The other day while yakking with a friend of mine over a call and blowing small episodes into full blown details of a short story, I wondered where did that characteristic come from.

I kind of remembered that when I was a kid, after dinner I would sit on the coffee table in the living room, with my parents, brother and sister around and tell stories on what all happened at the school that day. All anecdotes were narrated with the intent of making everyone laugh or rather all anecdotes were what I found super funny and they generated laughter. I actually still do that. I remember when I left home for the first time to do my post graduation and after few months of having lived away and not getting home made food, when I finally made my first trip home, I actually sat and narrated all incidents around food for 4 hours and my father was amused, saying, “How can you talk about food for so long?”. Though, all incidents were amusing, the skill of telling a narrative in a long winded way and trying to inject humour in it is something I still do.

Which makes me believe that perhaps, because, as a child I was encouraged a lot to tell stupid stories I still look for stories in everyday life. And because stories come not only from knowing and observing what happened, the best part of the story comes from understanding why someone did what they did. From following that journey of the story and then arriving at the conclusion.

In books the stories end with sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle conclusion of that understanding, understanding of why the main character was doing what they were doing. It feels like, once we have understood the character, it is time or rather a natural end to the story after having gone through what happened in great detail.

As kids we don’t know that, we just know that was sooooooo…. funny or that was soooooo…. sad but as adults we get to know why it felt funny or sad.

The end is the understanding, or understanding is the end of every story.

There are times I am totally fascinated with us human beings. For all the intelligence and brains we possess we fail at life rather miserably more often than not. We see importance in things that are not important and fail to realise that everything is transient but what makes it consistent is our view and integrity towards life itself.

I know I am probably not making any sense with that but right now the words poured out and I am still trying to understand my last statement of “everything is transient bit….”. So here is what I may mean or mean by that….at airports I am quite intrigued to see when people pick up a wrong suitcase by mistake and immediately put it back realising it does not belong to them and that always gets me thinking, “we are so burdened with the idea of carrying the wrong physical baggage, we so don’t want to carry someone else’s dirty laundry but the emotional baggage that we carry around is something we are so comfortable with. Emotional baggage that makes us hurt ourselves, hurt others till we understand and overcome.”

We are ruled by our hearts and not our minds in our lives. Even our most practical decisions are practical because of conclusions we may have drawn due to emotional pain at some point. But, we continue to believe that we are practical, we think with our minds and what mind says is the best decision. The terrible relationship between our heart and mind is what leads to further chaos in our lives. We don’t use our mind to question our heart and we don’t use our heart to understand the mind, which just makes us live in a state of self absorption but not self awareness. And self absorption does not help us to evolve but keeps us playing the game of denial to know ourselves rather than indulge in self awareness and understanding and know that what we don’t like about ourselves can change.

And then we keep picking the wrong baggage in life and keep putting it down just like at airports shaking our head thinking, “When will I stop doing that?”.