As I write this on a lazy Sunday evening, the skies are exploding in a riot of colors. Fireworks in the night. On a clear blue carpet. Lights to sparkle. Truly life can’t be better?
Sadly, it ain’t so for me. I had the most awful cold the past week – still have. I think the common cold is by far the most irritating of all the minor disorders our body is forced to endure. When I get a cold – well, even my closest friends don’t talk much to me at that time :D. I am irritable, moody, prone to philosophical and depressing ruminations on the nature of existence and the meaning of life with a cloud over my head that you can see from a mile afar!
I just played a round of badminton on Saturday morning with Birdie’s suitor and got squarely beaten :-(. The suitor seems fine…on the surface but there is a nagging discontent about him that I can’t quite place. It’s that bugger instinct again. I was telling Birdie today about my latest theory (and I’ve had quite a few this week) that it is better to marry someone who loves you truly than who you love.
Added to the cold, I was also in an off-correspondence phase the past two weeks. Let me say it was my search for solitude phase. Much as I love people, I love being with myself. It’s a dichotomy that I have never been able to resolve. Everything in life really for me has always been the same – I sometimes feel that I tend to look at life in the black and the white and forget all about the gray. The Middle Path as the Buddha advocated has been the one I have least ventured into!
Today and all week I have been thinking about life. And been struggling to find meaning in the thoughts – in the end all that life is reduced to is survival isn’t it? At the basic roots of everything – all our desire to find meaning, all our relationships, the endless machinations of living – boil down to a simple minimalistic attribute of survival. Ultimately, the only thing that we need to live life is that we need food, air, water and sleep. The four elements as I would call it. Everything else is secondary to it – and in fact, conditions that are not needed to exist. What is it that we search for? Where do we find what we search for if life is just reduced to survival? Why traverse the ends of philosophy trying to find meaning in life when all we need is just these four elements? Sigh…these questions…and the oldest question known to man – the meaning of life – have been tormenting me all this week. Sigh. I am stuck with words here and the limitations of language. Sometimes I feel one with despair and pain – it’s like it doesn’t matter what I do – but the relentless force of this sea of despair draws me always. I can lay my soul bare to this sea – and it asks for nothing in return. I can sit for hours and gaze at its hynoptic movement and not feel the need to challenge its horizons. And ultimately I sell my soul to its greedy waves…
