This post is being written, irritatingly enough, from Hong Kong airport where I seem to be spending half my travel time over the past year. Before I began to type, I looked up the last post written from here and that was on 8th May. Only 6 months ago and yet, it seems like a lifetime of events have washed over me, leaving me reeling & blindly reaching for a fixed point of perspective. Since that last post I have lived... a breath at a time, it almost seems. And yet, I have just been woken up from a delightful dream, to find myself back at this airport.
Living in Cambodia changed me, it's as simple as that. I found out something of who I am but more importantly, what I want. Want - a simple word, attached to so much meaning. It is important to want, but more so to want something with a calming certainty. Like a bite of perfect chocolate mousse at the end of the evening. Having it fits... it completes. And for me, rudderless as I was, plodding through one degree after another, it brings a measure of comfort.
I thought I was a world-citizen, willing and able to live anywhere, and do it happily. I cannot. I am happy in India. I sleep like a baby there, the blanket of my country's and my city's essence cocooning me in my dreams, like the rhythm of the train speeding through the black night. I appreciate what my life in other countries has taught me, but cannot, do not, want to experience that ache accompanying me from the moment I take any mode of transportation to the airport. To Bombay.
I cannot add anything to the outpouring concerning the events of the last few days in the city of my birth. A helpless sadness, no doubt shared by others, is what I have to offer. Sadness undoubtedly for death, but the helplessness for my conviction that those handed the responsibility for India, for Bombay, will do practically nothing. For once, I'd liked to be proved wrong.
I hate pontificating about what life is and so on and so forth... all I know is about my life and the direction I want it to take. And the people I want to be with. To share a laugh with. To float in the comfortable silences with. To grow old and not wonder too much how things could have, would have been. The day, the moment, is fast approaching when I will stop walking and face that fork in the road. Always, I seem to have taken the road less travelled (to borrow a cliché) with a lot of apprehension. I want to take the next one in peace... if lucky, a smile and damn the consequences. And return home.
To live fully, rather than in half-breaths. Half-lives.
The airport is a lonely place and I have a long way to go still... so I will end this by thinking back to a few of the brighter moments of the last 2 months... family and friends, a motorcycle trip, a wedding trip, a dear old friend met, other friendships ended, the first note I played on my saxophone, a dinner that may or may not mean anything...
C'est la vie.
Song for the moment: Jaane Kyun - Dostana
Living in Cambodia changed me, it's as simple as that. I found out something of who I am but more importantly, what I want. Want - a simple word, attached to so much meaning. It is important to want, but more so to want something with a calming certainty. Like a bite of perfect chocolate mousse at the end of the evening. Having it fits... it completes. And for me, rudderless as I was, plodding through one degree after another, it brings a measure of comfort.
I thought I was a world-citizen, willing and able to live anywhere, and do it happily. I cannot. I am happy in India. I sleep like a baby there, the blanket of my country's and my city's essence cocooning me in my dreams, like the rhythm of the train speeding through the black night. I appreciate what my life in other countries has taught me, but cannot, do not, want to experience that ache accompanying me from the moment I take any mode of transportation to the airport. To Bombay.
I cannot add anything to the outpouring concerning the events of the last few days in the city of my birth. A helpless sadness, no doubt shared by others, is what I have to offer. Sadness undoubtedly for death, but the helplessness for my conviction that those handed the responsibility for India, for Bombay, will do practically nothing. For once, I'd liked to be proved wrong.
I hate pontificating about what life is and so on and so forth... all I know is about my life and the direction I want it to take. And the people I want to be with. To share a laugh with. To float in the comfortable silences with. To grow old and not wonder too much how things could have, would have been. The day, the moment, is fast approaching when I will stop walking and face that fork in the road. Always, I seem to have taken the road less travelled (to borrow a cliché) with a lot of apprehension. I want to take the next one in peace... if lucky, a smile and damn the consequences. And return home.
To live fully, rather than in half-breaths. Half-lives.
The airport is a lonely place and I have a long way to go still... so I will end this by thinking back to a few of the brighter moments of the last 2 months... family and friends, a motorcycle trip, a wedding trip, a dear old friend met, other friendships ended, the first note I played on my saxophone, a dinner that may or may not mean anything...
C'est la vie.
Song for the moment: Jaane Kyun - Dostana
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