The serene silence prevailing around has taken me far from the instantaneous. The tranquility has given the inner voices a rare opportunity to knock at my consciousness. And with no face around to think of or to please to, the thoughts have taken a reversion, back to my inner world. As a child baffled by the intricacies of this sophisticated world of adults, this inner world happened to be the place where laid all the answers. When people irritated by my persistent ‘why’s’ fobbed it off, letting down my ravenous curiosity, it was the place to keep my optimism alive in discerning the world and shaping an individuality to fit into it. But childhood was altogether a different time. Then even with limited knowledge of the world around, I knew who I was and who I wanted to be.
Somewhere in the subversive progression of growing up that pristine childhood was murdered. Now even equipped with a considerably far erudite intellect I have no answer to such a plain question as now that consciousness seems to be drained of its sparkle, yes it is not the same. I am not certain of the person I have become. Even after an obstinate commitment to the pursuit of my identity I don’t know for sure who I am, what am I running from and to, and why. With nowhere to go in particular, I am ready to go anywhere. What is the reason I am travelling around? Why am I focusing nowhere while exploring miles? I have no answers.
I have poignantly contemplated through several sleepless nights as if looking for some kind of morning light to shine in through this confused darkness. Waking up at different times at different places as different person I have discovered that the surreal identity which I thought I was does not exists. I have been incessantly parting from one individuality to become the part of another, relinquishing one thing to espouse other again and then again. My amorphous individuality is now just a puppet in the hands of emotional symptoms which have imparted some confused beliefs to it but I don’t know when and why.
I have no fix set of words to classify myself. Nowadays I am an amenable me. Guided by the immediate my speech ranges from laconic to loquacious to even garrulous, my nature varies from reticent to extrovert, my stand fluctuates from pragmatic to naïve to gullible. I am now a masked man with my real face lost among the various masks with which I cover the nakedness of my empty soul. My self is a mere assimilation of the various patterns drawn on my empty soul. I was never a follower; I have drawn my own conclusion of situations. I have taken what I have gathered from coincidence. May be life itself is a series of coincidence one following the other. Or may be it is not all that meaningless. May be it is a sequence of systematic events which at the closing stages integrates into an exquisite drawing. One never knows.
May be I was destined to get what I am after only if I knew. May be I will end up reaching nowhere at all. I can never identify it for sure. May be this life like ourselves, is not something to be identified but something to be created. Anyhow, I the sailor of the lost ship have to keep faith in something at least, to find the tantalizing harbor of my aimless voyage and the direction leading to it. But where should an agnostic like me look for faith?
Now I can sympathize with the feelings of “The Grateful dead” of truck’in when they lamented the everlasting lines
“Sometimes the light's all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it's been”
