One day you're barely 11 years old, living in narrow undulating street full of mediocre homes, playing country stop in the scorching summer noon with a dozen other mini humans like you. Sweat running down your face, dust and dirt in your hair, many small abrasions on your feet from the vicious stampede of the game, you don't stop until the curfew starts descending upon the destructive party and one by one, you all start slipping home avoiding the murderous glare of your mother's who are going to have to clean you, the clothes you destroyed and the mess you will be making while you clean up. You never really think there's more to life, you never even assume that someday this will feel like ages ago and not at all enough. You simply tidy up, finish your homework and jump the TV remote and thus begins the battle of "which is more important, dad's news, mom's sappy Indian soap or your favorite cartoon." We know whoever wins, won't be us. So when we lie down to sleep in our beds, shift the pillow to the foot end because that's where the fan is all we think of is to become a grown up, so we can play with the big kids, so we can win the channel war, so we can escape all the injustices of being a child.. And as this thought gets confused with the onset of meaningless dreams we doze off.
This keeps happening until one day it doesn't. That one day you're 3 months shy of a new decade and one month away from turning 23, you've seen falling outs, betrayals, loss, highs lows, in between, happiness and combinations of it all. You've become a professional, you have been through the phase of realizing how people you thought would never let you down will because they are human and so will you. The sibling who annoyed you has moved out. There was a time you had one room and too many of you and suddenly the house is full of rooms but not enough people to fill one of those. Your parents are becoming fragile from the thought of sending all of you away, from not being able to get rid of you even in the bathroom to not being able to see your for months on end. Your busy schedule keeps you distracted from seeing the wheel of time moving and the book of life turning pages.
Mostly you even fail to notice the seasons go by, until there's this one night... When somewhere in a city far from home, you're sitting in the open, admiring the starlit sky and the bone chilling wind hits you. But with that wind, there's realization of how far you've come, and how mundane you've become. An adult who wears laughter on the sleeve but phobias in deep. You're on the verge of two worlds, where you don't want to become a stoke in the wheel that replaces your parents but you don't want to be stuck in neverland as the child who never grew up. That is when you know it's real, life just happened to you without you ever noticing it. That's when you find out that everything has evolved to engulf you in this series of events you have absolutely no control over. The time you spent moping over what you lost was the time, when you were slowly losing what you had.
There's a song called "Breathe" that goes like this "... because we can't jump the tracks, we're like cars on a cable and life's like an hourglass glued to the table..." Life really is like an hourglass glued to the table and we spend all of it trying to turn it around instead of savoring every particle of sand that falls in down until its too late. Until you see that the picture you thought would never change has become something entirely else. And it's beautiful, the way it all shaped out like a fine sculptor's handiwork, hence in that moment of cognizance you stand in awe of this phenomenon called life understanding you have no control whatsoever and growing up was an artistic masterpiece coming into being in the most trivial of manners. Grasping this, you jump from one abyss of transition to the other with all the baggage of the process that brought you here in anticipation of all the baggage that you will further have to bear. But before you jump, just take a moment to stand in the sideline of these events unfolding and watch how magical our apparently ordinary and boring is.
