Apr 18, 2024
Apr 18, 2024
What happened to "gili-danda"? What happened to collecting all those colored marbles and sitting out in the hot sun sucking on succulent mangoes? Now they have to worry about putting on the right kind of Sun Block and washing the Mangoes thoroughly (chemicals - so they tell me) What happened along the way? I remember my father coming home at 5pm every day. The latest he would come home (when not on Ship duty) was 6pm. He hardly ever worked on weekends - in fact none of the neighbors fathers did either. We always had time to play with him, go to the shore, build planes, wash and wax the car, do math. What happened? What have we created along the way? What kind of a niche have we carved for our generation and the generations to come? Life seems too full for everyone to do anything simple anymore. If we want to go for a vacation - it has to be some place exotic. And money is saved to go to the place 2 years later. Time does not wait. The kids grow up & we grow older. Time spent unwisely. Where do we go from here? I want to sit here and tell you that life is simple. Purely simple. We just have to open our eyes. But these are not the eyes we are bestowed with outside. I am talking of the eyes within. We need to open them wide. I guess what I am trying to tell you is that you should learn to observe. Observe everything that you do all day long, every day. Life, at its core, is perfect. Simply perfect. It's our expectations, our greed, our desires, and our egos that lead to all this misery. To all these needs, until it fills up our life. And we sit back and say; "oh life is too full for me to do simple things". Let me tell you a secret - Life in itself is simple. We make it complicated. We don't need all those luxurious items to ease our existence (okay - the truth be told - a few are really worth it though). But we spend way too much time going after things that we can really do without. We fill our lives with too much stuff!
A simple start we all have, with a burst of fresh air and the cold of this new environment. I am thinking that we all, at that moment, want to crawl back in where we are pulled out from. But alas, life has things in store for us. And the question has many a times crossed my mind, why are we born? Who are we? Where do we come from? Why do we have souls - or the better question would be - do we really have a soul? Maybe it's just this piece of flesh within us that pump's life through our bodies and we stop when it stops. So where is the soul? Who has seen it or felt it? Haven't we based this on myths and legends? Embraced it through folklore and tales of age? Sometimes we spend too much time on thinking about these things. We base too many do's and don'ts on beliefs that have no foundation. In the process we fill up our lives with yet more idiosyncrasies.
I am reading this book that describes the History of rhythm, and how it all started. And I am thinking "we have come a long way" and maybe during this journey we forgot the simple things in life along the way. Buried in some sand dune in a far away place. What happened to those simple pleasures of carrying not more than 5 books bound in a string to school? Now I see my nephews hoarding this piece of luggage that I would otherwise be charged for as being overweight (were I traveling by air)! I remember coming home from school, making a quick change and running back out to play till sun down. The only time I really studied was when I had a test or an exam to give. Now, well, now all I see kids doing is studying. Where is the simplicity of growing up?
Sometimes, and I don't know about you, but I think of what would have happened had I just crawled right back in the moment they pulled me out.
20-Jul-2000
More by : Trupti Derashri