14 Oct 2011

You are that

A famous quote of St Teresa of Avila: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones”.  I saw this quote first in the movie Capote.  (Spoiler alert!)  Writer Truman Capote wants something “bad” to happen as that would make his book more interesting.  That “bad thing” eventually happens, and he spends the rest of his life in guilt.  He chooses St Teresa’s quote as the epigraph for his next novel, which he’d never finish.

From the way the movie is shot, and from my own way of thinking, I interpreted the quote to mean “what you’re praying for is probably not what you actually want”.  Today, more than 5 years later, I happened to come across this quote again.  I am seeing it now in a completely different way.  St Teresa could have possibly meant that the more you yearn for something—the more you cry for it—the more it’s likely to happen.  If you didn’t want something so badly, maybe you won’t get it.

What’s my takeaway from this?  “When your eyes are blue the whole world looks blue.”  I used to have a negative attitude towards everything, filled with negative thoughts.  It was only natural that I saw the quote the way I did back then.  But I am becoming progressively positive.  Now I see the quote in a different, positive way.

Whoever said we create our own world is very right.  Our world is as wide or narrow as we want it to be.

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