Tag: foreverincomplete

  • Torturous love

    Torturous love

    And so it is…love and torture have always been stablemates.

    Sometimes, without warning, someone enters your life and challenges every assumption that you ever made about what’s possible.

    What you thought you deserved was limited to what you were capable of achieving up to that point, and maybe just a quiet desire to acquire some peace beyond it.

    Until they see in you what you thought was your own delusions, and you see in them what you thought were only your dreams.

    Once you connect with that truth, nothing can convince you that anything less is what you must settle for.

    Settling becomes a vulgar thought, and fulfilment becomes incomplete without them.

    When that happens, the distance between love and torture grows, and you find yourself stretched between the two, with only shards of sanity to prevent you from being torn apart.

    Those shards will tear at your dreams and taunt your delusions until their embrace is secured.

    Until then, life becomes a dyslexic dance with insanity, and love remains elusive.

    (From the archives)

  • Keep up, if you can

    Keep up, if you can

    Like they say, love is not two people looking at each other, it’s two people looking in the same direction.

    What happens when the one is looking ahead, while the other is looking behind?

    One common failing in relationships is that while one partner views growth as the amazing things that they can achieve together, the other sees it as a statement of their partner not being happy with what they have.

    One focuses on protecting what they have while the other focuses on improving it.

    One focuses on reaching their full potential, while the other is still waiting to feel validated for what they’ve achieved. And so it goes…

    And when these differences of perspective are not understood, it’s easy to assume that the conflict of priorities is a rejection of who we are or what’s important to us.

    There is no easy fix to this because at the root of it is the fact that the one who is invested in growth has a healthier self-worth than the one who is invested in staying where they are.

    Self-worth is based on how much gratitude we have for who we are.

    And gratitude is something that we cannot instil in another. We can point out all the reasons why someone should be grateful, but the choice to be grateful is always theirs to make.

    Self-pity or self-loathing, which is simply the opposite of self-worth, is what gets in the way of healthy emotional bonds in a relationship.

    Understanding and accepting your ability to influence your partner in this regard could be the difference between courting insanity and choosing peace.

    Choose carefully.

    Own Your Life

  • Dishonesty, the destroyer

    Dishonesty, the destroyer

    The profundity of the verse from the Qur’an that says that if you are grateful, Allah will increase you, resonates strongly through every theme of life.

    It is through gratitude that good is created, harm is kept at bay, and we are connected to what feeds our soul.

    Therefore, what destroys good must be the opposite of gratitude.

    It’s easy to call it ingratitude, but not so easy to identify it as that.

    Ingratitude is not just the absence of gratitude, it’s the presence of everything that denies it.

    It is the desire for that which undermines the good that we have, or pursuing that which we haven’t earned.

    It is the betrayal of what we stand for, to feed the fear of losing something that was never real.

    It the compromise of the authenticity of who we are, so that we may be accepted by another, because we can’t bear the thought of being alone with only our self-respect to keep us company.

    Dishonesty is a denial of the self, long before it is a betrayal of trust.

    That’s why it breathes destruction wherever it shows up, because it first destroys the self which then destroys the world around us because we grow desperate for others to make us feel whole.

    All that because we were ungrateful for who we are.

    Dishonesty is the enemy of dignity, and without dignity, the world will be at war with your soul.

    “If you are grateful, I will surely increase you.” (Qur’an 14:7)

  • Dream a little dream…

    Dream a little dream…

    In a world of cynics, it’s easy to lose sight of the power that you have to turn your dreams into reality.

    Your efforts become more daunting when faced with an endless barrage of naysayers who only see your potential through their own fears.

    Sincere advisors are often driven by fear, and thus focus on protecting you from their fears of what failure may bring.

    So you slowly give up on your dream as a fantasy, while using its promise as fuel to cope with your reality.

    When you maintain clear boundaries between the two, you convince yourself that dreaming is an irresponsible indulgence of youth, while reality is for adulting.

    Without meaning to, you adopted the fears of those around you, and measured your success by how much you could exceed their expectations within the frame of fear that they painted for you.

    Beauty is lost, endearments become fickle expressions of lightness, and death becomes the morbid milestone by which you gauge how much capacity you will need to keep going.

    All this because you believed others when they disbelieved in you.

    Your dreams are yours to abandon, or yours to claim.

