How was your day?

The single most important question that I've been asked almost every day of my life, sitting around the dinner table, and more recently over whatsapp or a well placed voice chat with one of my parents, is 'how was your day?'
There is no measure for what that question conveys, how loaded it is with concern, care and the potential that it holds for sometimes mundane sharing and often some fantastic self realization and gratitude to spill forth. The question holds promise for a safe sharing of your own stuff, but it's also accompanied by a few nuggets from the askers' day in the life. My dad usually has a range of quick bytes from work and development stuff, to a current read and some reflective philosophy on his mind. Mum will update me on a phone call from one of her aunts, or gran or my aunt, and the latest on the two grand kids scuttling around at her feet or in her lap. Everyday things that add to wholeness and being part of each others' lives. A world of love resides in that sentence of many things, many years, many ways of saying thanks.

How was your day?

Beyond Resentment and Judgment

Resentment is the ugly by-product of perceived or imagined expectations which are rarely communicated between people, friends, lovers. Beyond attachment, desire to possess and self-judgment, there's renewed hope for pure joy and love.
Beyond judgment: the judgment of the next person by what you perceive as their incapacity to deliver on your expectations of them/the relationship
Beyond self-judgment: your perceptions of not being worthy of being in the relationship based on how superior you think your partner or friend is...

Gratitude, Love and Life

On May 5, 1928 a baby girl was born to Muhammad Osman Ghoor and his young wife Mariam Tayob out in the sleepy Transvaal town of Potgietersrus. Born as second to an older brother, she would grow up to be the eldest of five more sisters and five more brothers. Today, 84 years later, I revere her influence and inspiration in my life. She is my beloved grandmother, restfully living her reflective days in Durban, SA. This is why the east coast city holds just so much fantasy for me, I admire and envy it for the job it has to have my granny living there.

Ma calls us the cream of her life, because she says, children are the milk of life, and so grandchildren are the 'malaai', i.e the cream of the milk; the delicacy, the luxury as it were. I last visited her in Durban in mid-Feb, and so a visit is long overdue, and she shared with me that she had begun writing down her thoughts about her life, not so much memories or autobiographical accounts, but rather reflections on the journey. And then she sent me to the drawer where I would find the notebook and bits of card on which notes had been scribbled in her signature, classic scrawl. She asked me to read them out loud, and I did, stopping every so often to ask a question or to listen when she prompted me to, so as to give her a chance to add or annotate her notes.

I'm thinking about those notes now, and wondering how much more she has gotten to pen in the last few weeks. It's such a thrill to know that she's actually writing! I hope the muse will allow me the luxury to do so for the next 50 years :)

Happy Birthday, to my darling grandmother. May the Beauty we love in you always inspire us to generate more of it in the work that we do, in the love that we share, in the life that we live.