Monday Morning

New Hopes
Things to Cope
Monday Morning
Breathing the Fresh July Air
My Whole Week is Set!

The Invisibles

12th April is International Day for Street Children

Here are some stats from Delhi to highlight how grave this issue is:

• Our city has 51,000 of them.20% are girls.
• 70% have their home, but don't want to go back - mostly due to parental issues or family/neighbourhood insecurity.
• 50.5% are illiterate. 87% earn a living—20% as ragpickers, 15.8% as street vendors,  15% by begging.
• Over 50% have suffered verbal, physical or sexual abuse.
• Fewer than 20% have ID cards or birth certificates, and so they miss out on government schemes.

Quick ways in which you can help:

• Volunteer: The most direct method. Join a NGO, Temple, or Gurudwara and ask if they need any help or know any local programs in which you can take part.
• Give A Moment: Rather than brushing them off to make your way, spend 5 minutes to ask them their names, what they like to do, or their favourite games. Just talk.
• Initiate Informal Education: If there are any particular street children you see every day, help them with basic literacy or numeracy skills. You can also teach them 'soft skills' like self-expression, patience, self-discipline and sharing - which are social skills that children would normally pick up in a nurturing home environment.

Between feeling upset and wanting to help these children enjoy a normal life, you, me, we all can make a small, tiny difference somewhere.

Positive Thinking & Meditation

Positive thinking is overrated.
How?
Let me give you an example – do you remind your name to yourself every day? “No”, right? Because you are so sure of it. You have been hearing it ever since you remember. You have developed a personality around it, and act according to it. That’s the surely you name has brought into your life.

So why not be sure of everything? Every task, situation, relationship – why not have the confidence that you have the power to sought it through? Why not practice spirituality at work and become the most awesome version of yours?

Searching ‘Positive Thinking’ on Google gives 2,96,00,000 results. More the interpretations, more the confusion over it. Let’s simplify:

1. Positive thinking is the art of believing that everything is perfectly like as it is supposed to be. It doesn’t mean you keep on reminding yourself that. It means, you believe that.
2. It is constant meditation. Being positive means to be in touch with your inner being and taking even the minutest decisions like ‘what to wear’ or ‘how to lose weight’ (in my case J) with peace. Playing meditation music in the mornings helps to build the mood.
3. It reduces influx of stray thoughts, and keeps your mind focussed.
4. It induces creativity. With a calmer mind, you observe more, and become less judgemental.

Nothing else, but a lot more. Keep on discovering!

And if you get, read these simple rules to make life better, happy & light. Send your comments at nitima@writingroutes.com

Shine on :-)

Being Like Water

I am an easy person. I don’t get into conflicts, raise my voice, or get influenced easily. Over the years, I’ve created plans for self-improvement, and tried spirituality to concentrate on ways that make me calmer.

So when this incident happened, within which I became a part of a rumour, and had to hear rubbish allegations, letting go became difficult. It was the situation of double confusion – my spirituality was telling my mind to let it go and move on, but my heart wanted to react – it wanted me to use strong words to reply back to the lady who had put me in a fix. And then I read somewhere – be like water.

Absolutely loved the concept of being open – rather than dominating my forcefulness, I tried to let my emotions go wherever there was an opening. I softened my hard edges (accepting that I too can be incorrect was difficult), and tried to become tolerant of others’ opinions. I pictured myself with same qualities as of water – free to flow, allowed myself to be soft, weak, and yet yielding, flowing delicately into the lives of those who created the hurt. I let my thoughts go beyond to enter their private inner selves, allowed them to see (perhaps for the first time) their own experiences with me – kept this image of me as gently coursing water, and watched my relationships change.