Muchness

 

“The innocence and imagination that appears in the hearts of young children. As the children grow older, they become more mature and gain more responsibilities. They lose their muchness.” I was sent this message by a dear friend and I don’t know who said/wrote this originally but the word has stayed with me since.

Do dwell on that for a while. It is so important and just taken as a given. “That’s life” or “This is reality” should not let us accept it but we do, mostly without giving it a second thought. I believe that at the very least, once we are made aware of it, like you are now being made aware and like I was, a week ago, it is imperative that we look into it. It is slow death for creators of any kind and definitely a dementor (Harry Potter is in my blood) that sucks out happiness from everyone. I am facing it big time with most of my fiction work not progressing because it feels too “in the face” or “too straight from the movies” or “that just doesn’t happen in real life”. Thankfully, I am not a fantasy fiction writer for my career would end before it began.

All we need is to get in touch with our inner child. One great way of getting in touch with our childlike nature is to be around little children or in Nature where true miracles lie. Children are such pleasure to be around. They see things for what they are; without bias, without overthinking or analysing everything. The sheer delight in being told something new or seeing something new gets their imagination all stirred up. They believe in magic while we are busy trying to find the trick behind it to put an end to the magic.

Once you become a teen and beyond, your logical mind takes over and that is so very limiting even though we don’t see it that way. Our humour is sarcastic and we actually love it. We are skeptical about everything and find humour in that. It is all about the intellect. Maya or the matrix begins with the mind. The more logical and intellectual we are, the more controlling and uptight we become. Don’t you see your parents changing when they become grandparents? They leave that mindset and want to play out their childhood with their grandkids all over again. They loosen up, for the intellect has been replaced by wisdom.

In an attempt to get past this serious tone that underlies our life, I stopped the last blog I was working on abruptly. It was heavy and I wanted a break. That may turn up on another day. Today, it is all about muchness.

I happen to voice my thoughts to my ever-ready daughter who would do anything in her capacity to loosen us up. Of course, she is sixteen and has entered the world of wisecracks and sarcasm but her take on various things is still young and fresh to a 47-year-old. She cashed on my problem and told me to enter the world of “Ghibli”. Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation film studio and it has made some popular movies and though rumours have it, that they are about to shut down due to poor box office performances, Netflix is full of their movies. I was introduced to “Howl’s Moving Castle” by her some time ago (she is gifted at the art of emotional blackmail which I am told, may be hereditary!! 😉) and after this revelation of my rather unimaginative phase and search for muchness, she came up with another! Even though I did try and resist despite having enjoyed the “Howl” movie, I ended up watching “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and I loved it too. I am glad to know that the muchness in me exists and that it is just dormant.

Come to think of it, I’ve always been enamoured by Magic. I may have mentioned in one of my earlier blogs about a Sri Lankan officer who was adept in magic. I was in grade two and he, a friend of my fathers, used to pull out coins from my hair or out of my palm and I remember having kept it really safe till I believed there was no magic, I guess! I did attend magic shows and was really disappointed when my kids showed me how those tricks were exposed on TV. I would have swallowed the hypnotism explanation far better than those trick boxes!

Despite that, I was totally taken in by JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the kids and I kept casting those spells at one another especially once the movies came out. These Ghibli movies are about magic too. While I got totally lost in the plot of the movie and the emotions and lessons, my daughter is hooked on the aesthetic of every shot- the artist and animator in her, pays attention to the intricacies of the background and the imagination that lies therein.

Tarot reading does give me the feeling of being a witch who has yet to come into her full power.

I was always with the kids as they grew up and involved myself in all that they did. Since I did have the tendency to get engrossed in whatever they watched, we always had a lot to talk about. When my son was growing up, we had CBeebies and lovely cartoons like Teletubbies, Tweenies, Andy Pandy along with Bob the Builder, Tom and Jerry, Miffy and friends, Engie Benjy, Noddy, Oswald and many more. I used to imitate each character for my son to eat his food. When they switched to Hindi versions, I had to learn those dialogues as well. By the time my daughter came into the TV stage, apart from Dora the explorer and SpongeBob on Nick TV and Chota Bheem which was Indian, Japanese animation dubbed in Hindi had taken over and so we started talking Shin Chan, Doraemon, Kitretsu, Ninja Hattori, Ninja boy Rantaro and then the really bad ones which made them laugh and made me cringe and restrict TV, Tensai Bakabon, Hagemaru, Uff Meri Family and many more. Oggy and the cockroaches was another one of the many irritating ones especially since the cockroaches had voices of Hindi movie villains while Oggy and his brother Jack had voices of Sharukh Khan and Sunny Deol. My kids were delighted and their happiness was infectious. It kept me very much in my muchness, the ridiculousness of those characters!

Just writing about it brings back so many memories and a big smile to go with it. I guess muchness also comes with curiosity of the “what if” kind but on things that are surreal and not “what if corona virus carries on mutating and takes over the planet”! That’s the kind of thing that adults kill themselves and their imagination with.

CHOCOLATES GET ME IN TOUCH WITH MY MUCHNESS INSTANTLY!

Catching up with friends who can crack you up is again a great way to get your muchness quotient back. In fact, this friend who sent me the quote is a great example of an adult who is so in touch with his muchness and can make me laugh my head off!

I feel good already. Maybe, I’ll watch another Ghibli movie or Shrek 3 later in the day! Sometimes, you have to force yourself to do things which are simple and goofy to get your spark back. In fact, in “Kiki’s Delivery Service” this little witch in training loses her magic for a while and isn’t able to fly on her broom and she gets advice from her artist friend to stop trying and do things that bring her joy and to forget about witchcraft for a while. Sure enough, when the time came, she got her powers back! It is the same for us!! Cheers to the much-needed muchness in our life!!