From & To Sathish #6 - Page 138

Avan Aval Adhu 667

Life is a journey from “B” to “D”. From “Birth” to “Death”. But what’s between B and D, it is C, a Choice. Our life is a matter of choices.

' I am so sorry, Mr.Azhagan. God can be so cruel sometimes. How old were you when you lost your mother?'

' I had just turned sixteen ' Azhagan answered and turned and looked at the cross and said, ' Twice. In a matter of a few minutes since we met, you accused God of being cruel and twisted in his creations ' and turning to Gayatri, ' Look at the cross and tell me what you think about God's own status. Who do you think crucified him? God or people?'

Gayatri replied a in defiant voice, that Jesus was different from humans. ' You cannot compare an average human being to the son of God? He was privileged and he had a purpose and so he did what he had to do. He walked on water. Turned water into wine and healed the sick and diseased and even gave life to a dead man.'

' What would you do Gayatri if you were in his place and were asked to suffer pain and death for the sake of others?'

' If I too was a child of God like Jesus, maybe I would have gladly suffered for the good of others.'

' Then why are you ready to murder the two lives that God has placed in your safekeeping? You prayed to God to watch over Ravi and Madhu and yet at the same time you are getting ready to drown them in sorrow and pain?'

' It is easy to talk and to dish out advice but have you thought about what their situation will be once they know that I am pregnant with Ravi's babies. How will their marriage survive after that? '

' Gayatri, the only problem I see in you is your way of thinking. All through your life, you have lived for yourself and your beliefs, needs and desires. Even now, even when you are talking about Ravi and Madhu, it is not out of concern for them but for yourself.'

' No. Please don't say that. It is not true ' Gayatri said vehemently.

' But that is exactly what you are doing right now and have been doing all through your life.'

Gayatri looked at him with shock and said, ' Stop it. Please stop. What are you going on about me and my life? What do you think you know about me?'

Azhagan smiled and said, ' Everything, child. I know more about you than you do about yourself.'

' All talk and nothing else ' Gayatri scoffed and waved her hand as if she was dismissing him and his thoughts.

' She told me that you were going to be a tough one to talk to and convince. But she also told me that all you needed was a gentle guiding hand and a bit of a nudge in the right direction.'

' She... which she and who are you talking about? '

Smiling, Azhagan pointed to her neck and said, ' The same woman who placed that around your neck?'

Clutching her neck, Gayatri felt the pendant that lay hidden under her clothes and looked at Azhagan with surprise, ' How do you know about this Pendant and about the woman who placed it around my neck? Why did she do that ? and stopping she asked in a voice full of fear, ' Was it that woman, Clementina who put this on me? Why? ' and reaching inside her sweater, ' I should rip it and throw it away. Far from me.'

' I wouldn't do that if I were you, Gayatri and no, that witch Clementina did not put that sacred pendant around your neck. Another woman did it and she did so to save your life.'

' Another woman ' Gayatri asked in a confused voice, ' who was that woman?'

Azhagan smiled, ' The woman who loves you as much as your parents die. The woman who is ready to sacrifice her life, her soul, her needs for you and for the promise made to your late father.'

Gayatri gasped in shock and finally realising who Azhagan was alluding to, asked him in a voice full of surprise, ' Madhu. Madhu was here, in Paris. Why? and why did she leave me?'

' Because she wants you to do what you want to do and feel is the right thing for you. She is willing to bear all the pain in the world for your need and thoughts.'

' She flew here to see me?'

' Yes. Not just to see you but save you and your babies and her husbands babies ' and pointing to the pendant, ' she was the one who placed that pendant around your neck and that is what saved you and the others in the end.'

Gayatri looked at him in silence and asked in a small weak voice, ' What do I do now, Azhagan?'

' That is up to you, child. It is your life and your choices to make. I came to talk to you and also make you see the light that waits for you'.

' Light? What light, Azhagan?

' It can wait, little one. But first, you decide what you really want and more importantly what you are willing to do for others with a whole heart and with a smile ' and pointing to the cross, ' We sacrifice and we revel in it and feel good about it. But the ultimate sacrifice is one you do willingly and with a mind full of joy. Jesus died for all of us. What are you going to do?

' What can I do? I am here in Paris so they can get on with their lives. What more can I do here?'

' Gift them a life. Give back your stepmother the life that you stole from her. Heal Madhu and her womb by gifting her a baby that you murdered when you kicked her in her womb all those years ago.'

Unable to take it anymore, Gayatri began to cry and Azhagan placing a gentle hand on her head consoled her and said, 'Little one, heal yourself. It is time you healed yourself, for only then can you begin healing others around you.'

It is time to step out of the darkness and to come into light.

The Ways In Which We Limit Love By Jamie Varon

Love has a way of making us believe that it is breaking apart slowly. The little fights and the little distances and the little inabilities to trust make us think that our heart is chipping away, one tiny broken fragment at a time. You both wander out into your own wilderness and if you don’t hold tight to each other’s hands, you wander further and further until that person you were so intimately tied to is just a speck of light in the distance. It can all happen as you lay next to that person each night, because life either pulls you together or breaks you away.

People say you can lose yourself in love, but they don’t tell you that you can lose each other, too, that you can kiss without feeling and you can have sex without connecting and you can convince yourself that the love you have is not enough of the things you need. You can be alone while together. You can sit next to each other on the couch and watch television and feel as though your hearts are on opposite sides of the world. You can wonder how the lines of your love ever connected, how this ever worked, how you can extricate yourself in the most painless way.

