Sailing with Life

Life seems to be filled with continuity which then is often interrupted with junctures. At every juncture it seems that life comes to a halt, if only for a moment, and then resumes at its deigned pace. Continuity cannot be stopped, despite the number and intensity of the junctures. In simpler words, life goes on.

You can treat the junctures like save points in games, but unlike games, you cannot restart from there. No matter how much you try to go back, you'll eventually be sliding forwards with your eyes in the past - kind of like a reverse moonwalk. You can of course, reminisce, but there's a difference between looking back and holding back.

I've said this before - looking back is always dangerous, because of hindsight. Hindsight is the mother of regret, and the grandmother of nostalgia. And nostalgia, finally, gives birth to yearning, which leaves you aside a pool of the past, sighing into it, like a convoluted version of Narcissus. Not that you cannot yearn while looking forward, but it is always an anchor attached to the past.

Yearning - it leads to revisiting of bonds you had, made by small talks and larger than life experiences, reinforced by the abnormal surreality of day to day events, and finally cemented by the absurdity of realisation that things have passed. It also makes you think about the highs you had, and wonder if they are cyclic or not. You then wonder about the lows, and you pray things aren't cyclic.

What yearning has taught me so far is that life isn't cycling like a wheel going forward, it is more like a wave going up and down. Think of sea waves here - I am probably biased by being by the sea all my life - no two waves you face at sea are ever the same, neither in height nor volume. It then makes you think, are the lows in life just about returning to where you were, or you actually have a bottom to hit beneath the water? So far, I've realised that every low in my life was just a reset - the larger the height of the positive wave, the harder the reset.

Life then goes forward on waves, and every time you hit a juncture, you reset, and hit the sea. But you are the wave, and you have rise back up, and unfortunately, you cannot look back. There's no option but to move forward. That is the continuity of life, and the continuity of waves.

All this has been a very elaborated way of saying something I've already touched on before - life goes on. You can stand amidst every moving thing, thinking you're stationary, but in reality, you're moving. Time flows, the earth rotates, and the heart beats. It is within these movements that the continuity is maintained, and in only one of these does the scope of yearning comes in - in the heartbeats.

The heart yearns for things it beat for before, and beats for things it will eventually yearn for. That the way this silly little organ works, apart from pumping blood, it also pumps emotions. And therein lies the difference between riding waves in life and being said waves - the presence of a yearning heart.

It is at the junctures that the heart autosaves itself, and then yearns for it. Airports, train stations, the seashore, sunsets and summits are some of the points most junctures happen, and then life moves again.

Up, down. Down and up. But ultimately forward, with a yearning heart. That either is an experienced sailor, or just a liver of life.