A soul for our words.
I grew up believing
That the thunder
Was the lightning
Speaking to me
And I still do
When the night
Closes on me
And there’s darkness
In the depths of my hope
I can hear the thunder sing
Me to sleep
And I just know that
If the heavens can sing for me
Then so can this soil stand up for me.
I’m pretty sure that from the time you went to school, the stigma surrounding math was so intense, that even if you did not find it tough, you still made it a point to tell others that math, indeed, is tough. And since you kept saying that for years and years, that is exactly what your brain believed and boom! Even if you had an aptitude for math, it got lost somewhere between the lines of common knowledge and your knowledge.
I’ve always wondered why this subject had to be the most hated, the most complicated one and it took me a while to remember what my mother told me years back,
“Most of the times when we don’t understand something, we totally disregard it. We find a lot of reasons to ridicule it and make the whole thing feel unnecessary, only because we cannot do it or it is of no use to us.”
Of course, back when she said that to me, I had no idea what she was talking about. And my pretence worked pretty well, too, since I wanted to look like I already knew what she was talking about. But like she always says, “There are some things that you have to learn by yourself.”
Years later, when I myself have endured upon a little of what life has had to offer to me till now, it suddenly occured to me right now out of the blue, that this is exactly how we treat people, too. When we do not understand a person, or believe that they’re complicated, we decide to completely disregard them, no matter how much they mean to us. But most of the times these people are the exact same people who form our backbone with their ‘complex’ ideas, who always know what life has to offer not just for themselves but also for others, which most of the times, includes us too. But these people who come up with amazing scientific, philosophical and various other ideas in their simple, everyday tongue are often described ‘crazy’, ‘jobless’, ‘living in a world of their own’, and numerous other things that only show our pathetic attempts at humour. But when these same ideas come about from a famous personality such as a scientist or a celebrity, our appreciation for the way their brain works it never ending. We should be actually very ashamed about the fact that we did not even consider the same thing a while back when someone we know said this. Why have we programmed our brains like this?
Maybe I’ll write about that some other day, but for today all that I ask of you is to appreciate that person in your life, it could be your mother, your father, your sibling, your friend or literally anybody else, who is just totally out of the box and your very own unique human. I assure you, you won’t find anyone else like them in your entire lifetime. Appreciate their thoughts, even if you consider yourself too simple to understand. What they’re saying now will be truly valuable to you later, even when they’re not around.
Let us all begin to appreciate and encourage the extraordinary people of our lives starting today!
I just showed this to my mother, who is the most unique and amazing human I know, and she had a smile on her face. Yes, this is exactly what she meant.
The Divergent Poet 