My playfield for sure has metamorphosed ..

When you look back in time life feels like a happy young toddler with naked feet, dressed in a sleeveless tee and short pajamas, a stick in one hand and a punctured bicycle tyre in the other trying to use one to balance the other on its roller-coaster ride. The carefree, careful, caring, busy, lost, adventurous, wanting and aiming young lad out to discover an undiscovered lane in the oft traversed terrains of human journey – he sums it up all. This character visits my pensive moods and solitude hours very often. He has all the ingredients of a character that is typically human.

He is so much in love with himself. To him the world is his little playfield that begins and ends at the horizons that he can not just see but also touch and reach. The grass beyond is for him some other globe that extraterrestrials inhabit. He has a small little world around him that is completely his own and he is completely in love with it. This little world
he guards from all else, keeps it “mine” and steps out of it with caution, pleasure and ambition only to return back when he gets his due. Just like him we love our homes our jobs our children and all that we have carefully chosen to qualify the tagline “mine”. All that lies beyond belongs to books, newspapers and televisions – to be heard discussed and forgotten. It’s only our ambition that takes us out of it.

But gradually playfields shift, definitions alter. In the ever changing boundaries of “my world” soon we have new pastures. The dream of the verdure yet unseen enchants satiety and we move on. Are the fields really greener? I have not yet known only time will say, but yes my playfield for sure has metamorphosed and my lure has brought me here.

This moment is really the “present”

Something seems to have gone off beam with contemporary times. I hear of people all over being pushed into conveyances that travel only the final journey of mortal breathing – burning trains, derailed compartments, crashed flights, Godmen gunned, fire let loose, people killed, kin massacred, its just so all over the place that you cannot neglect it even if you want to. In these small daily sentences that each one of us traverse as we pen down in the superior story of life we all are strained to sit back for a jiffy and deliberate – why all this, how long and what if it is me or my loved ones.

A confession – when something like this happens I stop (at least for a few days) grumbling about life, I stop fighting with my hubby over the petty chores of mundane living and thank him for the greater part that is all so perfectly done, I stop cribbing about my work and workplace, I stop complaining to the Unseen over what I feel is my due. I just thank Him for having given me whatever he deemed good, worthy and necessary. I do not know what He has in store for me and what His plans are. All I can do is trust Him afar all qualm and survive this instant in its entirety. And yes I do still plan, still strive and still better myself but with modesty and submission in His will.

We mortals are unaware or rather consciously ignorant of how ephemeral are the lives we lead. This moment is really the “present”. Live it and love it.

A moment in time..

Life sometimes feels so strangely stagnant – as if you have drawn in a gush of air and are feeling full of life and then the very next moment you are unable to breathe or rather not wanting to. You are crowded by things you love, people you deeply like and yet there is this lingering feeling to break free, to give it up all for a few minutes and just be you. To stand alone in a moment in time when there is neither a past nor a future – the present is all you are living in and all you are living for. It’s a strange amalgamation of emotions – hidden, unexpressed and desired. You do not want to be responsible for anything or anyone. Like that little apostrophe in a life of shoulders and care you crave for a few moments when it could all be numb and yet beyond that tiny pause you could still get back your world just the way you left it.

I am sure all of us will have gone through such pockets of emotions at varying periods in our life. The mundane and the recurring, however nice and coveted that might be, needs a pause. Life needs to escape to the realm of change and difference. It can be your parents visiting you after long, an event, a surprise, an outing, a letter from a good old friend, an uncommon “love you” message from your loved one, a heart to heart chat with your best friend or sister, it can just be anything that gives you a high as if that’s just what you needed to make your day.

Today you are a year and a half, and life so completely revolves around you. From the minute you wake up to the minute I can cradle you to sleep you are the only thing that does rule supreme my heart. Watching you grow from that sweet little baby the doctor held out for me to see, to the young toddler messing around and bullying me all the time, has been one of life’s strangest and sweetest journeys. To be honest I have never lived through anything remotely close to being more difficult and frustrating and yet more fulfilling than this. Nothing in this world that I can feel more “only mine” than you (to be shared with your dad of course). Not a single emotion that I have lived through has been more pure than what I feel for you when I hold you close to my heart and you hold me tight. Feels like I have my world in my arms. Looking back time has just flown by, so much packed into each moment that they cease to feel like minutes anymore. Life keeps changing by the hour. Being a working mom things are a lot lot more hurried that they could ever be. Each second comes with its own demands as if to test me anew. And still when at the end of it all you reach out to me with that sweetest smile on your face world seems to be at a full stop, waiting for the two of us to grant it permission to go on to the sentence beyond….

One day when you have grown up, when you have a world of your own that you are lost in and your dad and I silently sit somewhere at the periphery of it (like our parents sit today) watching you go through the same cycle as we currently do, you will still and always be ALL our world.