Phew...what a journey it has been.
When I look back at the past two or three years of my life, and especially at the last few months, life has been a whirlwind. I have been working almost non-stop for the past year, and in the meanwhile my fascination with my work has deteriorated into disappointment, sometimes even disillusionment. In the backdrop of all this I have made the decision of going for a Ph.D, and at the same time been assailed by doubts as to whether this was the right choice. And somewhere down the line I have had a remarkably bittersweet experience with relationships.
Then suddenly, this other day, in the midst of all this chaos, I decided to take a day off. Off, not as in run off to a movie, or catch a hasty train to a hill station. Off, as in the idle, time-is-eternal off: grab a novel, sit down where the only company you have is yourself, and watch time fly slowly by.
It was afternoon, and the sun was out, strong, but not scorching. In front of our hostel is a small garden of sorts (a herbal garden supposedly), and strewn about are a couple of benches and swings. I sat on a swing, behind which towered a tree. The sun shone through the leaves, and made beautiful patterns of light and shadow on the book I was reading. Every now and then a cool gust of wind blew, brushing through the leaves and the blades of grass so that they rustled. In front of me a small ladybird toiled its way through the grass.
But it was the pace of time then that struck me most. Time did not exist here. Time was a concept unknown to this world. Here the wind did not care whether it was 1 pm or 1:05 pm. The grass did not care whether I managed to stick to a deadline or not. The ladybird had no assignments to make, no papers to publish, no goals to follow. They were just there, in the present, eternally in the present. Looking at that scene you felt that this here could never change; that this moment would go on forever, and that sometime after eternity you would look up from your tranquil reverie and find that ages have passed, that you are old now, and it doesn't matter that you spent your life looking at the blade of grass fluttering in the wind, for that was somehow what you were born to do in the first place.
How different this was from the world in which we lived! How different from numbers running down a computer screen: 27 seconds to run through 30, 000 data points! How different from assignments, projects, applications, forms, mails, letters and phone calls! How different from the constant second hand chasing you through the day, reminding you that hey, you have a life to take care of. Life? What life? Can life be spent chasing life?
Let us pause for a minute here. Let us not rush through life, let us not aim at accomplishing a million things in life. Let us just learn to watch instead of look, absorb instead of witness. Let us not, as Wordsworth said, lay waste our powers, getting and spending, late and soon. For life is not a trial, life is not a mission we have to accomplish. Life is beautiful, and it is meant to be lived.
