All Things Stale
So much time of our lives is wasted in delving into what is wrong. So much time of our lives is wasted by not focusing on what is right.
For the umpteenth time I made a mental note of things that according to me weren’t going in the right direction, when I heard my family’s call to have lunch. While I stared at the meal in front of me, hot and of the kind that I like, for the entire day I made a mental note to list every thing that was going in the right direction for me. Unsurprisingly, the latter note turned out to be way longer than the former one and I felt ashamed, to say the least. At the end of that day, I planned to go to my hometown, and that in itself turned out to be a great blessing.
I went to my hometown, Banaras for a whole five days, I am emphasizing on the phrase ‘whole five days’ because after a really long time, I went to Banaras, and stayed there, in contrast to my previous visits in which I was rushing and rushing into one thing after another. This time, I did not have a wedding or a funeral to attend, not many social obligations, and hence thankfully no serious commitments. What better thing can happen to someone who thrives on writing, than some time to herself or himself? This time, I decided to focus on our blessings as human beings, our wasted blessings even more so.
I realised that uninterrupted access to electricity, Internet and the facility to work from home was a blessing for many people. When I went out for a six o’ clock morning darshan of two of the most famous deities residing in one of the oldest cities of the world (something I had been aching to do since a long time), I noticed the ample number of businesses that were shut down forever, because of the pandemic. Then, I couldn’t help but wonder, how were the families that were depending on such businesses for their livelihood surviving now? While I sanitised my hands every now and then, and wore a mask all the time, I wondered whether people who somehow eked a living had access to four meals in a day, let alone the requirements of masks, sanitisers and the related medical facilities highlighted by the pandemic?
It was during this visit, that I met some people my mother and I had committed plans with. I noticed the interest with which each of them greeted us, the voluble eyes of people who after having been in isolation for a long time, were unexpectedly happy to meet someone else. None of the people I met in this visit used their phones while we conversed, none of them seemed disinterested. It made me understand the true value of companionship amongst human beings. No matter how solitude loving someone is, we are all craving to have deep genuine conversations with someone else.
On the last night of my stay in the holy city, I excavated through a lot of old stuffs that lied in the old house, struggling hard to find a connection between those objects of the past and my present self. Few of those objects spoke to me, and the seemingly old connection with them felt fresh. It felt like it was yesterday that I had a ludicrous obsession for thumb rings, and they lay there in an envelope. However, a lot of those things made me question how they got there. No matter how hard I tried, I could not recollect the time when I had received a certain greeting card from a friend. I realised that people no longer gave each other greeting cards, and I could not recollect at what point in time did the practice become obsolete. I was amused at having forgotten some stories from my past that held immeasurable significance at certain points in my past. I looked at a page that had the handwriting of a girl I hated in high school; she had written ‘Happy birthday dear Shivani’. I stared at the word dear and smiled, feeling foolish for having hated her so much, then I failed to recollect where she was right now or what she was doing in life, and I smiled even more sheepishly. Looking at the albums that had captured the precious moments of childhood, I contemplated the extent to which I had taken things for granted. I wondered why was I ever angry or sad or desperate in those days when I had the opportunity to bring the world to my feet by taking a few right decisions. When we don’t value our privileges well, they turn into miseries. I made a mental note to never take for granted even a single day, because the weight of what I had was far greater than that of what I lacked. So much time of our lives is wasted in delving into what is wrong. So much time of our lives is wasted by not focusing on what is right. I decided to regain my focus on taking better decisions so that if I look back at my present days a decade later, I have lesser things that I did wrong.
I looked at the city with a whole new perspective this time, it was as if all the complains I had while I resided there as a stubborn child, then a crazy teenager, then an apparent visionary young adult seemed insignificant in comparison to my widened view of the world now. I remembered the great words by Pablo Neruda in his poem, Tonight I can write the saddest lines, “The same night whitening the same trees. We, of that time, are no longer the same.” The old stuff in the old house stayed the same, the way I left it the last time, and I on the other hand had changed so much.
In that city, I felt old and young simultaneously. Old because I connected with parts of me, I had long lost. Young because I felt a lively sense of energy that made me question that if so much had changed within me in a span of a decade, how much more was to follow? I look forward to looking back at the present time, a decade later and smiling even more. What is the stale part of you that does that to you?
You may reach out to me at sdshivanidubey@gmail.com.
