Changes are good because…

Every time I come back from a break from home, I feel as if a new chapter of my life starts. The flights to and fro home give me ample time to ponder over my life and its priorities, and I see them most clearly when I am riding the airport bus from Kempegowda Int’l Airport to my part of the city.

I grew up in a small town. While my hometown has all the facilities of modern life, it also has a blanket of silence that wraps it with care. This time, I went out on several morning walks, amid the monsoon greenery, and I felt the silence more than ever. Durgapur is somewhere you can take a pause in life, recharge your batteries and go back to the busy life that you had been living.

Bangalore, of course, is big, and with it, comes the noise. And when I say noise, I don’t mean the traffic. My apartment is quite peaceful, I wake up to the calls of little birdies and I can see trees from my window. It’s peaceful enough. The noise that I am talking about is the ricocheting of thoughts in my mind. In Bangalore, I am always busy. I lead a small team of four at work and throughout the day, that consumes my mind-share. If I am not thinking about that, I keep thinking about the thousand other things I could be doing in my life other than working in the corporate sector, the amount of money I must save, what I should be cooking for lunch. Durgapur has my parents, I spent my childhood there. The noise of responsibilities of my life is somewhat borne by my parents in that tiny town, and if not, I can somewhat put a hold on that noise for the time that I am at home. Alone, lying in my bed in Bangalore, I have a harder time falling asleep – having no one to speak my mind as the thoughts come by the droves at night.

This time when I came back from home, I decided to make a few changes around the room. One of it is the arrangement of the bed. When I was younger, I always preferred sleeping on my side, close to the wall, so that I could feel its cold and find some support in the wall. My bed in Bangalore was placed such that my head would be towards the wall and not my side. Monday night (in fact, early Tuesday morning), as I lay rocking in my bed, unable to sleep, the noise in my mind too loud against the sleeping apartment, I decided to place it in this manner:

The amount of white space that this arrangement resulted in the room instantly made me happy – somehow, this makes me feel better about this room. I keep thinking why I had not thought of it earlier.

There is another addition to my household. Say hello to Daisy:

Aloe vera is a great medicinal herb and works like a charm on the skin. I have an oily skin which breaks out in acne once in a while. I brought this from home, my mother was sure the herb would survive the travel and end up growing. “It has a strong lifeline,” she says. Throughout the week, I was quite busy to plant it. Yesterday, I found some time to put it to a mug which has remained unused for the past 2.5 years. I don’t know if it will grow, but the leaves are still green. I guess we will find out. 🙂

Arpita ❤

All these free moving feet, yet, freedom is a rare luxury!

As I write this, I am listening to In the End by Linkin Park. “I tried so hard… in the end, it doesn’t even matter.”

I think it nicely summarizes how I feel right now. Sometimes, when are you in a truly calm state, when you are having a conversation with yourself, you think about the deeper issues which you do not discuss with anyone else. For example, why is there so much pain in the world? Is there God?

Sometimes, I wonder, is life a forward moving journey? As your cells age, as your cheeks wrinkle and greys appear in your hair, do you always move in a linear progression, moving on from one experience to the other, learning things? Or is it rather a game of snake and ladder? You are constantly trying to move ahead, but circumstances, situations, keep pulling you backward. You feel you are moving ahead, but all the while, you are probably regressing. You might reach that final square too, but only if you are too lucky.

The answer is both. There are simple mistakes that we make, things that we learn from and make the correction part of our lives. But there are other issues which are deep-rooted. Sometimes, we don’t even realize these are issues. We jump from one mistake to the other, like a deer caught in a flashlight, confused, scared.

But today’s post is really about freedom. Everyday, each one of us, move from point A to point B, our free feet taking us wherever we want to go physically. Yet, how many of us are truly free? How many of us left last night behind ourselves, as hopeless as it was, and decided to live today like it was truly a new day, without the accumulated baggage of our lingering past?

Everyday when I go to bed and cannot fall asleep, I crave for a freedom from the thoughts swarming in my mind. Thoughts which are like buzzing bees without a hive to go back to. Thoughts which just swirl up, digging up the past in a new light, giving new meanings to things that have happened, giving new intonations to conversations that are long lost in the silent chambers of the past.

Meanwhile, the LP guys scream, “I will break away, and find myself today…”

I really want to find myself, that free me, who does things as she likes. She who does not require validation from anyone. She who is not a slave of the past. She moves like the wind through the present without the worry of the future being another version of the past.

Someday. Someday!