Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Life In A Moment

I stood there, staring at the red and orange colored sun as it quietly collapsed into its cozy bed with a sense of dense satisfaction… a sense of “I did what I had to do; but I do it every day anyway, still I do it and feel good” kind of a thing you know-dense satisfaction.

Well, on the exterior it all looked calm, the scene, the sky and the posture I assumed as I stood with hands behind my back and neck raised but relaxed. But on the inside it was a storm like no sea had ever witnessed. It rose with a violent “so what do you think you are going to do now?” thought-wave and moved to ferocious levels with the realization of not being able to direction the course of my life… the feeling of being scattered even torn if you will. Following the pears always seems to be a security blanket when you are really not aware of what you want to do. The “herd mentality”. A guru once said, “I am ready to accept your claim that humans are intelligent, provided you believe me when I tell you that when a human is amongst others, he is not”. Holds good for me and pretty much for all of us. Then there were the crisscrosses of statements that I had heard during a mind game that I was playing with my eldest uncle in my third cousins wedding… “Beta try doing a (some course I don’t remember the name of), it will be great for your business”. When a lady who has never seen the world or thought of it any more than a kitty party interrupts him. Says the lady, “No no, Shalini’s eldest son tried doing it but failed at it miserably. Instead, why don’t you do your…” And the words started blurring out and fading into the oblivion, as if I was drunk and some one was calling out my name as I try to figure out the voice, not the words… all just a muffled lip movement and sounds. These things that I detested then all started surfacing as I stood there.

I let thoughts pass without “thinking” them on deliberation. It is like standing on a railway platform, during peak hours and without the intention of boarding a train. You are there just to watch the “market” bustle. Then somehow the chaos is no more a cause of irritation but a stimulus to inspiration. That’s exactly what it feels like when you observe a noise in your brain, without being a part of it.

There were voices of my parents, teachers, friends… even people who I didn’t know. People rambling suggestions and some more suggestions. It occurred to me then that there was something waiting out there to come at me. Not in a bad way, in a manner to help me. There was an answer waiting to leap out and scream. But the noise was persistent; the intuition equally prominent. I was lost. And I wanted to be found. My brain felt like a radio, with numerous channels but all playing at the same time.

What happened at this juncture was remarkable. I stopped looking. I quit the idea of trying to battle life. I thought of a word called “wait”. It had to be around. It had to come blaring out if I stopped looking too hard for it. A sudden calm whizzed past and killed the riot for good. It filled the air with a deafening silence. I started to hear myself breath. Until this moment I had no idea how different it was to think and feel. If I closed my eyes then, the world felt strangely alien. I did not belong there. I was a part of a system that was there to revolutionize existence as mankind knew it. I lied down on my back and stared at the sky as it ebbed away. I felt it within me as much as it was on the outside of me. I felt one with the openness and its very nature to be abysmal. All of a sudden my existence started having a form and definition. The thin line between life and living was erased. The whole idea of birth and reality leaped beyond the words defining them and broke every barrier of empty concepts that were built by us. I could feel myself smile. The feelings bred every successive thought and the thought brought in a feeling. A beautiful balance between logic and emotion played on like a symphony in my mind, or maybe my heart, I am not quite sure where. I lay there for eternity. Either time stood still or it raced ahead so fast that I was, by now, only a reverie to nature.

“Lets go, I found the phone!” It took her touch to bring me back. “I left it at the tea stall, nice man that chai wala, he returned it promptly”. I smiled and said, ”Great, you ok now?” “Ya, but what happened to you? I left you waiting only for three minutes and your mood seems to have changed polarity. Guess I should have left you alone earlier huh?” “Rubbish! Those were the three longest minutes of my life”, I replied.

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