; the second, some undoing on our part. Which one is preferable? Of course, the answer will be unanimous.

All of us can be loving heroes and heroines of such small stories. It doesn’t need special effort. All it takes is to accept your essentially kind and considerate nature.

Small Holds the Key to your Most Lovable Self

 

Mother Teresa: “Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”

If you want to have a ‘complete’ picture of beauty, you have lost it. Forget. You will never get one. Irony is that life is brimming with beauty. Just that you have to notice in small frames. Spring breeze, birds chirping, sleepy pastures, snowy peaks, solitary woods, wild flowers, solitude-seeped stars, floating clouds, smiles, kindness, love and what not. The list is endless.

Great visions are pieced together through small, small frames caught by heart. Try it. Otherwise all this vastness out there has no meaning.

As Matt Bevin says, “While it may seem small, the ripple effects of small things is extraordinary.”

At a more practical level, take Napoleon Hill’s advice: “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”

Everything is so cute in its smaller version. Try to remember how many times you got pangs of compassion and felt like hugging big bearded bad fellows. Not many, I am sure. And how many times you suffered the pangs to mollycoddle a little one? Many times, undoubtedly. Well man, small holds its charm. You can hold it. Take a pan shot of its vision. Reality gets more defined in a small frame. Take your shots. Love, compassion, harmony, grace and dignity are the lines that show you truth more realistically in a small frame. More importantly, small is never distant. It's near you in your day-to-day life. You need not be a gutsy voyager to seek it.

Simply observe small things. You bet it, the boons and perks are inversely proportional to their little size.

High time we realize the mammoth value of the small. Everything has an assortment of basic building blocks. Just that we are prone to ignore the constituents while staring at the larger picture. So guys let us dive into the world of micros. It’s full of wonders I tell you.

If you can't so much as smile back at a flower's innocent, selfless offer of fragrance and beauty, I doubt your readiness and ability to laugh and roll in pleasure over the bigger boons of life. Learn to love and like the small-small charms of life. These are the building blocks that get you the largest palace of happiness and meaning in life.

The palace of happiness never lies in totality. It merely lurks as the next milestone. We can never reach it. But along the way we can pick up little fragments of beauty, love and compassion that constitute the spirit of that palace of our dreams. So don't overstep a chance to light up your face with a smile. Don't miss a chance to bring the same curve of life on someone's lips who needs it.

Happiness always was and forever will be defined by small things. The bigger things are just mirages lurking fakely over the horizon. They exist only to delude us so that we keep running and stampede over our little chance of happiness. So guys pick up your tiny fragments of happiness lying there around you.

You don't have to run too far. Stay there. Smile. There are as many things in your life to be happy about as there are stars in the sky. But these are tiny, twinkling feeble spots with their ray of hope. These are not bombarding stars, dazzling the cosmos. Learn to love the tiny stars of your life, for they don't startle you. They just hold the tiny flicker of hope and happiness and well that's what life is: a small, hopeful, happy ray, gently twinkling, imperceptibly almost, for a journey from the unknown to some vestiges of knowledge and awareness. Best of luck travelers!