Life and Travel

This blog post usually comes towards the end of a year. But it comes now. So much has happened already, that by midyear I feel I have lived a year already.

I have been in total disarray. Delusional, despaired and decaying. I have felt vulnerable; I have been explosive on the slightest incitation, a state of delirium so to say. I have despised the mess that I had become. I have tightened the grasp of my hand to withhold the sand within, and yet I have seen it seamlessly flow out from between my fingers, in the twinkling of an eye. Maybe, “perfection is not just about control; it is also about letting go”.

I have ached for what could have been, re-run the Butterfly Effect in my head and yearned for a relief, a reinstatement, and a restoration.

But then, I have held other vistas too, as a breathtaking response to my cries. I have seen it incessantly snow  in the month of June, I have seen an octopus inside the waters of a lagoon; I have known the fear when your car slips a tad off the edge of cliff and I have soared like a bird inside a chopper , eyes gaping wide with bliss.

I have stood along the edge of a panoramic lake at the border, feeling the pain and the stinging onslaught of the gale ruthlessly battering my ears. I have stood there in childlike glee, enthralled by the changing motley hues of the lake from turquoise blue to electric blue to pale blue, enveloped by the brown, barren and rocky mountains at the backdrop, completely bereft of any trace of vegetation. Picturesque; I have realised that brown can be beautiful and that barren can indeed turn a placid imagination fertile - if juxtaposed with the right pair. I have realised that beauty does not lie in the individual but in the resonance of the consonance of the collective.


I have been stranded inside a car, caught in a blizzard, staring at the complete white-scape beyond. I have felt an unnerving solitude hit me amid the overwhelming expanse of whiteness, despite a string of cars stranded along with me. I have been inside shallow waters and then inside open waters, feeling the pressure mounting as I have gone deeper. I have seen a whole new world inside the sea, marvelled at the elaborate and colourful coral reefs, swam past a sea turtle and in the process totally forgotten about the world above the waters.

And, I have jotted down these experiences on the slate of my mind, committing them to my memory, lest I forget. Because I don’t want to forget- while I am asleep or while awake. And though the pain may have its malignant way of finding its way back to you, splintering you all over again, there are these moments which help you diffuse that pain, soothing you down, brushing the embers aside and washing away the wistful.