Sunday, May 4, 2014

Mercurial stillness...

The universe is a vast space filled with silence. We all carry that silence in us, not as a dark, vacuous, empty space but as a stillness, that connects us to what lies beyond. A stillness, that reminds us of the eternities before and after us.

A stillness that urges us to look beyond the concerns of everyday, and into life itself.
Life, they say is a marathon, not a sprint; but for the past few months, life has felt like a marathon-long sprint as I have been trying to race with and against time. Trying to keep running, to avoid falling from this giant, ceaseless ferris wheel.

Like the mice being tested on the rotor wheels for their motor performance; I too felt, like I was being tested - by some one. Or may be something. For weeks, I had good musculoskeletal strength, good persistence and stamina but even as my body carried on, my mind felt rudderless, fatigued, exhausted, scared and helpless. After those initial weeks though, my muscles too felt like the tightly strung chords of a violin and they groaned loudly when plucked.

But despite the weeks and months, I did not give up and the wheel wouldn't relent. 
After months of this ceaseless battle and at the end of miles and miles of running, my feet and my mind just wouldn't and couldn't stop. They were gripped by this mad frenzy - a visceral need, to keep moving, to not stay still, lest something go wrong.

But how long can fear propel you? At some point, the body is left fighting the fright without the adrenaline.
That's when fatigue sets in, a fatigue that tires the mind, more than the body. A fatigue that leaves you feeling drained, of more than just energy as it saps away hope, happiness and love.
Life becomes a computer program, a force of habit - with strictly regulated hours of sleep and wakefulness, that followed rhythms of habit and not of will.

Sleep becomes death at the end of a long day, everyday; deprived of dreams, the sense of rest, calm or peace.
Meals become the mandatory pitt-stops that you must make to keep the engine running.
And all this while, a tiny voice in my head kept asking me to slow down. But tiny voices are easily drowned in the roar of deadlines, to-do lists. In the angry voices and in the relentless echoes of the mind.

But then one day, a storm broke through all defenses and laid claim to that primal silence of my heart. In that silence, I could finally hear the little voice urging me to stop. Reassuring me, that nothing would go wrong. And I finally succumbed to the fatigue.

That day, I ignored all deadlines and lists, and I walked to 'my' cliff. The cliff overlooked the pacific, but in my mind, it teetered on the brink of eternity, this vast unknown. At that edge, I sat. And I wait.
I wait for that stillness from beyond to find its way back to me.
I wait for that inner silence that has been shattered into bits with this flurry of activity.
I wait for the tiny drops of that shattered silence to roll into the center of my being. To come to a standstill and to become a meaningful whole.
I wait for my mind to reach that stillness before it disappears again.

On that wonderful sunday morning, I sat there, on my usual bench, acutely aware of the gentle breeze, the sunlight streaming in and the distant sound of the ocean. I will myself to forget all but that sense of stillness. That quiet and that peace. And that sense of awe that liberates you by trivializing your existence in the grand scheme of events.

It takes me a while to drag those fragmented pieces from the different corners of my mind but finally, I have a glistening mercurial pearl in the core of my being.
I close my eyes and I can see its brilliance.
I urge it to stay with me. I plead to everyone and no one in particular.

With that stillness, I become aware of the vastness of time and space before and after me. I feel like a spectator to my own life, as I stop by the edge and watched life itself flow. I was a happy bystander to my own life and at the edge of that eternity, no problem seemed big enough, no sorrow seemed deep enough and no pain seemed vast enough.

I had finally found myself in that stillness and I wasn't to let go.