So when they say, “If you love something set it free, and if it comes back to you then it was meant to be yours……blah blah blah”. This saying works at 2 levels to my mind, one, it is a consolation and hope to keep your sanity intact in the present and the second, the bit they don’t say in the saying is that when you do let it go, you will after a period of hurt, pain and all of that discover yourself. And that discovery will be so exciting that you may not always miss what you let go off. In fact, it may even so happen that you think that it may as well that you let go of whatever or whoever it may have been.

People and dreams, when they don’t work out for us have a habit of bringing in self-doubt. This self-doubt can also be good as it may lead to introspection and recognizing the areas of improvement in self. And that is fine in the process. But self-doubt leading to low self esteem is never a good thing. The only trick is to rise above the self-deprecation and seeing the good things, the good things being the passion and honesty with which you had pursued the dream. Honesty, passion and love bring madness and goodness to the human heart and that is beyond comparison to having a rational mind or even the outcome of all the effort. One just needs to know we did the best, with all the honesty and goodness of the heart. And rest shall follow, or may not. So, I guess, let it go.

This friend of mine Suvo has been saying, “Sab Maya Hai”, for as long I have known him and that is about 14 years or so. “Sab Maya Hai”,  just means that everything in this world is an illusion. By everything, I mean all relationships, emotional ties with physical or conceptual, attachment and love for others, for self, for things, for possessions, for acquisitions etc etc….

So as per most saints and sages, human beings are given the chance of being human till we learn and complete the journey of detaching ourselves from all things that attach us. And once we learn that apparently we do not have to come back to this earth. I am sure there are gaping holes in what I am saying but this is broadly what I have heard.

Lately, my very close friend’s father passed away. And that brought back this thought of Sab Maya Hai to my head. I got thinking, that yes, all around us there is so much loss so many human beings go through, loss of a loved one, loss of a child, loss of respect, loss of dignity, loss of face, loss of property, loss of money, loss of job, loss of relationships, loss of lovers, loss of friends, loss of family, loss of fame, loss of success, loss of marriages, loss of closeness, loss of family…..(I am sure there are many many more), but the point is we all carry on, we all live, we all go onto still enjoy life and if not all of it then most certainly some moments out of it, with the pain or despite of it.

In retrospect all the loss seems inevitable, it seems like a journey you had to go through, that it couldn’t have been any other way. And that realization is what gives sense to that line, “Sab Maya Hai”.

Sab Maya hai does not mean not to live, love or laugh. It just means do all that but with the knowingness that one day this shall not BE.

Since many years I have had this realisation that I hate Sunday evenings. No, its not the Monday Blues syndrome. There is something about Sunday evenings, a sense of finality, a sense of closure, a sense of something important coming to an end, an anxious feeling but you cannot put your finger on the reason or the cause of this anxiety. It feels like saying bye to your lover after a holiday and then each of you going to your separate city. It’s a mixed feeling of joy that you felt and sadness that you are feeling.

 

Sunday evenings make me reflective. Somehow, it feels like nothing really seems to be changing or moving forward. Though, in reality it is not like that at all. Things change, and move forward all the time. We plan holidays, lunches, dinners, meetings, we grow up or grow aware (though both these things are the same to my mind), meet new people, do new things, read new things, have new experiences, see new places and all that and more, but come Sunday evening and all this vanishes from the mind and I just feel slightly weighed down.

 

My sense is that some of us carry a heaviness within us. Feel all the feelings a bit too intensely, too vulnerable and trying to cover it up by pretending to be strong. Sunday evenings you let the pretense go take a walk and then you just feel so tired and so exhausted. And you become honest with yourself and you know something is missing and no matter how much of the world you see, no matter how many books you read, languages you learn, places you go to, experiences you go through, people you meet, will only make sense………..no, I don’t really know when they will make sense, maybe someday when I am 55 or something like that and when Sunday evenings cease to become this ominous thing, this mixed feeling phase, the one you want to stay in but also know the end is here and you can’t escape time.

This friend of mine Jonathan says his girlfriend is his favourite person in the world.

The first time I read it on some post I just smiled. It is sweet. And if you know the two of them it is sweeter.

So the term “favourite person”, got stuck in my head and I realised it is probably the best thing one can say to / about a person. It is more than “I love you”, it does not carry the pressure but a feeling of being hugged and held, it makes you want to respond with a smile and not with a frown, it makes you feel special like it’s your birthday everyday. Sometimes, maybe we all need to lose that intensity and heaviness for a bit and just smile when we think about our favourite person. The childlike excitement seeing your favourite toy is what is nicer sometimes than the passion of a literary romance. Instead of stories of huge sacrifices for them it sounds like you have stories of carrying flowers and chocolates for them everyday. Though, I am pretty certain we will deliver on big sacrifices as well for our favourite person.

So you see favourite people, you have a lot going for you.