We don’t love from our hearts, not really. We love from our need. We don’t hold onto who the other person is; we hold onto who we want them to be. Because, underneath the incompatibilities we think exist, is a human being with a vulnerable heart that wants to be felt. We love our facades, but not our vulnerabilities. And so, that’s what we ask of another person. We see only their facade, our own projection of who they are based on our own perception that we’ve accumulated throughout the years. We say we love them for who they are, but if we were truly vulnerable with each other, how could love even have an opposite? How could love never not be there?

We actually believe our love has limits. This is a foundational, insidious belief that we carry around with us. We think there’s a beginning and end to love. We say that we are in love or out of love or that we stopped loving, which would imply that the love we have to give and receive is finite, that we could actually use it all up. We attribute our worldly struggles to our plight, the unfairness of life. We think if we don’t have a partner, we are unloved. We are unable to see that the one everlasting component of love is that it is limitless.

The thing about love is that it’s an intangible, indefinable light. It is deeply felt, but it cannot be held. It is like faith: you believe it’s there or you don’t and if you believe, you possess it, but not believing doesn’t mean it’s not there. Yet, we are humans and we add our humanity onto love. We condition love and we bullet-point list love and we checklist love and we limit the love we give and the love we receive and we put these little boxes around the ways in which love can be expressed.

We can be with someone and forget that the love that is there doesn’t actually chip away, that our heart doesn’t need regenerating because it was never broken. It can seem that way: the distance between two humans can seem too far, but the distance between two hearts, well, there is no distance. That’s the thing we forget. We forget that our human need to define and to categorize and to box us in restricts love. Our need to appease our fears and the symptomatic ways in which we do that appeasing means that we are not without love, we have simply forgotten to remember that love is immeasurable and ever-present.

I call this the soul capacity. We have a human capacity and a soul capacity. The human capacity is filled with all the ways in which we block ourselves from love out of fear. The soul capacity is all the ways in which we remember the transformational properties of remembering to choose to expand into love more and more as each day passes.

In any relationship, there is a beginning and end, but not in the way that we think. Relationships of any kind begin out of a soul need for each other: to grow, to learn, to understand ourselves in relation to another. But a relationship never ends because of a lack of love. We may think that’s why it ends. We may attribute it to thinking we no longer care or we no longer love or we’re angry or they made a mistake or we made a mistake. And, while, those are reasons that we use to describe a human capacity, they are not our soul’s reason.

The truth is that we float in and out of each other’s lives for any number of worldly reasons, but we do not leave our lives out of a lack of love. Because, there is never not love. Whatever the relationship, it unravels because that is the natural end to that partnership. Your soul’s reason for coming together has come to completion. But, love? Love is the connection that never breaks. Love is the limitless light that encompasses us if only we simply remember to see it.

By Jamie Varon

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/23/nx-s1-5049707/its-not-a-b-movie-scientists-say-sharks-are-ingesting-cocaine-in-drug-tainted-water?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&PAVED-2024_07_26=&sponsored=0&position=10&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=9e457f54-1fc5-4cec-9c99-708e2c8da908&url=https://www.npr.org/2024/07/23/nx-s1-5049707/its-not-a-b-movie-scientists-say-sharks-are-ingesting-cocaine-in-drug-tainted-water

Scientists in Brazil have come up with the first evidence that sharks are being exposed to cocaine.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a61639494/the-bullet-in-my-mothers-head/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&PAVED-2024_07_27=&sponsored=0&position=9&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=f75d9f02-1f2a-4217-b636-8a5ec641c0cb&url=https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a61639494/the-bullet-in-my-mothers-head/

In 1987, she survived her own murder. Thirty-seven years later, a son investigates the mystery that defined his life before it even began.

https://www.popsci.com/science/olympics-swimwear-evolution/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&PAVED-2024_07_27=&sponsored=0&position=10&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=a0df1d75-8d03-4c1c-8fe0-b3678d0cb76c&url=https://www.popsci.com/science/olympics-swimwear-evolution/

The evolution of Olympic swimwear: From wool ‘costumes’ to tensoelastic race suits In the battle against drag, Olympians have science on their side.

https://theamericanscholar.org/to-catch-a-sunset-2/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&HUNGRYROOT-2024_07_28=&sponsored=0&position=6&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=56e33b61-a767-4f0c-87c0-ad55047392b1&url=https://theamericanscholar.org/to-catch-a-sunset-2/

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-600-year-history-of-the-singular-they?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&HUNGRYROOT-2024_07_28=&sponsored=0&position=9&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=8619e4de-030f-4ab6-9126-d5249a128ca2&url=https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-600-year-history-of-the-singular-they

The singular form of ‘they’ has been endorsed by writers like Jane Austen and William Shakespeare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T40pBHEV43M

Baakiyalakshmi | Episode Promo | 23rd August 2024

https://www.zdnet.com/article/7-password-rules-to-live-by-in-2024-according-to-security-experts/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-SPONSORED&PAVED-2024_07_29&sponsored=0&position=7&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=9faf474a-e692-4901-9956-23edee3edbd3&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zdnet.com%2Farticle%2F7-password-rules-to-live-by-in-2024-according-to-security-experts%2F

The US Government has invested heavily in cybersecurity. Here's what the experts recommend you do when you need to create a new password - and one rule likely goes against what you've been told.