The Art of Embracing Goodness: Delights of the Ordinary No. 21

When Delights of the Ordinary Newsletter manages to make past your spam folder I continue to send you across abundant reminders to find balmy moments of reassurance and embracing goodness.

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.”

―C.S. Lewis

Did you notice?

This year is now slowly rolling itself up, about to be archived in our memories. And as petite November chills gradually turn into numbing ice-boxy winter winds, the world has a lot to recover from.

Impressions of the pandemic have merely faded and now our spherical world squares up to this existing geopolitical Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine war landscape, it feels like we’re blazingly bolting down a rapid rollercoaster without our safety belts on! More so because people on our blue blob quite easily react with bombs and rocket launchers to disdain each other.

Hence, I hope with lots of sunshine, that Delights of the Ordinary will help you unlock thoughts within you, or at the very least, help you once in a while find something interesting and useful in it. So this week, when I sat down to write to you I have had this etched desire in my heart to continue to send you abundant reminders, some balmy moments of reassurance and coax you to embrace goodness through this newsletter amidst our rollercoaster life sans belts on!

The Opposite of Goodness

The opposite of goodness is wickedness or meanness. We do not need to comprehend it in our heads or in our hearts because meanness is visible from afar or is standing right at our doorsteps.

Goodness then is the quality of being morally good.

Goodness looks like making a lot of effort not to do bad! Even our best-intentioned self is not capable of endless goodness, all day, every day. If you have forgotten when you were mean (even slightly) and wage mini-wars with your loved one then you have not lived in this world. We all make wars, singly we do compact versions of what the nations do at supercolossal levels most of the time. Because goodness isn’t an effortless trait to us. It surely can come in good times but it is the bad times that wring us of our good virtues and hang us on the clothesline to be parched dried of all our good flexes.

Of course Good doesn’t exist like chairs and tables, it’s not… either outside or inside. It’s in our whole way of living, it’s fundamental like truth.

– Iris Murdoch

How Do We Overcome?

We can overcome all the non-good stuff like anxiety, treadmill traps, rat races, meanness and even doomed war news by taking it one day at a time. Things could be worse and we are blessed to be alive and have the possibility to discover what remains indispensable in our story of life. Here is a quote that rings true –

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.”

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince

Thus, amidst the turbulent arrows of the waging sea, and the discordant winds we ought to find a space of goodness breaking in through small pockets. To be precise breaking flinches from our hearts.

Izumi Shikibu, a Japanese poet of some Heian period, wrote:

“Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.”

Small steps to embrace goodness.

I truly acknowledge that we all are knitting true stories. We meet; our paths cross; somewhere; someplace; for a stretch or two or for longer – maybe a lifetime; we are constantly making many stories -some are good ones, made up of dust and stars and a lot of inspirational things interwoven with the logic of life while some are destructive – like the stories with bitterness and fury, devoid of any goodness. That is life!

In reality, navigating through the world to become good and improve ourselves is actually a mucky, one-step forward, three-step sideways, two-step backwards wobbly kind of process. In all of its potential, you can not really learn how not to screw up in life. We all have and we always will! What we can actually learn then, is to hope to screw up less often and have the courage to admit and rectify those mistakes quicker.

We may not transform our lives with sudden shinier moments, breathtaking epiphanies, elaborate verve and walk-in closets, but then there are incremental moments that add up over a long time. The goodness is such a slow process like a snail deciding to take a walk on a beach. It is a long hold, prolonged sharp falls, lengthy steep slopes and terrible blows, to eventually letting your anguish bring in the goodness like a moonlight.

Susan Cain, author of the bestseller book, Bittersweet says, “In Hebrew, the word for longing, leh-heesh-toh-kek, comes from the same root word, which also means passion. The place you suffer is the same exact place where you care desperately. It’s the same place that inspires you to ease someone’s pain however you can. And it’s the place where you vibrate with the insane beauty of this world.”

“And when the dark times come, and they will come, don’t be surprised, but ask yourself: What are you longing for? And follow your longing where it’s telling you to go. It’s pointing you in the direction of the sacred. Once you look, you will see it everywhere around you.”

That goodness surely illuminates and will be a part of us only if the full range of circumstances and emotions are permitted into our lives. Almost always, when walking in the difficulties of life, we habitually pitch walls to protect ourselves tightly from the heat, wind and rain, from anger, grief and frustration, but it’s the cracks in the roof, those unanticipated spaces through which the radiance arrives. 

We have this life to see much more goodness around and create more awesome things. it is a wonderful life of brokenness.

We will cry a 1000 times in our lives. Over heartbreaks, over losses. Over many many failures. But then we will overcome them too. Another 1000 times. And we will laugh silly too. Another 1000 times. We will mammoth all of this in our lifetime eventually leading into goodness.

– Anugrah

And as I keep collecting my internet favourites for you and show up each week as your weekly internet curator I am also surprisingly overwhelmed that how on earth this digital realm became an essential part of us because I remember some odd years back our lives were absolutely fine without it!

And now ending my rant.

I hope these weekly finds will have something to cheer you up:

To What The Heck – In Mumbai, I have conquered the vicissitude of living in cabin-look-like houses of 600 square feet and behold on the far-flung deep corner of the world in Los Angeles an estate with 105,000 square feet of living space with almost $350 million price tag! Visit the mansion here for a virtual tour. I wonder do you even need a cigar lounge in your home, because this house has one!

To Joy Scroll – Our newborns and toddlers are a generation of “AI Natives” as Angie Wang calls it. She narrates her story of finding the perks of neural-based AI to comprehend how her toddler is not learning like the other newly born GPT-4, even when GPT is created based on human neural learning. Read her animated comic page published in The New Yorker for she says, “A toddler has life and learns language to describe it, An L.L.M. learns language but has no life of its own to describe.”

To Sooth – I also make art to echo my feeling of how life can sometimes be good. I hope you would echo the same feelings.

To Ponder - “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

To end:

Tired by Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two –
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

Wishing you a busy and fulfilling week with ample goodness firing inside you.

– Anugrah

Delights of the Ordinary

Note: To you who have been my diligent reader, I am highly grateful for the time and room that you give me in your heart.

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