Gazing outward, ‘looking’ inward !

It is said that man has tremendous potential. Seems absolutely true taking into account the histrionics of feelings and emotions that our minds experience throughout an entire lifetime. Could the relentless thought process – conscious or subconscious – extending from birth to death, may be even further, be sustained without potential, qualified by the extreme? Makes one wonder why a person can’t live beyond ten seconds in the absence of oxygen in the brain, in the absence of thoughts. Food for thought???

The mind seems akin to a prism with the scattered dewy thoughts being the occupants of the spectrum. We constantly gaze at dear life through our own tainted glass. A slight change in alignment, a trigger of the mind, a surge of a thought wave and the entire picture transforms. The same situation, ground reality at times rears negativity while at others breeds positivity in terms of will power, determination and so on. It all depends upon the frame of the mind at that moment. Matches your wavelength???

A serendipitous alignment, a sweet accidental orientation of the prism, the dawn of a new depth of thought, the origin of philosophy – not a discovery of new realities but novel perspectives. There are diverse provocations among various people that whip up their philosophical cream, which has a distinct corner of the mind all to itself.

One such inspiration that shifted the gears of Akshata’s brain and creaked her philosophical muscle into motion was, staring out the window of her room. While rolling through her engineering studies she would religiously extract sometime to have a date with the window as a daily ritual. Her hostel room on the second floor in the second year of her college had been the best; offering a panoramic view of a vast campus playground at the centre, neatly framed with the adjoining road with its graceful curvature and the portion of the city beyond. The shades of the sun would paint the scene in its own hues, sometimes bathing it with the morning freshness and at others embellishing it with the majesty and peace of the night. The twinkling street lights would highlight the flowing curve of the street like a princess’s necklace, if not a Queen’s (that’s the monopoly of only one!). The jungle – green and concrete – could be seen near and far. She would in a trance keep gazing through her beloved window immersed in the peaceful darkness of the night, transgressing the threshold of minutes to hours, touched by the poignancy which her act evoked. The physical expanse perhaps would assist her mind and heart to spread the wings and soar high to an elevated plane of consciousness thus dwarfing her worldly predicaments to a size insignificant enough to abruptly stop worrying about.

As the year drew to an end, departure from her room was a pain. Yet, she had to move on; having emblazoned the window and its magical conjuring of thought provoking images on her memory but alas not the photographic plate of a camera. Ahhhh…

In the journey of life, flowers of new experiences blossom to eventually wither out during the fall, bleeding the heart. Nonetheless, the cycle continues and spring brings in its wake yet new shoots to be welcomed and caressed. This play of birth morphs the sadness of the heart into nostalgia, a bitter-sweet lingering memory, thus continuing the journey forward. Akshata’s window gazing had been replaced with her visits to the terrace. After all, something’s better than nothing. However, she missed peeping through her cosy little recess at the infinite wilderness beyond, a paradox pregnant with thoughtfulness.

College gave way to professional life. She turned busier and the time for poignant reflection was devoured up in the pursuit of the mirage of the ever alluding success. Along the course, she happened to move into a house at the fifth floor of an apartment. Yet again, the setting of her room was punctuated with a little window that opened to a divine vista; a string of misty hills at a far distance, a colony of thatched roofs on the sloppy land nearer, blocks of houses with patches of green all over the landscape.

The view is wider than the earlier, perhaps by virtue of elevation from the second to the fifth floor. She has come a long way from the second year of engineering to the fourth year of her professional career. The window has grown smaller but the aspect wider. One wonders if it is an indication to widen one’s vision, open one’s mind, elevate one’s goal, slip through the contracting aperture of positivity among the myriad difficulties of life, spread one’s wings and soar high above the petty considerations of material success in the pursuit of not pleasure but happiness!!!