Magic Monday/6

Mondays are full of madness! Mondays for most people brings out the colour blue (Monday Blues). But like so many things, is it just a figment of our imagination? So if we change our attitute, is it possible to change Manic Monday into Magic Monday? What if we feed it into our system that Monday will be a grand day? It will be a day when our energy levels will be the higest because we will be refreshed after a break and that we will start a new week with zest and high spirits! What if we tell ourselves at the start of the week that this week we will be unstoppable, be a powerhouse and race ahead,  could it change things? I believe it could :)

And believing is the first step towards changing things for good !! :)

This is my sixth post in the Magical Monday series of inspirational stories aimed at motivating us to bring out our best on the first day of the week! The story today is of a renouned American author, poet, dancer, actress and singer who we lost this year, Maya Angelou. Her story exemplifies the strength and poential of the human spirit. 

Maya is known for her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which is the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. She also published the Pulitzer Prize-nominated poetry collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die and wrote the famous poem "On the Pulse of Morning" which she recited at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993. Angelou received several honors throughout her career . She died at the age of 86 on 28th May this Year.

Maya Angelou

Maya achieved all of this after a difficult childhood and early life. Her parents split up when she was very young, and she was sent to live with their father's mother in Arkansas. As an African American, Angelou experienced firsthand racial prejudices and discrimination in Arkansas. At the impressionable  age of 7 Angelou was raped by her mother's boyfriend. Then, as vengeance for the sexual assault, Angelou's uncles killed the boyfriend leaving her traumatized and shocked by the experience.  Angelou stopped talking and spent almost 5 years as a virtual mute after this episode. She became the mother to a child as a teenager and as a young adult she took up different jobs in order to make ends meet. This also included work as a  prostitute and as a nightclub dancer and performer.

Maya joined the opera Porgy and Bess and toured Europe with the production of the opera. She began her practice of learning the language of every country she visited, and in a few years she gained proficiency in several languages. Following this she started her career as a writer and poet and achieved great heights and success in this field. She had the likes of Malcom X, Martin Luther King and James Baldwin in her circle of friends.

I find her story to be so inspiring because even after seeing the worst in her life she kept her positivity alive and gave a beautiful direction to her life and inspired so many others in the process.