Know that feeling, when in the middle of a busy day, you come across a profound saying? Or moving art..? or a picture of your childhood? Or a child’s laughter?
To me, such moments have an intense quality of turning me from running along the immediate and the urgent external road, to falling into a deep rich internal pool. It feels like being jerked awake from slumber. Like somebody violently pushing you back from the edge of a cliff. A violent process that saves you.
It is as if a jarring constant background noise is silenced. And you can hear your heartbeat again. It is a moment such that, till you experience it, you do not realize that you were missing something. And when you do experience it, it is a moment where you go ‘aah’.. feeling a connection to something vast, wise and timeless. It is a moment of relief. Of feeling like the masks have been dropped and the real you is free to step out and smile in the sunshine. The imperfect, the beautiful, the vulnerable, raw, joyous, melancholy, complete you.
I have been trying to find the words to describe what it is that one misses in the humdrum of day to day. It is a word perhaps I have never used, but it came to me like a gift in my hands the moment I asked the question- it is ‘tenderness.’
The complement of harsh reality… tenderness.
The contrast to hard facts… tenderness.
Tenderness.. the things too ethereal to touch, too invisible to describe, too timeless to bind. The richness of life. The language of the soul. Soft, raw, real, invisible, connected to all of life and all of time. All that is worthwhile.
Featured Image: Clicked May 2016
