I sometimes think of a piece of rock between the flowing waters, undisturbed and unresponsive of the water currents that pass by it. Just there. Sometimes I think I could be the rock, amidst the flowing time. Just there. Festivities are one of those times I feel most like the rock, like the observer.
These holidays, these festivities are perhaps a break in the flowing waters, like a dam that has been constructed so that the water overflows and remains there for a while, covering everything beneath its level. Instead of currents, there is a lake, a pool, a break from the nature of everyday. A pause to look unto which might have been missed in the everyday current. So much of time has passed, and so much remains to be passed. No fuss, no grandeur, just like that, just everyday stuff.
Nostalgia overcomes me, flows through each of my veins, as I smell the marigolds blooming in the kitchen garden, or the silent roads beyond the balcony of my room, or the half empty skies I haven’t stared at in a while. I know this is a price or the boon of growing up, of knowing something I did not know a decade ago, and of waiting to learn more in the years to come.
As I try to learn, with a tint of fear, to let go of all time that was and embrace what is and what comes, my wish for you, to you the traveller, to you the dreamer, and to you the believer, is that may you find your Why, may you defeat the darkness first inside of yourself and then outside, may you always shine like the sun, who I imagine doesn’t know its purpose, and still continues to shine for a million years to come. May we all, though a little lost we are, learn to carve our directions.
Happiness must happen, writes Viktor E. Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. I pray for happiness to happen for you, for me, for us all.