Meaning of words

Passion: It is the clammy hands of a seventy-year-old lady, as she stands there, addressing an audience of three hundred people.

Heart-wrenching: It is when you feel the pain of your heart breaking, as if someone were pulling, tensing the muscles inside your chest, squeezing until it bursts within their fist.

Hope-found: It is the sound of your own voice, as you lie back on a calm sea, singing:
“Somewhere over the rainbow,
Blue birds fly,”
And you smile back at the moon, and wink back at the stars.

Hope-lost: As you turn the corner, certain you’ll never come back, knowing you can’t look back.

Pity: It is a dirty word. It reeks of decay.

Joy: Opening a window to the icy air, stinging your face as it gushes in, like bristles of a brush as it speeds past your ears and you just can’t get enough of it.

Pain: It is the missing spark in those sunken eyes of the beroken-in horses and elephants who have to earn their livelihood on Bombay’s streets.

Fear: The feeling when your mind is working so fast, it’s not working at all. The feeling when your pupils become so large that you can’t see anymore. The feeling when your pulse races so hard that the beats merge into a deafening sound.

Freedom: It is that incredible feeling, around you, above you, beneath you, inside you, beside you. That feeling that hugs you, begging you to hug it back. That’s bursting from your chest, waiting to see the world. It is that feeling, that sits beside the door, watching you with its pleading eyes as you ignore it and leave.

Understanding is learning. Learning is living. I have lived.