Said the ancient sage. It has been a
part of a sentence that has stayed around and about for quite some time. No
prizes for guessing who told me about the quote. The title of this post is connected to a
question, which barring a few months of my life and very early years has stayed
with me – ‘why is one not dead?’. Some weeks ago when I visited a dentist to
get my teeth cleaned for the first time in my life, and the dentist was telling me that if I did not take care
of my teeth – they would rot and fall out, I couldn’t help but say (while
having funny memories of Florentino Ariza among some other images tickling me) that
I was hoping not to be around for that
long, and she shushed me. Back in my college days, I used to say that I didn’t
know why I didn’t kick the bucket instead of kicking the stone on the road –
and nobody much cared for that line.
The question that floats around or
comes barging in sometimes is, “why is [one] not dead?”. It is connected to the
question - “why, on earth…is one alive?”. Sometimes while walking and feeling
strangely disconsolate and discombobulated – the same thought strums in “well
you’re not dead – so, there's a reason.” Through the rushing of time and the dripping of time in
the hourglass and the motionless of time, if one looks at life – one can see
patterns if one is old enough (and feels much through sometimes faultless
intuition when one is very young). One can observe patterns – no matter how
impossible – and one can take note of many mundane and not-so-mundane incidents:
people encountered, people remembered, off-beat experiences, a person remembered,
career choices not made, relationships which suddenly caught spring showers and
came alive, relationships which died sudden and sometimes slow deaths,
professional awards, places seen, career setbacks, realizations which stayed, roads
taken and not taken, risks taken and avoided, knowledge growing like a dream
and meeting sometimes with realizations, fate tempted, fragrances forgotten
which on their return shoot out jumbled (and sometimes maybe conjured memories),
songs that send a pang, writings and stories which send a jolt through one’s
being, poems re-read, waking and sleep dream-images remembered, coincidences
repeated, love encountered... If one threads through and very insidiously and
watches the pattern as best as one can while being a part of it and sometimes from
a laughing and sometimes dispassionate distance, one can find an answer to why
one isn’t dead as yet. One goes through a steady process of ‘not this, not
this, not this…’ as one subconsciously and consciously and sometimes even
rather desperately and in despair searches for reasons that one is not dead. It
is in the eye of the storm that one sees what one needs to.
How one chances upon the ‘this…?’ this…?’ ‘Is it really this?’ ‘Can this be
the reason?..’ ‘this has to be it’ - is probably a unique experience for
different individuals – but I am convinced that most people can find out their
reason/s for living – whether by digging
into the reason that they are not in the grave or by asking themselves: ‘what
makes life worth living?’ ‘What makes overarching sense in life - no matter the
pain and the heartache and the greyness and the loneliness and looniness and incomprehensibility
that linger like a fog as one walks…?’ – One would have to make a list then. One
would have to see what makes life feel like an almost completed jigsaw puzzle or
like a steadily clearer one and what are mere flirtations or in fact silly
distractions or simply choices that go only thus far and no further, no matter
how one tries. One would have to make a list of all that makes life meaningful
for one – indeed all that comprises Life. One would have to think of the sparks
of joy that one feels and when that is ignited and why...
It could be a delusion. But if it is
a delusion which cannot be knocked out no matter how hard one has tried and in
spite of how hard one has resisted and doubted and despite all tradition and
convention and established knowledge – even unconventional but established knowledge
– it is not a delusion then. If in the deepest part of one’s Self there is an
incessant call which is backed every now and then by an external knowing of
what/who matters (and does not matter) and of what/who is important (and unimportant)
or of what makes sense only in a particular context – it can’t be a delusion. It
is a personal journey and it can be a terribly lonely journey too sometimes –
when everything and almost everyone in the outer world says that one is wrong
and deluded - and one cannot sometimes make sense of what is real or merely
imagined or is a mix of both and one makes horrible errors but one can keep
walking, knowing that for whatever one is –
one does indeed walk with one’s God within and for crystal clear bits of
time in this world as well, and even if one does not know or understand all as
how one would like to, one senses in an unshakeable way that there is a reason
that one is walking along. When one stays close to one’s deepest and highest
love/s – one knows that for better or worse and no matter how strange or
unusual or lonely or dark or plain puzzling the going seems sometimes, one is
walking the path that one is meant to…
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