‘Tis the Season of Simple Smiles and Simple Joys: Delights of the Ordinary No. 25

With time it is a serious business to smile in our un-smiling serious world!

If you know even one person who will enjoy reading Delights of the Ordinary then feel free to share it with them.

Sometime in your life, you will have occasion to say, “What is this thing called time?” What is that, the clock? You go to work by the clock, you get… your coffee by the clock, and you have to get on the plane at a certain time, and arrive at a certain time. It goes on and on and on and on.

And then, one day, you look in the mirror — you’re old — and you say, “Where does the time go?”

– Nina Simone

The sun is now losing its intensity. The land losing its heat.

It is about time to slowly crimp up our twenty-twenty-three calendar and gradually open up our days into twenty-twenty-four. For we are so used to writing 2023 in our journals that we will nonchalantly forget to write 2024 multiple times in January…

Because the old remains humming inside us for a very long time.

Also, because we are so fearfully and wonderfully made that out of any created cerebral being it is we who can audibly think in ‘past continuous, present continuous or present continuous future tense.’ A bat will hardly echo to his mate in the present about the future worries of what they eat, wear or do out of life. And while we can hear sounds limited to frequencies between 20 and 20,000 waves per second, bats can emit and hear sounds at frequencies that are over 100,000 waves per second. But a human being, if not echo at that rate, can undoubtedly worry about the future at frequencies over 100,000 @ rate of infinity-waves-per-second!

Other than worrying and pouting on most days we are wrestling with time – well, to find out…, we grow old and we die! Though time is eternal and will go on – for us time is finite, limited and un-pausable, and at the end of the day there are a trillion things we would want fixed and done and dusted but at the heart of it never get done. Like the books and newsletters to be read, films we could never watch and many promises we could never keep.

And when our lives are an un-smiling-serious business of amassing our groceries, folding our laundry (Marie Kondo style), getting children to bed on time and answering that serious e-mail right now, then in all these solemn serious businesses we leave out the essentials of life to know that time has left us sooner than we predicted.

The essential, if you know, is to smile as often and as much as we can.

We can cry too. Because, there will be phases of deeper sorrows, when if you smile it will not be good for you. Because, though we all know all the savvy tactics of pretentiousness in the world, we are also given the freedom to weep and lament in terrible times.

Isn’t it sad that we pretend to be snappily strong in hard times and become serious with life when we could have smiled?

Albert Camus, a French philosopher, author, dramatist, journalist, and political activist said, “Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

Albert could say much about happiness because his boyhood was spent in poverty. He never knew his father, who was a poor farmer and got killed during World War I. Without the father, Camus, his mother and other family lived without many basic material possessions. Therefore, he would know in his solid senses, where real happiness lies and where to find it in time.Subscribe

Lots of Hope!

That is why I hope that for the rest of 2023 – you and me – we will find plenty of time to cuddle up with our loved ones, watch binge-worthy Christmas movies, stuff up our faces with nachos or popcorn (you choose) and learn to live amidst this murk of anticipation. Because none can guarantee a happy ending to anything in time. What is guaranteed is Time – that will go past us like it has been going and we need to take it one smile and one grin at a time!

Along with this, I also commit myself to long-form writing since the digital hyperlink environment have had shortened our attention span to 8 sec. The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain.

I fear that we will not have any form of attention span left at all in the future. Behold, the precipice of doom scrolling have robbed us of the magic and delight of – waiting for someone, holding our breaths in severe anticipation, and little spurts of anxiety-fuelled hand-wringing. We are losing the tolerance to solving hints and riddles. Hence, I commit to the longer gullies and abyss to walk through rather than taking snappy trends of short renditions and one-liners.

I honestly hope that you have not stopped holding longer gazes onto horizons, because if we had to remain under the dictating advice and the spell of thumb-operated-social media apps, we are surely not going to find the space to gape at the stars and constellations because they will never give us the same kick and rush that is spewed onto us on severely higher doses. I hope to find such people in the world who will be also committed to taking their long-term plans somewhat lightly and work from moment to moment…

I leave you with this classic 1959 song “Turn! Turn! Turn” that Nina Simone sang – the song was Pete Seeger’s adaptation of about word-for-word, from a passage from the Hebrew — Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 – hoping that this newsletter will help you assemble essentials to be worth your time 🙂

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain that which is to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time of love, and a time of hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Here is the video to enjoy the finitude of your sunny or foggy weekend!

“Not every problem needs to be overcome, just the ones stopping you from getting where you want to be.” – Ann Hill 

Now to the faves of the week wishing that there is something for you here:

To Watch: As humans in most of our spaces, we are too handicapped to express our emotions in the right words. And words have power. When in reality we would want them to hold our hand and hug us deep inside, but then because we have not got what we want we would outrage in our words. We could have spoken what we wanted but we protected our inside and spoke critically. Watch this video where Esther Perel explains what is innately wrong in us and why we go on a critical mode rather than an expressional mode.

To Fun Things and Play: Land Line is a Google-led exploratory initiative that lets you walk through the world on your screen. It is not exactly like real travel and since our attention span is lowering its bar, this fun project can at least grab your attention, well hopefully for more than 8 seconds. It is a lot of fun.

To Cook for Christmas: 7 Brilliant Cookies to Keep Your Holidays Bright: Make one or make them all. Such divine toothsome pictures of beautiful-looking cookies for the Christmas time. Make one or make them all as they say.

To End:

Holding The Light  

by Stuart Kestenbaum

Gather up whatever is
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled
in the waves or fallen
in flames out of the sky,
for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken,
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together.

Make a place where
the day speaks to the night
and the earth speaks to the sky.
Whether we created God
or God created us
it all comes down to this:
In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together
what beauty there is, stitch it
with compassion and wire.
See how everything
we have made gathers
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.

– Anugrah