The daily ritual!

 

I like watching birds at dawn in our garden. Some residents who are residents or regular visitors in our garden have their favourite spots from where they fly out to their flight path for the day. 

I have a suspicion that birds plan their flight path in the morning while perched in their favourite site. 

I watched this Mina from the time it arrived in the Bell fruit tree, to flying away to a distant place across the farm land. 

During those few minutes it was perched in the tree in our front garden, I noticed its behaviour.  It looked for fruit in the tree. Finding none, it reached the tallest branch and looked in different directions by turning around. 

Then it settled down to one position. Few bird calls followed thereafter. Then it positioned itself to fly away in the direction it had positioned itself earlier. 

For birds, flying is their way of being! Birds spend good part of the day flying. A friend told me that some birds might cover even fifty kilometres in one day!

It was a good introduction for a Monday morning. Working is a way of being and becoming for humans. 

I realised that I have three and half weeks left before I retire from my current work place! That shall bring to a close,  a few months short of eleven years of presence, in the current work place. 

It was while listening to a family, who came from Germany for a holiday, I realised how a work place brings larger meaning to oneself. This family having enrolled their child to nursery education, found considerable progress in her social behaviour and communication. Her mother recalled how a statement I made a few months ago during their previous visit, 'Your daughter is ready for joining a play group' encouraged them to look for a place in the local nursery school, although the medium of conversation was German!

It is when we can help others discover meaning and direction in their lives, we can discover larger meaning in our own lives. 

To be to others, what they are looking for,  is often possible when we can feel the readiness or hesitation that people live with. The family referred to above, was ready to move on to another level of engagement with their child. It looks like that those words spoken to them corresponded with their own inclination to plan for the next step of their child. 

This synchronisation between the aspiration of a person and a corresponding encouragement is possible, when we listen to others with our being. Listening with our being is more than hearing with our ears. Listening with our being involves, hearing, sensing the tone of their voice, receive the feelings they carry, body language which announces the state of their emotional milieu, staying focussed on the questions they ask, etc! Listening with our being is  is becoming present to a person as if he or she alone matters at that time!

I find this journey of being present to others a means for making the work place an experience for personal growth in openness and awareness!

It is when we learn to be present to others, we ourselves shall know a deeper way of being present to ourself. 

It is a journey towards becoming ourselves and being ourselves for others!

A Mina is flier and I feel that I am a voyager!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)