Saturday, July 30, 2016

Day 31 : Closure

Remember the good old times? When things used to just end.

You woke up. Sleep ended.
You ate. Hunger ended.
You got the highest score. The game ended.

Things always came to a conclusion. Things did not linger indefinitely, hanging there like an axe of inevitability over your neck. You never know when or how things would end. But you know for a fact it is definitely coming.

Nothing you will do will ever come close to making anything last longer than it was supposed to. Still you do not always take efforts to end anything. You keep lingering on with it. Trying to hold on to that moment as long as you can. Lying to yourself this moment is worth holding on to. While you really are just scared of letting go. Afraid of what might come next.

I think that is what makes it more uncomfortable. The unknown. We do not know what next. And it is the not-knowing part that makes eternally clingy monsters/exes. There is no real guide map that takes you from this stop to the next. Life is not Pokemon Go. You do not know where you should be heading to. Or if at all the path you choose leads to that rare precious creature you are looking for. There are a few Squirtle and Weedle jokes I can think of here, I will try and hold off on those for now. If I can.

People expect a bit of grandeur in their lives. They expect the next moment to contain something far more glamorous shinier and than what they have now. Mostly the next moment doesn't. Mostly all you get is the same old moment you were always going to have anyway. Does that really mean that it has any less potential to be just as memorable?

Stability and ordinary has lost its charm. I still love those old-timey pictures. People doing ordinary day things, looking and being their ordinary selves. They extraordinary for us now. Aristotle and Ved Vyas are extraordinary for us now. But I am sure back in their day they did completely ordinary things like we do now. I think they all dug for boogers in their respective ordinary noses.

Being ordinary and doing ordinary things are just fine. What survives is that one extraordinary thing that you leave behind. That one thing is not any one moment that would just happen to be there in your life. A bunch of seemingly inconsequential decisions that you make along the way leads you to that one thing you will be remembered for. Most often you don't know what those are crucial when you actually are making them. But in the end, your life is defined by those decisions.

Don't expect a constant stream of grandeur in your life. Don't cling on to something that has already overstayed its welcome. Learn to let things go. Thank it for giving you a visit and forever cherish its memory. Then open the doors wide and wait for whatever comes next. Welcome whatever it is, as it is.

All the while keep working on that extraordinary masterpiece of yours. The one thing that survives way after you've left this augmented-reality game that you are a pawn of, called life.