Receiving Kindness and Love

This has been my new pursuit!

It came as a very welcoming insight during a lovely conversation I had with a friend. When he asked me how comfortable I am with receiving love – I hesitated a bit but eventually accepted that yeah I am not that great at it. As I reflect, I realized that I am more of a giving person and have always believed that in giving I shall receive.

But it has been an interesting series of incidences that I experienced in last week where I watched myself closely every time someone tried to be kind to me or extended his/her love to me and initially I felt the same uneasiness I have been feeling but overcoming that and accepting love and kindness from those lovely people made me feel very beautiful :-)

Kindness when comes totally unexpected makes you feel grateful to life and existence eternally.

While on our way back from watching a movie, I suddenly realized that I forgot to buy the chaipatti for home. Sharing it with a friend in rickshaw, I was expressing how I will have to get up and get the chaipatti first thing in the morning else my brother would get really mad. After having a brief conversation about this, we got on talking about the movie and life at large. By the time we stopped the auto near her building, I had totally forgotten about the chaipatti and was saying her goodbye. Suddenly, the auto driver said – ‘Yaha se kharid lo chaipatti’  :-) I was speechless for a minute while my friend acted quickly and got me a small pack. When he started the auto, I thanked him, again and again. He shared how he would have felt if he was to get the chaipatti the first thing in the morning. He said he would get very angry on himself for forgetting it and said I would have felt the same way. 

I had no words to express how beautiful and grateful I was feeling. We had never met before and we may never meet again, but what he did was so thoughtful and considerate that I felt blessed to have received such kindness :-)

After having such blissful evening, yesterday I met one of my dearest friends from old days. We met after four years and had a lot of catching up to do. After sometime of our meeting, she opened this big bag and started giving me all the gifts that she had collected for me since couple of years. I was feeling very overwhelming and a bit uneasy. I did not get her anything because it was too late by the time I reached her home and my visit was planned at a very short notice. This made me feel a little bad and to add to it I was not comfortable receiving so many gifts. She saw the concern on my face and said to me – My biggest gift is your presence. In a minute or so, with a smile on my face I accepted all her gifts with open heart and saw how happy it made her.

I love this feeling, because it’s a new feeling for me. To let someone care for me, to receive love without being worried or burden about having to give it back and to receive it with smile and gratitude :-)

In giving you shall receive and in receiving you shall give :-)!!

Hugo

‘You are cruel’, said Papa Georges to Hugo.

Last night I saw one of the most beautiful films I have seen till date – Hugo.

Out of so many dialogues, I am still stuck to this one. What must have that old man felt, how intense is his hurt that he is complied to say this to a child of a tender age.

To me it also reflected how the character of Papa Georges was deeply attached to his dreams and how sad he became at a sight of seeing them all coming out flying from a box in which he thought he had suppressed them.

Dreams! One of my most favorite mysteries! And perhaps that’s why I loved this particular film so much.

There is a particular feeling to the film, the feeling which makes you look at every experience in your life with so much positivity and possibilities.

Papa Georges’s character successfully makes us hate him during the times when he hated Hugo…hated him for bringing the possibilities of all his dreams back in his life. I loved one of the line he says to a young boy ‘If you've ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around... this is where they're made’ And by ‘here’ he meant on the sets of his films. He is shown to be someone who realized that films have the power to dream, to imagine and to make its audience believe in the power of dreams.

To me the film took an interestingly happy turn in the second half, when Hugo decides to fix Papa Georges after fixing an automaton. Another simple yet brilliant dialogue – ‘I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.’ Says Hugo to Isabelle when the two of them were talking about their purpose of being in the world. Totally loved the machine analogy!

Never before have I written about any film and how it impacted me, but what attracted me to this film is its simplicity, its closeness to the life, Hugo can be any child we see on the streets, Papa Georges can very well be someone who we interact with everyday.

The film successfully depicts how dreams affect positively as well as negatively. Its power is superlative when they come true, they make our life more beautiful and exciting. But when they are shattered or when no one believes in them, we are sad, depressed and the first thing we do is we suppress our dreams and we dream no more!

 But how important it is that we love our dreams…not because they will come true one day, not because others believe in them, but because what I dream is what only I can dream, so my dreams become my purest form of creativity, the one which comes from heart and soul.

Dreams aren't relative, dreams are absolute :-)

Go dream with Hugo :-)