Moments of joy

What makes your day? It varies for everyone and for different days. It can be your baby’s smile or a compliment from your spouse, job well done at work or pleasant weather or call from a friend etc. You feel happy and elated in those moments and carry that good feeling throughout the day. I call them – “moments of joy”.

The other day, I experienced such moments of joy when I learned a few new things. I was reading a few articles on “Analytics” and “Advanced Analytics”. One thing led to the other and I found myself learning a lot more, thanks to Wikipedia and Google. I learned about the existence of a programming language called “R” and also about a career called “Actuary”. All this in just 10 minutes. For a moment, I felt so grateful to the Internet and especially Google and reflected on how techonology has made the process of acquiring knowledge easier.

Another thing that struck me was that I actually enjoyed learning. Memories came back to me from my childhood when I used to lament in despair that the end of schooling/education seemed too distant. There were always assignments, examinations and progress reports year after year and the inevitability of undergoing all that for another 10-15 years seemed cruel to me. I used to imagine myself sighing in relief at the end of all that ordeal but the reality turned out to be different. I never thought it’s possible that one can choose to study when it’s no longer mandatory and here I’m taking course after course and with great plans to study further to quench my knowledge thirst. Ha!

On relationships

Never take any relationship for granted. Every action you do counts and affects the relationship. Better make sure it’s in a positive way. Every relationship needs to be nurtured. Sometimes it requires a lot of effort. Right words should be spoken, right things should be done. Everything follows the ‘give and take’ rule. First give to the relationship, what you expect from it – be it respect or love or care or empathy or anything. Well, I guess this is what that binds us to other people. If the nature of relationships is not the way it is now, our lives would have been utter chaos.

It seems to me that you can’t afford to be yourself with anyone all the time – if you really care about your relationship with that person. There is nothing called unconditional love. Everything is conditional – only the degree varies.

But as I think it over, it doesn’t seem to be such a bad thing. On the contrary, I feel that it enables one to become a better person.  By responding to the demands of a relationship (assuming we want to make it work successfully), we constantly acquire new abilities. As social beings, there is no desire for us to get out of the relationship entanglement.  So, we just have to do our best.

Love ramblings

It’s amazing how mysterious love can be, for something which is pervaded everywhere.

An interesting thing about love is that – nobody can tell you that ‘you’re in love’. You might have to feel it yourself. Of course this is true of other feelings too – jealousy, envy, hatred, sympathy etc. but ‘love’ is different in that you can’t be sure of it just like that – it usually takes time, sometimes lots of it. Why??

Sometimes in being overcautious not to believe as ‘love’ something which is not, one might be really letting ‘love’ go.

I have another fundamental doubt: how can one differentiate love for a person from the love of just being in love? What happens eventually in the later case? Is it right to even call it love?

Geez, it seems all I have is questions and assumptions…

May be ‘love’ is not meant to be analyzed and/or scrutinized so much. May be it’s just meant to be experienced and felt.

Taking in the theory that ‘too much analysis spoils the beauty of things’, I’ll leave this train of thought here.