Search­ing for an idea for her new paint­ing, young artist Gurleen Kaur chanced upon the 19th-cen­tury British painter Au­gus­tus Ed­win Mul­ready’s paint­ing of a flower girl. She was mes­merised by the eyes of the flower girl painted so beau­ti­fully by the Eng­lish genre painter whose works in­cluded scenes of Lon­don streets with urchins and flower sell­ers, re­flect­ing his in­ter­est in so­cial is­sues, es­pe­cially poverty ex­pe­ri­enced by chil­dren and their strug­gle with adult prob­lems. Ex­clu­sive to WSN, we proudly pre­sent this Gurleen Kau­r’s ver­sion of the his­toric paint­ing and her ac­com­pa­ny­ing piece on Grat­i­tude, borne out of her query, ‘Where does that rich­ness in the eyes of the flower girl come from?’

THE LIT­TLE GIRL’S EYES ARE FILLED WITH DREAMS AND AS­PI­RA­TIONS as she sells the flow­ers in her bas­ket. Her clothes are torn but the sparkle in her eyes and the glow on her face shows how strong she is to chal­lenge the hard­ships with a charm­ing smile as, within her heart, she is grate­ful for her ex­is­tence.

What­ever life of­fers, cel­e­brate each day with your unique share of these of­fer­ings. We of­ten hear peo­ple say­ing, “every­one is unique”, so our chal­lenges are also meant to be unique, but we all are very much equal in our unique­ness. There are peo­ple amongst us whom we call ‘dis­abled’, some call them ‘dif­fer­ently-abled’. They are nei­ther dis­abled nor dif­fer­ently-abled, they are just unique like every­one else. Dis­abil­ity rights ac­tivist Deepak Nathan says, “Dis­abil­ity is the part of di­ver­sity”. This re­al­i­sa­tion will in­stil more re­spect and ac­knowl­edge­ment for all.

Grat­i­tude’ is some­thing which would never let you drop your swords even when you are at the verge of los­ing. 

There are times when we feel low and com­plain be­cause of our unique chal­lenges. We are all in­spired by some­one at some point in our life; never lose that in­spi­ra­tion as that is go­ing to act as the dri­ving force be­hind all one’s en­deav­ours. Never let your ears for­get the words that mo­ti­vate you as words have a lot of power. Wheel­chair-rid­den Pak­istani artist, pub­lic speaker and singer Mu­niba Mazari put life into words telling the world, “Some­body some­where is dream­ing the life that we are com­plain­ing about”.

When in de­spair, read what I read and did a turn­around, “When life puts you in tough sit­u­a­tions, don’t say ‘why me’, say ‘try me’ “. We never ask ‘why me’ when we achieve some­thing and this at­ti­tude needs to be the same when dif­fi­cul­ties turn up. I can still feel the strength of these words which not once but twice pulled me out of the swamp of hope­less­ness.

Our ex­pec­ta­tions can be so over­whelm­ing that they even en­gulf the thought of be­ing grate­ful.  ‘Grat­i­tude’ is some­thing which would never let you drop your swords even when you are at the verge of los­ing. Soon, when every­thing will be okay, you will be glad for not giv­ing up in times of de­spair. We just need to change our think­ing and fo­cus our jour­ney will au­to­mat­i­cally change.  Amer­i­can coun­try mu­sic singer Jimmy Ray Dean tells us, “You can’t change the di­rec­tion of the wind, but you can ad­just your sails to reach your des­ti­na­tion”.

Think of Mul­ready’s flower girl. She was bliss­fully sell­ing flow­ers, be­ing grate­ful for her day with­out tak­ing any­thing for granted. She was tak­ing life as a bless­ing. The sparkle in her eye shows that she knew the se­cret of hap­pi­ness.  Fill your mind, body and soul with grat­i­tude over lit­tle things and big things. Your eyes will sparkle like those of the flower girl!

Gurleen Kaur is a Pun­jab-based bud­ding artist and writer, in­ter-twin­ing her taste for paint­ing and writ­ing in a unique way.  She de­picts com­mon day life on her can­vas with ease and writes es­says to bring out the good­ness in peo­ple.