Never Cliché

Dear …………………………,

I saw a great movie today. A beautiful one.

The sun’s almost down here. The birds are all returning to their modest abodes. If every day was a movie, then this would be a very cliché ending. But yet this is beautiful. Every day is filled with ephemeral clichés that we seem to enjoy with a satisfaction that makes no sense at all. Stefan, haven’t you gotten tired of seeing the sunset, the flying birds, and the full moon? You’ve been loitering on this earth for 18 years. But no, you still enjoy them. They still make sense to you.

The movie I saw today ended with a cliché. And yes, I would have liked it to surprise me, but it didn’t. But yet, it was beautiful, full of meaning. Today, films are trying to survive. Everything is becoming cliché. Around a lakh movies are made every year. New clichés are made every day. Playwrights and directors are rocking their brains left and right to find something new.

Why do I never stop loving a good sunrise? Why do I never get bored with nature?

Is it the acceptance of my unawareness of many of the delicate details I have yet to see? Maybe.

I have a feeling that a cliché becomes annoying only when you are aware of a better possibility. If this is indeed true, then it is the limitations of my imagination that makes me fall in love over and over again with nature, love, beauty and another human being.

And that, I find extremely beautiful. In a world that keeps changing in time, I find it comforting to think that my sheer oblivion to an alternative for many things and my sheer inability to form one, makes what is there everlasting and beautiful.

God, you have indeed painted your glory in the skies and in the most minute vestiges of nature. I can’t find anything to replace it.

Yours,

Stefan

 

 

 

True Love

It stays there, lingering in your heart like a mellifluous note of tranquility. Its sonorous echo hits against the walls of your heart and asks to be let out and be shared. It’s a love that’s pure. It’s not limerence or lust. It is an iridescent truth. It is a love that makes you want to find the meaning in life, it is the love that makes you want to love God.

I look around as I move like a somnambulist through time. The love in me brings tears to my eyes as I see how true love is caged by the pride of man. They fall on the open grounds of my heart, the very foundations of what is true and they let out a petrichor that is a stink at the same time. It brings fragrance to the value in the true but cuts against the walls of my heart with its stark contrast to what is beautiful.

Look into the heart of a child. Look to the strings stretched across the heart of a young soul. So innocent, unpolluted by the world. Listen to the song that comes out and treasure it in a transparent box with little space. Let not anything pollute it, but let everything behold its beauty.

Man, look at how God has painted love with ethereal colors. Look at how it glows in peace and how it dances in true forgiveness. Don’t complicate it, don’t mock it. Look through the eyes of the creator on a suffering world.

Oh, only if we would understand true love!

God help us, come to us and let true love flow through us…………

Isn’t it ironic??

Life can be ironic sometimes. Here’s something I thought about when I heard people move about in the room above me.

I hear them above me, like restless birds in a nest. The shifting of beds and screeching of chairs on tiles, seep through the walls and reach me. I’m lying there awake. My body shifts in my bed as I try to find a cozy spot to fall asleep.

I hear them again. The shuffling of their feet echoes in my room. Their faint voices seem to fade into the corners of my room. Still I don’t see them.

If I could go through walls, I would have stood up on my bed and reached out into their world. But I can’t. So I will have to wait and maybe, live with not knowing them at all.

It’s a strange world out there. Where I walk past people I know nothing about. Where I brush past strangers and forget their faces forever.

It’s an irony and could very well be a tragedy. But its how humans are. We categorise and prioritise. We go deeper into detail and embrace precision to empower development.We prioritise knowledge and seek what we need to find. Without that, what we see around would never exist.

This is our ossified version of life.

But isn’t it all ironic???

Baby Embrace

It’s amazing what you can learn from a great relationship. The raw, sincere love that you come across in a relationship somehow jolts and shakes you violently, waking you from your dormant stage of inaction and makes you do something for other people. You learn to value life a smidge more.

Yesterday, I was sitting in the last row at church, attending a music event. As I sat there, I was looking on amused by the actions of a baby boy on his father’s shoulders.

He was just sitting there, his face like the face of any other baby, a face that is trying to make sense of everything around him. Things did change for him after he came out into this really bright place. No wonder babies have got a look confused at times, when they see us. They have a way of seeing through the words, mostly because they don’t understand them.

They make conclusions completely based on what they see and what they feel and sometimes by what they hear, especially when it’s too loud.😊

You know how when you ‘meow’ at a cat, it suddenly cocks up its head and looks at you like, ‘What in the world……’ and then looks around as if to ask the world ‘Has he lost his mind?’ Yeah, I love that look, which is why you’ll always see me ‘meowing’ at cats. Lol

You’ll understand why I said that in a few seconds.

Anyway, I was sitting there, persistent, determined to make him smile, but he just sat there, the little ‘daddy climber’ giving me the ‘cat- look’ ( described above ).

