Notes

Since form often constrains than liberates, I will ditch it for the time being and dispense encapsulated bits of substance to summarize the random clumps of thoughts simmering around me. It is indeed odd that after some 5500 kms of travel, I have wound up feeling the most amount of peace in a place where I have experienced little of it in all my life. It is easy to mistake consistency for routine, as both address degrees of deviations.

Balance: It is nice to feel like the air through which an exquisite music is being played. You are neither the artist, nor the listener. The music only passes through you, making you an incidental party to the whole transaction. You could argue that the music can't exist with you, since it can't be played or listened to without air. But that is irrelevant and we can always pretend to play music and hear it, if we do it in a mutually agreeable manner.

Children: I have always had a mixed bunch of feelings about them. Cannot quite make sure whether I like them enough or dislike them intensely. They are, though, much easier to deal with than grown ups, that is, until they start resembling us grown ups a lot more. They do have the gift of much simpler trust mechanisms and are more flexible on that front. No fears of the next big fall or the next big heartbreak. When they trust it is without the fear of the past. When they don't trust you, it is also without the fear of the past.

Rootedness: Never felt it. But I have always alternated between absolute paranoia of new places and a desperate urge to cling on to the freedom to be able to pack my bags and move out of anywhere on a whim. Ten-years of a career, fixed address for a passport, bank accounts – let go all of that just on a thoughtless thought. Just because it can be done. Now, though, there is no longer the urge to belong. I can pick between belonging anywhere – at home in the middle of a cold desert or here or anywhere else – or belonging nowhere. Between personal history, geography and nuances of the language either seriously means nothing.

Events: These are nothing but markers of the passage of time. They mark boundaries of a larger continuum, necessitated often by our need to mark, measure, compare, contrast, accept, deny, decline, embrace anything and everything out there. These are our hot air balloons in our attempt to give shape to the air that it holds. They are functional attempts, but their functionality is limited. When did you start loving? When did the pain subside? It must have been a great thrill when that happened. The continuum never demands measuring, only our nature does. It is hard to go against nature. But to experience nature best, you often have to go against nature.

The irony is even borderline galling. I'm sitting here, staring out of the window, which I've stared out of through my twenty-years here, and as it has often happened before I can see the rain drops fall and they fall. There is a liturgy being performed outside by nature – a mixture of the most lush of greens, pleasant bright sunshine, a lovely stiff breeze with a hint of the ocean and a passing shower. It is the same people, same place and yet I feel nothing like what I expected to feel. Makes you wonder what exactly is the importance of all that you've considered important till now.

On a plain, some fifteen-thousand feet above main sea level, I stepped out of my car, after days of hard driving. I honestly had no expectation of what I would find there. But what I did find was a familiarity – that we are seeing each other again. You could call it projection or you could call it looking inward, but you can't escape your inside by choosing distance as your medium. You'll always carry what you are looking to avoid within you. It could also be seen as a roundabout way of embracing what is inside by seeing it even so far away.

You can feel the stirrings. You could attribute it to something new and immediate. But no pebble is polished to its smoothness overnight. It takes time. It takes the magic of nature – for the winds to play its part, for water to run endlessly over and at times a human being to pick it up and throw it, out of turn, to where it is now. It is nothing special either. It happens to every pebble and every human. Just that very few humans choose to not be pebbles and accept and admit what happens – often even in all its tragic tidings.