Moving On

 So I move on, professionally, yet again. Life has always been a panorama for me and I have responded variously to its fleeting glimpses, mostly with excitement and a little bit of trepidation. Would that make me a true blue Gemini? The duality in me has always been thus, the buccaneer in me, always eager to chase the proverbial pot of gold under the rainbow vs the dowager countess in me, unwilling to step out of my comfort zone. 

Following the pandemic however and exposure to some wondrous stories of first time entrepreneurs, paralympic participants and geriatric genii on Instagram, I think I might have finally made up my mind to live my life the way I want, without looking back at 70 on my middle aged younger self with condescension and contempt. The one thing in life I dread is the stagnation of routine. It seems a slow poison that seeps into our veins surreptitiously, smothering us with the illusion of a facade that only seems satisfaction.

I've always loved writing. It came to me as spontaneously as breathing. Maybe it's time I awoke to its embrace and put my 'behind in the past' (Lion King Pumba style) to reclaim my calling as a writer of some possibility. Beware of my Gemini duality, however!

What colour is your emotion?

 While taking my usual morning stroll and doing my daily stretching routine on the west facing upper terrace of our apartment today, I casually looked at, in passing, the clothes that had been put out to dry in the unpredictable early morning monsoon sunshine. An interesting fact of physics that we had read in school crossed my mind, reinforced by the science syllabus of my son at school. The colour of an object that we see around us is in fact, the only colour that it cannot absorb. The rest of the other colours are absorbed by it.

Pondering this fact, I was intrigued by a slightly different albeit related chain of thought. Could it be that our moods consist of one emotion which dominates the others by suppressing them? In short, the other emotions are there but not sensed because of that one prevailing, all consuming autocratic one? For example, anger. When we are angry with someone, is it not true that our other or past emotions towards that person get suppressed by the all consuming current passion of anger?

I'm going to hold onto this train of thought for a bit. Does it not imply that if we allow ourselves some physical and temporal distance, maybe our other emotions towards that person will abate and be diluted/conditioned by emotions evoked by previous circumstances? That would be a useful psychological self-help tool to calm ourselves and mellow the intensity of our negative feelings in generally most circumstances, maybe.

United at home

Common to most of us is our current recognition that what can't be controlled can at least be capitalised on to do what we've often yearned to but never found time in our routine-ridden lives for.

It's been so heartening to find fistfuls of friends rediscovering talents they knew they had but never could explore for lack of time or opportunity. Leisure had almost always been conquered by the need to be useful or to ensure all was done that could ease the routine of the next day. Whereas now that the deadlines are still there (maybe) but less looming on the immediate horizon, we do have 'time to stop and stare'.

Maybe then, although at the tragic expense of almost 3 lakh deaths worldwide (till date), this was an overdue break for humanity, suffering from an unmitigable fever of materialism. By this time, we have probably realised that food and sanitising supplies are worth more than their weight in gold (even literally). Endless weekend trips to stores selling branded clothes, toiletries and electronics have been replaced by once-in-a-while visits to the closest (geographically speaking) supermarket/grocery store just to purchase essentials that would justify queueing up for quite a few minutes at the entrance.

Technology, however we rue the toll it takes on our eyes and spine, has definitely proved more than a mere point here. If our sanity is intact, then the former has surely contributed considerably to preserving it. In an era of abruptly terminated real-time library services, Audible and Kindle and Netflix have made the transition to the stay-at-home phase painless and plausible. My son has been able to access school learning meaningfully through sites like Education City, My Maths, TT Rockstars and BBC Bitesize. Our lack of too many books on foreign shores have been compensated for by friends and family pitching in with links to scanned books, fiction and non-fiction, via email or Whatsapp.