He seemed very amused by my special techniques to make him smile. So did many others in my row. So I put on my serious face and looked on.

He looked at me one last time, I could see a faint smile there, but then, he is one of the living alternatives to the ever smiling Barbie dolls. 😊 I just sat there admiring him.

He was tired, evidently ( as all my master techniques to make him smile had went down like a lead balloon (with smoke 😊)) But I still could see a lot in this baby on his father’s shoulders.

It was absolutely amazing. Every time he looked up to criticize my professional attempts, he would, after giving me the ‘cat-look’ lay his head down, in extra slow motion on his father’s shoulder. And every time he did that, I mean literally every time he did that, his father would react.

It was as if some shock had gone through the father’s body. I would see his hand hug the baby closer and his head would slightly tilt to meet the baby’s head. Every. Single. Time.

It was a gentle embrace. An extremely beautiful one. One that showed the small effort of a baby to show love and the greater effort of the father to give every inch of it back.

It’s the ‘baby embrace’. That’s how you hug a baby. You can’t hug him like you hug a grown up person, you have to go that extra mile and let him rest completely on you. And if you don’t, according to protocol…… He. Will. Cry.

I sat there trying to imagine that baby growing up, sitting on his fathers shoulder. I tried to imagine him on his father’s shoulders, thirty years old. Though odd, it seemed to make sense to me.

I’m not a father, but I believe, every time that father hugs him, be it twenty or thirty years from now, he is going to hug him in a way that his baby boy can completely rest on him. Every time he hugs him, he’ll be trying to put every drop of his love out there. Every time he’ll be doing a different version of the baby embrace.

And I doubt we as kids ever understand the depth of that embrace or the meaning of that embrace, a meaning that has its roots in a time that we will never remember. But then, maybe that’s what makes it so special.

I am already choking up writing this. And maybe you are too.

We are lucky to have parents. They are not perfect, they are human just like us, though we expect them to be so much more. For some of us, they might not be here today, for some of us, we might just have had an argument with them. But for all of us, they’ve left an inheritance of amazing hugs.

Next time you hug somebody in need, hug them the way your parents did.

Hugs and love……
Stefan

What did you think of ‘Baby Embrace’?

Comment. Share. Be a part of the movement 😊

God bless you guys!!!

Happy Mother’s Day!! :)

Just wanted to take a moment to thank the mothers who always stand behind us, never expecting anything back. It is their smile that we see first and their heartbeat that makes us feel secure. They made us smile. Today, it is our job to make them smile.

Here are some pics of the old me and my mom 🙂

Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy!!!!

 

3 Day Quote Challenge! Day 3

Ooops!

Hey guys, I just wanted to apologise first to you all for doing my Day 3, 2 hours late. Does that still count. I am technically 2 hours and 30 minutes into Day 4. I got caught up with a lot of other things and I couldn’t make it in time. Anyway, I won’t let you down next time 🙂

But I’m still excited to do this.

Here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you.
2. Post a quote for three consecutive days.
3. Nominate three other bloggers each day.

This is the last post of this challenge. I just wanted to thank 4 very special people for making this possible. If you haven’t checked them out yet, do me a favour and do so. I promise you, you’ll love them all! 🙂

1. Grief to life – https://grieftolife.com/
2.Sunshine – https://kerri-elizabeth.com/
3.Living What You Love – https://rominascorner.wordpress.com/
4.Stuart L. Tutt – https://stubaby777.wordpress.com/

Okay, here goes………….

The last quote of this challenge if from my post ‘Life’s Orchestra’. You can get the full post at https://thefourthdimensionoflife.wordpress.com/2017/05/11/lifes-orchestra/

Life is a song sung by you. It’s up to you whether to go solo or to form an orchestra.

Why I like this quote:

In the post, I tried to make a similarity between how every life is in fact a song and how no life is useless because every song has a listener who will understand and adore it. We all have different tastes. But this particular quote deals with how we produce our song. You can  stand out there on the canvas of time and sing it all alone. Or. You can bring in all those people who love and care for you. Sometimes it’s hard bringing in other people. It leads to a lot of contrasting opinions and preferences and sometimes ends in arguments. But. at the end of the day, you have a fullness to your song. You can’t play all the instruments. Life’s not a recording studio. It moves with time. The only way to put those instruments in your song and make it an explosive work of creativity is to be a team player.

I hope you liked this quote. What did you think of it?

Comment. Share. Be a part of the movement.

My nominees for today!

1. Wordpalblog :- https://worldpal.blog/
2. Quotes, Blogs and a Whole lot :- https://daradgamer.wordpress.com/
3. Jessy :- https://faithandbooks.com/

Have a great day guys! I absolutely love you all! God bless! 🙂

 

 

 

3 Day Quote Challenge! Day 1

 

Hi, guys!! It’s so good to see your beautiful faces! This post is a milestone for this blog and for the entire 4D family of followers and friends. This is my first 3 Day Quote Challenge on this blog. Let’s get right into it 🙂

First of all let me explain the rules.

