Chitkul, Himachal Pradesh, March 22, 2012

Life  skills and confidence are two of the best things you can ever give to a child while growing up. For a variety of reasons, I had had little of either for most of my life. When I moved to Delhi in 1999, I did not even know how to write a cheque or how to buy grocery. Now, after almost 13-years 0f being here, a string of failed relationships and a life and lifestyle that is scorned upon by most things traditional, the persistent feeling of being a failure or being wholly inadequate is as hard to dodge as your own shadow.

It is easy to say “ignore society, conditioning and expectations of your loved ones,” but doing that is an entirely different challenge and doing it consistently enough is a feat in itself. But, the fact is that neither swimming with or against the tide trains you enough to deal with failures, loneliness and feeling lost for no particular reason. Most schools of thought and ways of living emphasize too much seeking, negating, suppressing or emphasizing select feelings. And if you can’t seem to do that (consistently reverberate with joy or make disappointments disappear), there is an almost implicit stigma of failure attached to it.

For someone like me, with my previous history of inadequacy and failure, the last three-years have been significantly harder due to an unwelcome addition to my list of problems - loneliness. From the time I could remember, I have always been a loner, but till three-years-ago it has never been something that used to bother me. When it started being a problem, it kicked in as a problem that was impossible to dodge. As if feeling that way being out there in the crowded world was not bad enough, coming home to just myself made it nearly unbearable.

After years of struggling with it, the past few months have slowly seen the tide turn. It is, by no means, an end to my troubles. But it is a promising and persistent reduction in all those feelings – inadequacy, failure – probably for the first time in my life. It also does not mean that I’m not paralyzed by disappointment or that I don’t feel like wanting to dig a hole and never come out of it when I have messed up. I still feel very strongly about those things and I don’t expect it to change. But I do know now that even though those feelings are a significant part of my life, it is not all of my life, unless I choose to make it so.

It feels good to feel.

Freedom is not the ability to do anything I like and do anything I want when I want to. Those are only few of the various manifestations of freedom. At a higher level, freedom is the release from the only choices I have given myself so far in life. Freedom is the choice always available to me to release myself from guilt, regret and pain of things that I have done and of things that I have not done. Freedom is my ability to choose what makes me genuinely happy, even if it does not make everyone around me happy.

That happiness, though, need not be easy or kind to you. I gave up the security of a well-paying job 3-years ago because I was not happy. In the process of discovering the specifics of what makes me happy I have erred a lot, made a lot of mistakes, let myself and a lot of others down, incessantly doubted my own abilities and I have also been living a far less flamboyant life than what I have been used to. You may not believe it, but joy and pain can co-exist at their extremes on this road.

Eventually, I wound up feeling far less divine and a great deal more human and ordinary than what I used to think of myself earlier. I am free now to feel a lot more, but what I feel may not always be to my liking. Therein lies the essential paradox of the situation – why would you want to be free in this manner to feel all those difficult things. Well, you don’t need to. The freedom at stake here is not the freedom from pain or difficulty. The freedom at stake here is the freedom to choose differently, each time, every time. It is the freedom to realize that you are in a prison by your own choice.

It is an old track and not for the faint of heart. Lots of layers, big beats, synths going crazy.

I was recently looking a the list of things I wanted to do in life and it occurred to me that some of those things had been on the list for years now. I have not had as much free time as I have had in the past three-years. If I could not make even a minor dent on that list in that time, the problem really was elsewhere and it has everything to do with distractions.

It was not until I quit Facebook on a whim last year the realization of how much time I would waste on a daily basis. I would mindlessly click through albums, profiles and so many other things. Looking back, I can see the same pattern in almost everything else. I have done the same thing with people, problems and anything else as long as I did not have to really deal with my own things.

After Facebook I quit almost every other social network I have been on. I have not used Twitter in a week and often times I feel this is what rehab probably is like. The elusive fix is even harder to deny myself when what I am trying to work on is not easy. Sometimes it is immensely frustrating when I manage to do little of what I am supposed to do and I can’t get around to my fixes that would otherwise give me the feeling of having done a lot without having done anything of any significance.

The good part is that as a result of all these shenanigans I am slowly reclaiming time. I have not been proud of saying “I don’t have time” for a while now. I can no longer say that. Now it is a matter of making good use of the time that I have found. I’m still working on that one.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Mesmerizing then, mesmerizing now.

Mushroom at Chindi

Today, I have no stories to tell. There is only the faint glow of an old oil lamp, a flame from the wick steadily lighting up a warm circle, keeping at bay the night and its darkness. There should, ideally, be a breeze, but not today. There is only a loud stillness and the ebb and flow of thoughts. A conversation is not rare, even when words are not spoken. There is much to be said, but not much already not said. It is a kind of repetitive rinsing. Washed repeatedly, it shines a true transparence. A new spectacle to see the world through.

Being twice out on the roads in two months should satiate even the hungriest looking for an uncertain familiarity in the hands of strangers. Not for me. Each outing only makes the yearning stronger. When you dream, plot and plan for it so much, the inevitability of it is least surprising. It is not unhappiness that I find here, but it is not the zenith of happiness either. I’m uncertain whether leaving here would be flight, or a homecoming. I don’t have the required objectivity to call it right. Regardless, I’m inching forward.

We had a day of almost endless rain. The incessant drumming of droplets and bits of pine slows down now and then before it starts off again. I can sit and watch it rain endlessly in the valley; what does time mean? I do not care to know how this universe came about, but I can imagine a very creative bent of mind at work. Hell, I could call you ‘god’ just to have a name I can send the congratulations to. Morning finds night’s blanket dragged away from the valley, leaving bits of cottony clouds still stuck to the mountains. Untidy, it is childishness at its best, but it lends an indescribable joy to this adult’s mind.

Returns often find me maudlin, not this time. Few miles on our way back and I had already returned in mind a hundred times and plotted another hundred times more how to be back with body in tow. We have flowers here too, where I live, it is hard to escape the green. But, it is something about the green’s shade? Or is it something about that droplet on the tip of a leaf, a purity that can only be experienced? There is something there and there is no escaping it.