AGE I - A PEEP INSIDE

Age is just a number.

"This used to be my favorite song. I had completely forgotten about it. It’s been a long time. Since college. I suppose. "

I witnessed this happening to me. Not once but many a times in the last few days. I scoff. I am growing old. This is the first time I am saying this to me. I have never been worried about numbers before. Twenty Seven Twenty Eight Twenty Nine Thirty. Doesn’t actually make a sense in real time. But this time it hit me. And it hit me hard. Something similar happening quite frequently. And it’s not the frequency which is a matter of concern but the impact of those moments when this conflict happens and what follows afterwards. Things when recollected seem quite far, quite distant. I am using far and distant at same time to distinguish the distance both measurable and immeasurable one.  Sometimes it’s difficult to even draw the outline. Everything seems blurred. And it’s not been a very long time actually. Just few years. Mind is a weird construct. It has its own filters. It doesn’t believe in linearity of any sort. It convolutes, juggles and churns the time. Not as per any law. It has a system of its own. Mind is a place where time flies and takes a leap into the gone and futuristic fantastical songs of life, slogs, crawls and treks into the most painful chapters of our life,  dies not once but several times in a flash of moment , takes rebirth and reincarnates many a times as and when it wishes it to be. Time is all meshed up and messed up inside like a kid’s spring toy. In a way what we say is gone is all there inside stored, preserved and bucketed one into another. So we may say we have aged and we are aging every moment but we are getting bulkier and richer too. It may seem blurred at times but everything is always there for us to sort it out.

So aging in particular is not concerning really but what is really concerning needs to be brought out. Despite continuously experiencing and witnessing the change and hoping for it too as time goes by, nothing actually appears to have changed. It seems as if I am locked in an era constantly and perpetually since a long time. An era where nothing ever changes, nothing ever enriches. It only depreciates or it only stagnates. Change when seen at microcosmic level may sometimes be appreciated but at a macrocosmic level things are pretty much the same. Dull boring mundane dead. I feel caught in an ever existing circle of pale yellow red sunrises and sunsets. Nothing has changed. People are the same. When I say people I say people as a race. As a race people have not evolved. They are the same. Their fears, their insecurities, their choices, their priorities, their absurdities, their moralities, their routines, their lifestyles, their illnesses, their behaviors, their attitudes, their appearances, their experiences, their grooming, their conditioning, their weaknesses, their expectations, their loneliness, their strengths, their empathies, their sympathies, their resentments, their poverty, their contempt, their discontentment, their days, their evenings, their nights everything is the same. The situation has only become worse to put in a nutshell. We are still embroiled in our mud of moralities and ambiguities. Humans are the most discontented and scornful race existing on this planet. As a group we don’t know where we are going. I wonder sometimes if we all belong to the same group or race even. We have just been scattered all over directionless pointless to consume and pollute as much as possible. At unit and individual level also we function as purely consumptive beings without any consideration for the ecology around us.

It might sound disappointed and disenchanted. But fact of the matter is all this proves that a certain notion of uniformity has always prevailed in the human race. What seems stagnation and regression might actually be the normal course we are doomed to take since eternity. Whatever it is it’s not rosy at all.

So the question of age is tricky one. It has to attain a balance somewhere. It should be a reflection of our evolution. Time cannot be reflective because it’s all relative. Past will definitely come to haunt and make us realize if we are evolving or not. Past has to be a landmark from where we should move on. Purpose is just an illusion. So we must move on because that’s what we are supposed to be doing in life.