Making sense of…
Time is a concept that robs us of our ability to live life with spontaneity. While most of us are racing against time to make the best of this moment, others are lying on the streets under tattered blankets, whose entire existence spans around waiting for a miracle dressed as Death, or asking for alms from passers-by. And some others are trying to become oblivious of their time by drowning themselves in pools of intoxication and clouds of highs. Isn’t it just amazing to even grasp the starkness of the fact that every day, with each passing year, we are stealthily crawling towards the all-consuming, invincible Death?
However, this reflective writing is not about the abstractness of Time. It is about the subjectivity of it, and how we are enslaved by the snares of each second, minute and hour, day, month and year. I am sitting at a study table beside the lone window in my bedroom, located in a quiet part of Morgantown, one of the most populous towns of West Virginia in the United States of America. It is 11:45 pm, dark outside, and almost 75% of the town has gone to sleep. I am, however, awake, with a nagging headache, and while the mind tells me it needs to rest, the heart wants to talk to India, because the sun is above the country right now. So I just realized, although the body is tired, the soul is relentlessly trying to communicate to all that it has known for the last couple of decades. Soul, we don’t see it, but we know it exists in us. And this soul, this consciousness has not yet been conquered by any man-made notion, and therefore, it is not bound by time and space. So while I sit here, with the nightstand glowing in my room, I am looking for the souls in my country who I could exchange a few thoughts with.
I realize, there are several types of people I could and would like to speak with. There are three main categories. The first type is that who would eagerly respond to anything I tell them- my parents and closest family members and a few friends, the ones who are infinitely there for me, no matter where I am. The second, the ones who I could talk to for sure, but should not, because of personal and ideological differences that have caused us to drift away from each other. And though we have silently moved apart, I still think of them, remember the good times we had and make peace with the fact, that some relationships were made to be broken, so that I could grow as a person, and make my life seem meaningful in hindsight.
The third is that someone I hold so dearly to my heart that the mind sometimes almost forgets that talking to that person is not feasible any longer. It is that person for whom I would make mountains move, to see him, just one more time, one last time. It is during these odd moments that time and space stop making any sense. Someone has rightly said that unless we lose something, we underestimate its value in our life. I wish I could physically travel back in time, and make amends. However, coming to think of that, my mind asks me…Do you really want it? Could you have become what you are today if certain events, that were beyond your control, had not occurred at certain points in your life?
And this is when I am kicked in the gut, my consciousness torn apart, one trying to accept the pros and cons of this reality, while the other keeps undoing all the mistakes and imagining an alternative reality, where whatever is black in this world, looks white in the other. As the clock ticks by, as the night deepens over my sky, I can’t help but wonder, why my mind is laden with full of contradictions! Is it Time, is it Space, or is it the Universe that conspires to make me write tonight what my mind dictates? Will this make any sense some years down the line? I have a feeling, it will. It has always been this way. In the end, it all begins to make sense.