    But if you’re trying to claim a dream that is intricately woven around the presence of another, brace yourself for the anguish that accompanies a lifetime of trying to convince them that achieving your dream is possible, when the events of their life convinced them not to try.

    Dream with abandon, and live with courage.

    If you don’t, the regret will be yours to court, and dreaming will become a cynical taunt that feels like a nightmare.

  • Daydream your life away…

    Daydream your life away…

    Sometimes we lose ourselves to nostalgia to the point of disconnecting from the life that we have.

    Good memories are great, as long as it’s not a reason to take our current blessings for granted.

    Many of us are so fixated on the life that we once had, that we neglect the people and the quality of life that we have now.

    Sometimes, in fact often, we even neglect our health, because if we don’t have much to look forward to, there’s not much point in taking care of ourselves. Right?

    Wrong.

    When you only take care of yourself on special occasions, you’re taking yourself for granted the rest of the time.

    Memories are created between those special occasions more than on any specific occasion itself.

    When we hear of the good old days, we don’t hear of weddings and birthdays. The majority of the stories are about the wholesome and uncomplicated lives that we once lived. The family bonds, the solid friendships, the lekker meals and adventures.

    If you find yourself only celebrating life on special occasions, you’re taking yourself and your life for granted.

    Worse than this, you’ve probably lost your self-worth to how you want others to see you, and you don’t see yourself clearly anymore.

    You reclaim your life by reclaiming the present moment.

    But you can’t reclaim the present moment if you don’t see value in it.

    And you won’t see value in it if you spend your days longing for the past.

    Live romantically. Now. Not in the past. And your life will be everything you dreamed it could be.

    It always starts with you.

  • Fanning our rage

    Fanning our rage

    Fear is driven by need.

    The moment we give up on the need, the fear subsides.

    Our need to be significant to those who are significant to us drives most of the fears that may fan our rage at the world.

    But only for as long as we still have hope that there is a chance for us to be significant to them.

    When we give up on achieving that status in their lives, the fear subsides and gives way to an emptiness that carries with it no energy at all.

    That emptiness feels like peace after a lifetime of struggle. But only until we realise that when that peace entered, hope departed.

    Thus, the dulling of the soul begins.

    Quietly receding, carefully subduing, and slowly disappearing from the lives of those we once courted.

    Until, eventually, we successfully fade from our own life.

    Some see it as a cowardly surrender. Or perhaps a convenient choice.

    If only it was convenient to be invisible, more would choose that over self destruction, or suicide.

    When we stop paying attention to those who seek us out, we surround ourselves with those we seek instead.

    If we don’t find a balance between the two, we’ll find the isolation that accompanies being both, looking for a place to belong, but finding none.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • That empty bench…

    That empty bench…

    The saddest scene for me has always been the abandoned park bench.

    It echoes with profound intensity the pervasive isolation that too many experience, but too few reveal.

    There is a shame that is carried upon the broken wings of abandonment that anchors us in that space between wanting to create beauty in this world, while believing that it will always be unreachable for ourselves.

    So we birth the martyr within, presenting it as the selfless lover without.

    Being sure to distract others with affection, so that no one notices how achingly we stare at those empty benches.

    Those benches that once bore the hopes and dreams of togetherness.

    Those benches that once were claimed as sacred spaces.

    Those benches that remain available to the next loving embrace between its arms, knowing that once the lovers move on, it will remain, rooted to that spot, waiting to be embraced and abandoned, again.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock


  • Elusive peace…

    Elusive peace…

    Peace…that elusive mist that needs to enshroud everything.

    Its absence creates the need to change the circumstances of our lives, so that we leave no space for nothing, needing every space to be filled with something.

    Some look to fill those spaces with trinkets and tokens.

    Others look to fill it with purposeful endeavours.

    But central to both, lies the need to benefit someone in our efforts to avoid being no one.

    Without that someone, we remain unfulfilled and incomplete.

    Similar to the nothingness in the absence of peace.

    Because life must be lived, and living must leave a legacy.

    But a legacy ceases to be a legacy if it has no inheritors at the moment of our passing.

    This primal instinct to be something is what drives our efforts towards avoiding being nothing.

    The threat of which is the root to losing ourselves to the distraction of everything, when we lose hope of ever being something…to someone…but not just anyone.

    Thus, the test of gratitude enters, as we reject some in our pursuit of others, never knowing for certain the impact we have on the lives that we touch.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock