And the circle goes on...

Life in all its complexities, in all its disappointments, in all its laughter and smiles as well as in all its achievements holds a balance, and in it lays a charm of its own. We win some, we lose some, but eventually it always balances each other out. Today yet again, in a conversation with a close friend i realized yet again how everyone’s life in one way or the other is intertwined. There is always someone in some corner of the earth in the same place that you were in someday. Some other pair of feet always fit into the shoes that you’ve outgrown at some point in Life. It is like watching the repeat telecasts of your favourite sitcom, with different characters each time. And each time though the story begins the same, it leads to a very different set of consequences, very different set of experiences, very different set of choices, which finally decide the outcome.

It is often through other’s experiences that you re-live your past and bring on nostalgia. Nostalgia for emotions you felt, emotions you could feel at one point and are sure you no longer will. The all it takes is the whiff of another someone living your life, x years ago... And there you go! Only this time you smile and say you know better and would have chosen more wisely. However what we forget to consider is taht if we’d not made those mistakes, taken those risks, chosen those less-travelled paths, today would be as good as yesterday. And we’d  have to start all over again!

Looking back, i d not cringe for a moment when i acknowledge that i’ve always not taken the best of decisions, not chosen the best of people, not done the ‘right’ things always, (actually mostly, for that matter), but that what makes me, Me. And am glad of the ‘me’ i am today.

And like another close friend says, the best we could do is to keep walking..the rest will fall into place!  J

It always does!

This thing called Life!

A distant sound

A broken shard of glass

A piece of blank paper

A drop of rain against the glass

Some cherished, some passed unnoticed

Some that rippled the surface,

Some broke the surf

Some that the wind echoed

Others merely gallantly rode away

Some were just thoughts

Others plain fortitude;

They came by and brought with them

A flavour each that would each last a season!

I fell, I rose...and the circle yet again

Claimed and maimed,

Ruined and restored

Stayed and then not:

Only each time it gave me

A lill more taste of what it is

To be living,

This thing called Life!

The Music Inside...

The music is all around you...

All you have to do is listen...

With these concluding lines, it touched a chord in me somewhere.

It has always struck a chord in me, come to think of it. Music. A form of relevance, a form of energy, that has always reached out to me in ways nothing else has ever been able to.

It has its own mysterious ways of speaking, of communicating. Tells you things, that you know are being whispered only to you.  It’s like the wind in the trees, the caress of a soft touch, the overcast yet blue sky, the sound of the waves, the calm of the mountains... all of this communicated to you in a few magical notes...and the interpretation is solely yours..

How much can be conveyed through its notes, through its existence, is something that’s immensely endearing; immensely attractive, if i may say so. All the more the creative energy channelled through it, the expanse of the energy it exudes; the expression it provides; all of that and only more. Sometimes like the swiftness of rapids, at others, merely soothing me through its very presence. The reaction i’ve had to various forms of music has always been very strong; some guitar solos, still make my toes curl, each time i listen to them...

I’ve never mastered the art.  Not that i’ve never wanted to. There have been pockets of time, when i’ve had strong urges to pursue learning music. I’ve just never pursued the urge;  Now, i guess i will...now that i’m a lill more sure about what i want to do professionally. When these urges happened, i guess there were more important things in my head that needed clearing up; gradually things are falling into place; they always do, don’t they?

Sometimes when i look back at my childhood and think that i’d learnt classical music for three whole years i smile..I also remember what my mother said when i was adamant to give it up; that i’d always regret not having a ‘special talent’ later in my life; I look back and smile upon that too. I regret not learning music, but not for the same reasons. My mother i guess, with all her best interests for me in mind, did not possibly have the right reasons for her want of me to learn music. That apart, the period when i was tried to learn music, i never did...i never enjoyed it, because it did not come from within me. It was somewhat enforced. It was someone else’s want; not my own.  What my mother should have probably figured out then is that i don’t do very well with enforced thoughts; she still hasn’t ...and i’m still hoping sometime in the near future she will;

 I needed more motivation, more reason than it just adding to my resume. I guess i have that now. My want; my appreciation for it; Strong enough that i’m writing about it! My muse has always been me...

 Sometime soon then... J

Wistful...

As the fallacies fail,

Only the emptiness remains

They silently call out to the rain.

As the downpour continues,

The memories wilfully flow through...

Not thinking, not wasting another precious minute

The clock strikes yet another hour

It erodes a lill more of me, a lill more of us;

Love, lust, pain and glory

Strangely, they all belong together, in the same old story

The story has long been told before

Only time will tell, what part has been played out

And how much still remains

In Faith or Fate...

Its been a while since i found something inspiring enough, that it urged me to sit down and write and i’ve missed that feeling!...I just watched the movie ‘Serendipity’- what they call a happy or a fortunate accident. Co-incidentally it fell into place with a set of thoughts i’ve been fondling with in my mind for a while now...Serendipity for sure!!

If i close my eyes for a while and think about all the people i’ve known or met, everyone has come back with very strange consequences in my life. Wait...strange is perhaps the wrong word here. Very different consequences in my life, is better put, than i would have imagined them! Friends, parents, partners etc...none are where i thought they’d be, and maybe in twenty years, or even five years from now, they again will not be, where standing here i think they will. That gets me wondering, and worried too...Do we have control over what we do, who we meet, who we make friends with and how our life shapes out...or do things just fall into place by some supernatural order? To sound more cliché, as Shakespeare put it are we just actors on the world stage just playing our parts in a grand play, or are we really the directors who are playing the parts and deciding the course  of the play at the same time? Are we just pawns in a much larger order of things or are we playing the game too? Is it about the choices we make or about those that we don’t?

While Sarah and Jonathan from the movie found their own ways to tweak their destinies, did they have absolutely no role to play in it...I cant help thinking, if they’d taken more  initiative the first time they’d met, years before Jonathan and Sarah decided to come back and look for each other just before very crucial steps in their individual lives, wouldn’t they have spared their own lives, and taht of a few others a lot of drama and perhaps pain too? Well, if taht’d happened we would definitely have missed out on an inspiring watch but what about life?  While a certain Sarah, did find her Jonathan, years after they met on a fateful evening, what about the Halley who lost her Jonathan. Is it designed that way, that in one’s happiness, inevitably lies another’s pain.. I am just thinking out aloud if what Sarah’s friend said to her that Life isn’t some elaborate stage-play with directions, that all a part of a master plan, some larger picture; Life’s a mess , its chaos personified. If that is true, then it is we who add or subtract from that mess.Like i said i cannot help but wonder what if Sarah and Jonathan had not played hide-and-seek with the Fates and instead taken charge. Would we have had just another depressing cinematic experience of how ‘Life just happens’ inspite of your plans?

Strangely, as i’m keying down these confused threads of thoughts, my play list decided to play a track for me that says ‘we must be the change we want to see, if this is to become reality...Only you can get your fire started...only you can keep it burning...”Maybe that is a sign; or maybe its just another plain co-incidence. But then again we have another school of thought that says all co-incidences are a kind of sign. But am i looking for signs at all? I am at a point in my life where i am about to take a major decision that is going to personally and professionally affect me in several ways. If i am to vote in favour of the decision i would be sitting up and taking charge.  I do not know, if am acting on impulse, but a part of me strongly wants to take charge. I have my own inhibitions too, like everyone else. And am trying to overcome them...I am at crossroads again... I’ll guess i’ll let  ‘life happen’....

The Stories Untold

The rain, the clouds, the downcast sky

The gaze, the look, the mist in your eyes,

That, and all other natural calamities...

Stop to whisper, to their soul-mates

The woes of the vows,

The pain clouded in the rain

They whispered the stories of love and laughter

Of valleys and hills far beyond

Of roads not taken, of scores not kept

Of the old and the new, of the plentiful and of the few

As the lull before the storm passed

A calm consumed, the wholeness still

Your eyes dint move, neither did your soul

Left behind were only the stories untold...