By the hour hand
Part I
The days are long but the decades are short, and life passes by the hour hand. The second hand measures the life. And every hour marks the triumph of life.
There is a parallel universe where I am all the things I want to be, and I am sure that even in that universe, I am still writing this blog. It is the human condition. Of unlimited want. Thankfully, we are gifted with unlimited ability.
I turned 25 recently. That’s a big number. But I have not secured esoteric human wisdom I had hoped to receive magically in my sleep at midnight. Maybe my sleeping position is wrong, or the angel1 is lost in the by-lanes of my society. My building’s caretaker is a strange man, he may have shooed the angel away.
I’m sure that my writing generates a lot of disdain with people, younger and older who very rightly question my ability to say anything about anything.
“Oh, here is this guy again. Writing about his ‘experiences and perspectives’. Can somebody tell him that nobody gives a shit and he’s not that smart?”
It doesn’t bother me because there is nothing out there that I have not said to myself, and a thousand times worse. I don’t care much for external critics because I am my biggest critic. And now I am 25, and have a partial license to wax eloquently about ‘how to live life’ and ‘optimise for efficiency’, at least to people younger than me. And write I will. But not because I want to teach people something they don’t already know, but because for me writing is a desperate attempt to put my own life together. My writings are pieces of myself that no longer belong to me. And I will forever remain shedding parts of myself until there is no more of me left. Until all I am are the words that have come out of me, and the transient thoughts that drove my hands into specific patterns to be etched in the corners of internet forever.
I don’t know a lot about life, and much less than I had thought I would have figured out by 25. I remember being 18 and thinking of how it would feel to be 25. I thought being 25 would be a grand feeling of having arrived in life. And now that I am 25, I chuckle at my naivety. Every year, I realise that I know very little about life and the world around me, and especially about the people that inhabit this world. But also every year I become wiser, and richer.2 I have never disliked growing old. In fact, I look forward to the ticking of the clock and the variable second digit of my age. Every year brings with itself new experiences, good and bad. Heart wrenching, horrific, but also lovely and heart warming. I think I do agree with 18 year old Divyanshu when he thought that to be an adult, you have to be happy with anything that happens. To be an adult, at least to me, is to take things as they come and still retain the capacity for wonder.
Part II
Life is pattern. A good life is good patterns. A bad life is bad patterns. Mostly people fall in the middle, and most people’s lives are not as bad as they think they are. For the longest time, including even now in brief moments of failure of rationality of my brain, I think that I have utterly failed in life. And then I look around, breathe for a second and return to reality. It is not that bad. It is life, and life goes on.
I often think about what kind of a person I would like to be. Not in the sense what I would like to do in life. But more in the sense of how I want to be. The past year I have filled pages and pages with ink and typed words encoded as electrical signals on a digital cloud about everything wrong with my life. And then I would read a poem, read a good article, play a game of basketball and my capacity for wonder would return. Even if briefly, it would be back. It is very much here at this present time as I am writing this piece. On days when the bug of uncertainty would bite me and the future looks like a looking glass from the 17th century which has lost all its polish, the only capacity I have is of despair. But then those days pass and then better days come by. The arc of life bends for the better. Sometimes you have to push yourself for the arc to bend. Other times the arc of life will push you.
My sister is 30 and she is the guiding light of my life. I’m lucky to have a great relationship with her where I am able to talk to her about my feelings and she is gracious enough to bear my idiosyncracies . And it is of some comfort to me that through her I can see that as we grow old, even though we rarely live the life we thought we will live, but we live a life where we are happier than before.3
Sometimes I think if the apparent ‘stability’ I have managed to reach in life is just defeat masked as calmness. I wonder if the only reason I don’t feel restless all the time is if I have accepted defeat from life and accepted my fate. I am not where I want to be. I am not who I want to be. I must ideally constantly strive to reach there. I should be restless, moving fast and breaking things. Is my calmness and the sense of slow living merely a sign of having accepted defeat? A little, yes. But not all of it. I have realised that you cannot brute force most things in life and as boring as it sounds, you must allow some things to happen to you. I have also realised that you cannot punish yourself for being on the journey towards your goals. It is a painfully slow journey and the earlier you realise that, the better. To punish yourself for not already having figured everything out is akin to an athlete training for the olympics cursing himself everyday for not having won the gold medal already.
With the benefit of my sister’s wisdom, I know that you never really figure it all out. But you get better at figuring most things out to a good extent. Jack of all trades, master of none. Perhaps, life is all about mastering the art of being a Jack. Not a Jackass.
Part III
How do you measure a life? Do you measure it by the money you made? Or the people you helped? Or the books you read? Or the dopamine you were able to generate?
I don’t know. And I will never know. All I know is that it is worth asking these questions every now and then and to take a stock of where you’re heading. I also now know that a close scrutiny of your every action is a sure way to live a miserable life. I have lived that life for a very long time, and I am only now starting to break off that habit. You will always be imperfect and if you judge yourself at the altar of perfection, you will always fail. Beware of anyone who judges at the altar of perfection. They’re delusional.
Now that I am 25, and life goes by the hour hand, I find myself writing this. I will shortly go back to my house, and live the same life I have been living. Turning 25 did not shake my life upside down as I had anticipated. I think the angel is still stuck in the by-lanes of my society, trying to figure out how to go around the dogs that line my lane. I think that is a good metaphor for life. Anything you want to happen to you is an angel who is forever stuck in the by-lanes of your life, and it cannot reach to you until you find it first. It can never find you.
By the hour hand, life goes by. Another hour has passed and my coffee is finished. The second hand is measuring my life, adding it to my tally one tik, one tok at a time. I am 25 now, and I will be 30 later. I hope to be 50, 60 and 70 one day. And i would not be surprised if even then, I open my laptop (or whatever device we use by then) and write:
“Today is a long day, but I can’t recall all the decades that have flown by. Life went by the hour hand, and the seconds hand is still ticking to measure my life. I hope to read my tally soon. But until then, I live, by the hour hand”.
Not to be confused with angle. Apparently a lot of babies are angles. I’m sure they’re acute angles.
My colleague while wishing my happy birthday said, “I always tell people that the best thing about getting old is that you get richer. Even if not materially, at least in life”.
As a side note - nothing enriches one’s life more than having a good relationship with your sibling.