one cup tea please.
In our daily search for our muse and a constant inspiration in what we do, we are willing to try out anything. We will play games and have long discussions. We will take long walks and make deep entries in our red journals. We will isolate ourselves to connect to the soul within and lose ourselves in noisiness to live fully. All in the name of a creative life. In her book
Living Out Loud, Keri Smith says, quite simply and rightly, that,
"As creative beings, we have the gift of taking all our experiences, embracing them and using them as a source for our work." Its easy to look at life differently, with your own brand of quirkiness and your own angle of vision. Take more. Give more. Be more. Feel more. Tomorrow, in an ongoing crusade to keep the creative human being inside us alive and kicking, my designer friends and i will attend the
creativitea party, an interactive conference being held here in Karachi, in the hopes of finally somehow starting the process of explaning to the people who need to learn that creativity is not bound by 9 to 5 timings and a need to churn out work. That it is a way you live life. It is a way to
be. And that even when you have clocked out of work and gone back home and are vegging out in your pyjamas, your life is slightly different, more zingy, more vibrant, more designed...because if you are "creative", the feeling needs to spill over uncontrollably in the mundane-ness of everyday life and make it...not so mundane.
Stay tuned.
A Not-So-Good April 25 Gets Better.
To make up for
today being one of those particularly failed, disappointing, non-achievement-types, I advance-ordered
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince at Liberty Books today. He said I should get it by July 20. Almost 6 weeks after its release worldwide. But hey, it's the original and hardbound. And for a good thing, or so they say, you have to wait.
And three days after getting the book, inshallah, I will get married. :)
foxy lady...
on my birthday,
mars gave me a book,
Virgin Territory, to celebrate what will be 'yet another first' in my life. marriage.
ive been thinking about firsts. first tooth. first cycle. first best friend. first love. first heartbreak. the book has a collection of stories of firsts. of bad first memories of people who later turned into your best friends or great first memories which then turned sour. and as i read through it, i noticed again how we so measure how far we are in life by our firsts. we laugh at them, holding them close, cherishing them, and yet feeling relieved that we are now beyond somehow, onto the bigger and better.
i dedicate this post to my first car, which i bought 5 years ago today, fresh out of college and oozing with the high of what was going to mark my first step into being my very own person.
club 28.
on april 13, amidst family and friends, i turned another year older. wiser. younger. happier. scareder. funner. me-er...none of this is new wisdom, mind you. just stuff re-realized in different contexts.1. just as the going gets rough, sisters show up like troopers, armed with crazy snacks and party songs, ready to bash away the blues.
2. the time to let go must happen slowly, with anger, resentment, sorrow and eventually deep sympathy for the loser who lost out on wonderful you.
3. sometimes, old flames make the best friends.
4. every birthday has a sparkly, magic moment. an sms, call, visitor or feeling that suddenly leaves you breathless.
5. pancake breakfasts can fix anything.
6. bother a little, it may matter a lot.
7. love is a warm pink shawl on a brisky cold evening at the beach.
8. if mama is happy, the world is happy.
9. broken hearts can be somewhat mended with the right dosage of haagen daazs belgian chocolate.
10. getting older and getting wiser have not necessarily met.
11. nothing beats the anticipatory excitement of waiting for a special occasion, mentally crossing off days till that morning dawns bright and clear, full of possibility.
12. sometimes, suddenly, in a flash, im overwhelmed by how rich i truly am. thank you, Allah mian.
13. happiness is a white kurta with bright, crazy coloured handmade flowers along the neckline.
14. i will never cease to wonder how, when it is time, human beings move on. so easily. so happily.
15. believe. believe. believe. and some more.
16. all the logic in the world will not soothe an aching heart.
17. you cant lie about about love. it's there in your smile, in your hands, in your heart, on your face, in your eyes and it shouts pretty loudly too.
18. sometimes 5 years arent enough and sometimes 5 minutes are.
19. if you cant shout at your friends for hurting you, they might as well not be your friends.
20. if you are lucky, you will end up with your best friend as a life partner.
21. birthdays bring out the real expectations, the real feelings, the real needs.
22. only your sisters can be fiercely loyal and caustically critical in the same breath.
23. you can hide your unhappiness by dancing with abandonment to "chunnari chunnari". it works each time.
24. true love is quiet, unassuming, not needing to be loud and proclaim its presence all over the place. it just...is.
25. girlfriends can fix anything in the course of one afternoon.
26. and as life goes on, we get more freaky about collecting the good times and storing them for the long winters ahead.
27. it takes one right person to undo the damage of several wrong ones.
28. i will love wholly, completely, truly, passionately and without reservation, for anything less is not fair to me.
living out loud
im short on words these days (although my friends may vehemently disagree). so instead of using words on my blog, im using colours to say what is in my head and heart these days.
credit for title goes to keri smiths book Living Out Loud
i act. you react.
i ran into
meyum on the stairs today and as usual our conversation went in leaps and bounds from india trip details to the fact that its broasting weather to the recent developments in life as we know it...and as we laughed helplessly at imagined scenarios of the years ahead...i got to thinking how true it is that for every action there an equal and opposite reaction.
does everything we do get propelled by some action on the part of somebody else out there in the world? preferring to be the master of my own fate or atleast the mistress of my own indecision, i am disturbed by the thought that someobody else's actions will mean my reactions...and my actions will bring about reactions somewhere else. are we all merely black and white dominoes, waiting statically in line for some fault in the earth to start shaking our lives? or are we stronger, defying turns of events we dont like, creating our own individual psychedelically coloured paths and funky, mad, crazy patterns?
