The Road
The road still stands tall; alone yet it cares for all. It lets you and thousand others, known and unknown, cross turns, close or widen distances, reach destinations, and set off new journeys. But it never moves, not even an inch. It stays where it is, alone yet never complaining about it at all. People on the road have a dynamic life. But the road lives a static one. Yet it pens down the most amazing and wonderful stories of life - pleasure, pain, union, separation, and all the other emotions one goes through while walking the road and crossing it. Has anyone ever thought of the road, its pain, its pleasure, and the likes it feels?
The Promise
She always used to choose the wrong guy. Or perhaps there was no right guy. She was losing herself slowly, and by the time she realized that, she lost herself with no recognition of who she was or wished to be. She was becoming something else, someone else. Well, almost. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was turning away from what she was supposed to be deep within. And then she stopped to get hold of the scattered bits of that lost entity of hers. It further took five years to fight against her demons within and win back that lost self. In total, a struggle of nearly two decades. And now that love shows and showers in every corner she could possibly think of and lay her eyes on, she cannot just lose everything back to the same old vibes. That would be stupidity, and she cannot afford another round of it. She told herself this very clearly.
The Magic
When a boy/man and a girl/woman meet, it is not always love that sparks between them. Not the same kind of love that can spark between them. It can be the magic of something else. Like the one we find in music. She had a huge crush on this cute-looking, humble, and somewhat quiet guy in college who was superb as a singer and composer. When he used to sing on stage or simply strike his guitar chords, the entire hall would go silent to welcome the wavelength that voice would create. It was magic. What is even magnificently magical is he sang to her last night over the phone, live after more than two and a half decades. He was humming something, some nice soothing tune he had created hours before the call. And she ended up writing the words for his tune. Indeed, she ended up writing two sets of lyrics for him which he composed along. It was all through their conversations when and how those beautiful songs were created, crafted as she would say. They just conversed about the current times - the lockdown, the helplessness, frustrations - and the old times - his songs, college functions, hostel days - and she wrote along as he sang along. It was like that in the movie Music and Lyrics. And she did not realize how almost four hours passed by. Some great songs were born out of that soulful conversation that began before midnight and went beyond. She is talking about that kind of love, which has a magic one can hardly explain in exact words but feel so deep within. And as luck would have it, she got her college-time crush sing for her past midnight! She would say, there is a first time for better things in life. Always.
The Lesson
Something my teacher said some 30 years ago is my greatest lesson.
What if a person says "You look a bit insane today" to you first thing in the morning? What if it is repeated by the next three people you meet that day? And ten others on the same day? Won't you tend to have a little self-doubt about it? Yes, because that is a normal tendency. But then, what if you never pay heed to the words of the first person because you are clearly aware of who you are?
So, my teacher said, "Do not pay attention to unnecessary words people say about you."
The point here is to know your self and soul, to start practicing things that will lead you to that knowledge. Keep knowing yourself. Keep discovering yourself until you are truly aware of who you are, why you are and how you are.
I have added a little extension to the lesson from my teacher. The road to self-discovery is never ending. The more you learn about yourself, the more confident and sure you are of whatever you do and however you do, and the better you would want to explore the unexplored corners of your soul.
The Star
So, this guy was a bookworm, an ambidextrous, a quantum physics enthusiast, a Shiva devotee, a scribbler of self-musings, a coder, a game and app developer, an actor, and an all-time learner who had an infectious smile. Now it depends on you which of these qualities you choose to love him, hate him, blame him, or criticize him. And it is with every human being. We can choose what we want to imbibe from another human being and when - the good, the bad, or the ugly, or whatever you name it. It is indeed that simple.
The Evolution
Sometimes, intellectualism itself it the very reason to kill simplicity. Blind following of any -ism or -logy leads us to nowhere else but a dead-end. This is what happens when we keep looking at white or at black for a long time and forget to look at the smudged line of grey. Why does a good keep being felt good and a bad keep being felt bad without the possibility of being looked otherwise? Do we ever evaluate our perspectives, opinions, outlooks about things, entities, existences, thoughts in the course of time, or blindly follow whatever opinion we had once due to one incident or a set of aspects practiced once by that entity or existence? Do we keep loving or hating someone or something because of a particular logic and put our perspective under that logic without feeling the need to evaluate it? Can we see the different lights of perspective? Does a good or bad human keep being good or bad all the time, or we consciously choose to ignore the bad or good he or she does at times? Basically, we keep ignoring the human side of us by doing that. The human side which gives us the basic knowledge of good or bad. That refutes the very idea of evolution, our evolution.
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