1. Thank the person who nominated you.
2. Post a quote each day, for 3 consecutive days and say why it appeals to you.
3. Nominate 3 different bloggers each day! 🙂

I would love to thank 4 amazing people who nominated me for this challenge.

1. Grief to life – https://grieftolife.com/
2. Sunshine – https://kerri-elizabeth.com/
3. Living What You Love – https://rominascorner.wordpress.com/
4. Stuart L. Tutt – https://stubaby777.wordpress.com/

Do go check out their blogs. They are amazing bloggers and even more amazing people. I am always humbled by every comment, every nomination and every like you give. Thank you guys, for making this possible. God bless you!

I was given four nominations. Though I would have loved to take each one and do them separately, time would not allow me. So, I decided to bring them all together and do one challenge. 🙂

Here’s to an exciting 3 days!

Since this is my first time doing this, I wanted it to be something special, something different. These 3 days are going to be a window to my earlier posts. For the next three days, each day, I am going to summarise one old post of mine into a small original quote. I hope you like it. I will also leave a link to the post in the end if you want to get the bigger picture.

Here’s the first quote!

 

So often life can be like a white blank room with only you and your shadow. But that shadow will tell you that somewhere in the blankness of life, there is a light shining.

 

This is from my post, ‘the diary entry in the cupboard’. It was a tribute to my lovely grandfather, who is a great inspiration to me, even though he is no longer here.

You can read the post here :

The diary entry in the cupboard

 

Why this quote means a lot to me:

It is a simple logic that passes through my mind when life gets tough. Whenever I’ve fallen down, God has always told me that the night is always the darkest before the dawn. This is a picture I like to think of when life gets tough. I hope it uplifts you in some way.

 

My nominees for today!

1. Marisa Donnelly : https://marisadonnelly.com/
2. Life is short, I believe in making the most of it : https://totalbradnessblog.wordpress.com/
3. Alethea’s Mind : https://aletheasmind.wordpress.com/

 

Have a great day guys! God bless! 🙂

 

Sea and Sand

The wind whips through my hair combing it with cool air. The sand reaches and clings to my feet each time the water comes in. The water is cool to the ear, soft to look at and noisy to the touch. It is transparent in its beauty, but vast and without boundaries. Opaque to the eye, hiding what lies beneath the surface and where it ends. But take it in a glass and it becomes transparent.

That is how I explain the beach.

It’s a weird beauty I think. A strange juxtaposition of the fluidity of water and the solidity of the earth. They come together to create this great scenic beauty that we cannot describe in words. In this beauty we find solace, calm, even romance. We cherish the moments we spend by the sea. We love sitting there feeling the water, the sandy earth and the wind all at once. A strange yet beautiful mix.

You walk on the wet sand, your footprints leave a mark. You walk into the sea, you look back and I assure you, you will not see your footprints.

So different and yet the sand and the sea create such beauty!

I was thinking about this yesterday. I had just woken up to the sound of rain. The lightning, the water pelting on my window and the rolling thunder all forced me to remain in my bed, my eyes fixed on the window and think. It’s amazing how God has brought together all these different things to create the captivating natural beauty we see around us.

Another thought passed through my mind when I was thinking about this.

Isn’t this what our world is like?

We are all different, yet together we create such beauty.

The ‘difference’ among us adds to the beauty.

Today we see people parting ways because they are different. We see friends breaking up just because they are different. Today, we look for similar. We don’t try to find ‘different’. We don’t want ‘different’ because ‘different’ calls for effort, sacrifice and courage.

We want everything to just work out. We want relationships to just move on like a train on a straight, endless track. And it’s only normal that we should think this in an age where everything is made for comfort. But it’s not always ‘easy’ that creates value and beauty but ‘sacrifice’, ‘love’ and ‘courage’ when it comes to many things in life.

Yes, there are times when you need to part ways. But there are times when you can work things out. When you know there is hope. There are also times when you cannot part ways, like when it’s family. But when you emerge from it, in victory and in joy, you will see beauty. You will see the beauty that comes when sea meets sand.

Putting time into understanding each other is important. It just doesn’t come to you. You have to pick up the book, open it and learn. That is when the sea becomes like water in a glass- transparent. It is at the edge of the sea, where it meets the sand, that the sea is the most transparent. The more you stay together, the more you learn.

There are times when you have to part ways with people, but there are also times when you can work things out. We are all different. Understanding each other and learning to love and forgive and accept is what creates the best of friendships, the best of marriages.

God made us different. There’s a reason why.

 

I hope you guys got something from this post.

What do you think?

Comment. Share. Be a part of the movement!

God bless! 🙂