SepticPen ...

you know its been a long time since you wrote your last post. to be frank, you had gotten yourself 'reset'. hard to explain it, but its similar to unlearning everything. so you somehow felt you shouldn't write another post until, you hit a problem.
    
Its not too hard for a problem to find you once you have reset. You work long days, cause when you lie down, you don't want to be able to think,you want sleep to find you easily.
But yesterday you couldn't sleep. Its back, those old days,when you were forced by life to stay awake at night without sleep to accept and recognize your existence and actions.At first its terrifying. you are afraid to peep inside. You know deep down you dont understand life. but some part of you wants to desperately understand it, and there is also a part which is scared of stumbling upon a possible truth. 


But you want to be at peace with yourself. its really late, in a few hours there will be sunlight. you can no longer lie down, your breathing is heavy,its almost as if you are breathing steel. But you are also tired. You sit up in your bed.


"Why? ... Nothing in life makes sense".The street light is flooding your room and You notice you are casting a long shadow across the floor. You look at it for sometime.... 'the constant companion'. Doesn't your shadow always follow you. is it not always less a feet away. An Old man once said the shadows are the greatest gift you could have asked for, it is the very form of 'Death'. that's how close death always is, less than a feet away.

Suddenly you are face to face with death, even though it had followed you for ever.It is no longer a stranger to you. A role that death plays for you is to remind you of how soon you are forgotten. You do much to impress yourselves upon the world, to make yourselves remembered, to stamp your existence.And yet, as Marcus Aurelius often reminds himself, after we die we are quickly forgotten. Our legacy is short in the larger time span of history.

"All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike" (Book 4, §35 ,Meditations of Marcus Aurelius).


If you have to be at peace with yourself, you have to prepare for things that are likely to remove that peace.

You might want to read my previous post titled “Evanescence”
http://septicpen.blogspot.com/2009/07/evanescence.html

Feel free to leave any comments & please tweet this post if you like it.

Its funny how sometimes the songs you have been humming for years don’t really ‘speak’ to you all. But a time comes may be on the bus, or the tube, or a train, or a taxi u hear it and for the first time you actually listen to it…. And u realize something, something greater than the song , something which could not have been conveyed in words to you, and between the words of the lyrics it just erupts in you and floods u with its calmness.

Something Similar happened today:

It was a mid-summer afternoon, the heat was unbearable. And with the heat we all became very restless indeed. The class was nearing its end, the audience was hardly listening to the Instructor, everyone was talking and their minds whizzing in a million directions. Everyone was clearly frustrated not excluding me. The atmosphere outside became dark and windy.

We were starting to be relieved a little by the coolness offered to us by the winds. Sullen clouds are gathering fast over the black fringe of our small campus. Soon we were smelling the rising summer dust, and we knew it was raining. I stared at the dark clouds around us from the window. The winds were roaring and struggling among the branches like a wild beast tangled in a trap.

And the rains sang their song, the same lyrics that I had heard since I was a child, yet this time I listened to its roar, intimidating yet graceful. And after many years the rains decided for the first time to ‘speak’ to me….. There’s something about the rain that’s beyond this world. Though it is noisy yet it is as peaceful s silence. The noise of your mind just dissolves in the melodies of the song the rain sings.

Centuries have passed; poets and seers have sung hymns and poems praising the symphony of rain. Yet there is sacredness to rain which is not of thought, nor of a feeling that can be awakened by thought. This sacredness about the rains can’t be written down, it is no to be thought of. It is not recognizable by thought nor can it exploited by thought. Thoughts cannot generate it. But there was a Sacredness to the afternoon’s rain and every rain, which is untouched by any word or symbol. This cannot be communicated. But it is a fact. And I would like to take Krishnamurthi’s quote to describe what we had realized, “Like beauty, it cannot be seen through its opposite for it has no opposite”

Every one present there was filled up the immense peace of that indescribable sacredness.

-- Sachin Modeel