After a particularly soul wrenching heart break I was talking to a girl friend of mine and we were discussing how to get over it. Women do that. I am sure men usually have very practical solutions, like, “go get drunk dude”, or sleep with someone else, or go out with someone else, or do that drive down you have been wanting to. But women, on the other hand like to revel in the pain for a bit longer and talk about it so that the good and bad remain in the mind.

So anyway, I just mentioned to my friend I wish there was such a thing like they had in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where one can remove parts of one’s life from one’s own mind. It would save everyone so much of heart ache.

My friend very seriously looked at me and said, “But there is!”, I was so excited for a moment and I asked, “Wow, where?”….and she, with equal seriousness of the moment just previous to that, turned around and said, “It’s called moving on”. And both of us burst out laughing for a long time forgetting how to get over hear breaks.

Many months later, I was kind of thinking about this entire moving on thing and one thing that stuck out to me was that moving on particularly did not have anything to do with big, dramatic shifts of life, like, moving cities, countries, and houses etc. We can do all that and still not move on. Moving on requires one’s mind to be interested in other things, its takes a lot longer than just the change in our superficial environment. Of course superficial always helps as the chances of  new things stimulating you are higher but still it takes time in my opinion.

I realised moving on reflects in small things. I changed country and all but once I moved, my house looked like I was either just moving in or moving out, but not like that of someone who has moved on for almost a year. The paintings were always leaning against a wall, were never on a wall, I still did not have a local credit card, there was no rug in my living room, a particular lamp went on with a fused bulb for about 4 months, maybe at the back of my mind I kept thinking this is a phase meant to be forgotten, a phase I did not want in the first place, so do not accumulate things because you don’t want them in any case. Because you keep thinking that this will soon be over and everything will be back to normal and you will feel happier like you did in the good old times. Without realising that today’s normal is this, your house in a state between moving in or moving out, keeping you and everyone guessing around you.

So moving on came to me in the form of acceptance that this is my life now, and I will probably never get it back and that the only justice I can do is acknowledge it. It started slowly, getting a handyman to put up the pictures, buying clothes, getting a local credit card. Rest, let’s see how that goes. 

 

I can read Catcher in the Rye from any page that opens first till the end, always.

I can watch Before Sunset as many times as one would want to see sunsets in life.

I love dark and depressing movies, books and poetry as much as I love the happy ones.

I can watch FRIENDS over and over again, wait for the joke and still laugh like I heard it for the first time.

I watch sports only when in company of others, on my own I would rather be reading.

Sipping my bed tea is the most important moment of my day.

I would love to meet one author I love over 2 bottles of wine, at least.

I have learnt to appreciate mid week holidays after years of working…….

Contrary to popular belief, one does not always live in memories. Sometimes you live because of them.

Love being mad about…….a song, a book, a writer, some words strung together, a place, a spot, that colour of the sky which is never the same, a person, a restaurant, a dish, yellow roses, poetry, a cup of tea, a glass of Chianti, the feeling after finishing a run, It’s so important to be crazy about one thing all the time. The thing keeps changing but craziness needs to be a constant as nothing stays, nothing lasts, but what remains is only the feeling. That feeling in the middle of the chest when I am mad about something, the one which is a sign of happiness and slight heaviness because I know it won’t last, either my love for the song, or the book, or the writer, or the spot, or the place, or the city, or the dish, or the person, or that colour of the evening sky, or the yellow roses, or the poem, but what will last will be the desire to feel like that again. And so I will never be stagnant. 

Oh you wonderful being
Gather your self from your fragments in the dust
That dust which holds parts of you
That dust which will reshape you
Gather it
To be the dust again that’s sprinkled over the living.

Lately, or rather every now and then the urge to put down ones thoughts, stories, anecdotes, musings come to me as well and the brash feeling that I could be a writer too. I have so many stories to tell, stories which on their own may seem like any average Joe’s life but of course they hold a lot of importance in my mind as those parts of my life either shook me up, made me feel intense happiness or sadness or made me take and act on decisions that I realised were wrong the moment I acted on them, but they are my stories….so when you look back at your life and try and capture that feeling you were going through, the inexplicable feeling of flying, or falling, or floating, you can never put it down in words somehow the best possible way. Every time you look at those words they seem slightly shallow and you end up using heavy words to express your emotion but heavy words are not the right substitute to capture what you felt at that time.

 

So, the most important thing I have realised is to write down when you are going through your experiences, write down when you are indulging your mind with random observations of people, places, things around you.  Write down when you know that you are at a loss of words to say anything out aloud because all this intensity can make someone feel like that at times, but somehow, pen and paper always find a way to make sense. And when you look back at it, you may not feel as intensely as you did when you wrote it, because you moved on and you felt new things, had new experiences, met new people, went to new places, realised that you are mortal after all, became a health freak, vegan, non-smoker, a person who runs marathons…… whatever…..but it will help to connect all the dots of this being. So write.