Our Own Kinds

I have been thinking about writing on this topic for a while now. Somehow, couldn't get around to it very well. But here I am, while it's still dawn and dreary outside my home window, ready to finally finish this piece. The subject is about the connection we feel with some people in our lives.
There is a song by Avicil 'Wake me up' in which a young girl with her younger sister finds herself alienated in a community because she feels totally disconnected from the people there. One fine day, she gets on her horse and rides her way to the city where she meets people of her kind and there she takes her sister to live. And when her younger sister asks, “Where are we going?”, the young girl answers, “Somewhere we belong”.
In a scene from the film 'Good Will Hunting', Will (played by Matt Damon) is asked by his doctor Sean (played by Robin Williams) if he has a soul mate. Will asks him back, “Define that”. Sean answers, “Someone you can relate to, someone who opens things up for you.” Will replies, “Sure, I got plenty...Shakespeare, Neietzsche, Frost, O'Conner.”
And there is a point in that answer. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay once that if we can connect with the thought of a thinker from even a thousand years ago, for some time, the distance of time and space disappear between us and our minds and theirs just connect.
In our lives too, we often find that we can be our true selves before some people. Free to say what needs to be said without any pretension or care. And the other one just gets it. Our thoughts and theirs seem to magically match. It's like finding your own kind.
About friends, this is what Emerson had to say, "A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another."
One of the keys to success is to be in the company of like-minded people. So, if you have people that you just connect with, I strongly recommend that you take care of them. Because, even though we all have some people that we find ourselves connected to, we don't appreciate or value them enough for what they mean to us. Have an attitude of gratitude. God has given us family. But he has left it to us to find our kindred spirits. You can call them friends, soul mates, lovers or brothers/sisters from other mothers. But life is a little better. Because we have some such people in it.
Let's be grateful for that!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nothing to Say

Image
What if it were true that life is meaningless? What if life really had no purpose to it? What if everything that we do was nothing, meant nothing, resulted ultimately in nothing? How would such a realization impact our way of life? Will it mean that we begin to see the pointlessness of having to live this tardy life? Will it mean that we finally decipher why sometimes people can seem so despaired, why sometimes we despair and why we can, at times, look half-dead, half-alive? Albert Camus said, “The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions,” he said in  The Myth of Sisyphus , but “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning.” As for death, Camus said, “We know it ends everything,” and results in  eternal nothingness . Eternal nothingness , yes. And it comes to everyone, eventually. Whatsoever one may possess, one may attain, one may achieve. So, how are we to deal with this?  I think that the answer is hidden in the question itself. If life means not
Read more

Fight Club

Image
You know that moment when you see something that gives you a fresh perspective and a new take on things? I had that moment in the morning when I saw the David Fincher directed Fight Club . Now, the film has a lot of violence, fighting and bloodshed but it also has something serious to tell us about the lives we lead or at least think we lead. The movie has this unnamed narrator who befriends a soap salesman named Tyler Durden on a flight. They later start a fight club where people come to fight recreationally. I was fascinated by Tyler's take on life and things. What was remarkable was just how relevant his outlook is to the contemporary world we live in. A world where we have all become simply consumers. A target for companies to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like. And yes, the line originates from this movie only. So why a fight club? The director says, "We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's noth
Read more

The Omnipresent

So finally I've begun writing about the greatest story ever told: the Human History. And I don't intend to begin by talking dryly about Harappans or Mesopotamians here. I want to start by using the three words found at the start of the world's most read text: "In the beginning". And I want to start by talking about History's greatest hero and most revered being: God (and He's still going strong, by the way). So, in the beginning, we had God who created everything around us. Or so the Holy books say. Throughout history, if there's anyone who has most impacted our lives without actually having ever been seen, it is God. From our very birth onwards, what we eat, what we wear, how we see the world around us is dictated by our religions. And all this is done to ensure that our guy in the sky doesn't get mad on us. He is in everyone, in everything and he is all-knowing. He is perfect, the purest and without his wish, not even a leaf can move. But you
Read more