This was one opening line I came across in a recent trip of random browsing.. “I tell you. I fell in love with a tree. I couldn't not. It was in blossom”.
This tied in beautifully with something ive been musing about recently - the beauty in experiences and the plethora of vistas laid open before us to indulge our senses in.
Taking stock of the experiences and sources of beauty that I have been allowing myself to access in the recent years, I find only two things i can honestly call my sources of joy – music and books. These have been to me the sole arbiters of the struggle between my multitudinous hours of ennui and languor and the need for some amusement. The common ennui, in my precocious maturity, I often misinterpreted to be world weariness, seeing the world with a stereotypically adult disillusionment and guarding myself against reinforcing that early impression with any extensive contact with my fellow men. And shying away from people did not mean that I could handle all those long hours with my thoughts alone sufficing to provide me with amusement and instruction. Books and music flowed in to fill the chasm and life was filled with experiences, albeit predominantly vicarious. I was seeing the world through their eyes, these authors and song-writers and musicians, and it was wonderful insofar as I found their acuity and range of vision enthralling. I silenced all my doubts of the real worth of such vicarious experiences with promises of these being only temporary and the means of honing my tastes and thoughts to enhance my own experiences when I would be ready for them. But, in retrospect, that was the beginning of a path that led to me losing several dimensions in my life. Seeing life through a third person’s reality was not how I, the independent thinker that I pride myself on being, should’ve approached life. Also, there was a vicious cycle with the books building a wonderful utopian world, which threw into further relief the distastefulness of contact with reality and drove me further into the other world, and this cycle progressively diminished the duration and intensity of contact with the physical world, and thus ensured that I grew up with a very Holden-like view of the phoniness abounding the . Propensity for solitude and self-indulgence, and a disdain for the “sordid” reality surrounding me were the natural children begotten out of this mode of life and they brought with them further dependence on an alternate reality.
In recent times though, the voice that questioned the sufficiency of these experiences has gained intensity, testing and hinting at inadequacies in my range of experience, telling me that being lost in the works of man, I had completely ignored one significant source of experience, human interaction.
Read this on headbutler recently “Any book you read is better than all the books you don't.” this statement, applied to people instead of books, struck me with its force of simplicity. Interacting with one real person, however deviant from my radar of preferences, would be more of an experience that all the favorite characters I met through my books. And there I am, looking for me in everyone I meet. This overreach of the ego has been the cornerstone of my policy of selective interaction, which in turn only buttresses my ego further, as my friends, however few they may number, have added a lot to my life’s experiences and this good thing would also serve the nefarious purposes of my ego, by acting as a justification of my super-selective instincts. I wonder how it came to be that inspite of one of the earliest and oft-repeated statements in my education being ‘Man is a social being’ my instincts could’ve evolved to deviate so much from the supposedly natural instinct of man. If, someday, I were to look at a person un-judgmentally, to be able to appreciate each person for their differences with me as well as their similarities, to see all the possible causes for any action of theirs that puts me off and realize how everything is only a concatenation of circumstances and not to be considered as worthy of forming a lasting or permanent judgement upon, then id consider myself truly evolved. Anbe Sivam was a character in that mould, one at a higher rung in the ladder of evolution and well-worthy of emulation, not of phony or senseless imitation but real, enlightened emulation.
Though writing this down makes it easier for me to face the huge dichotomy in my thoughts and actions in this matter, it still remains for me to act on these new found instincts of mine and actually get to look at the world around me as being composed of individuals and not a mass of faceless people. In the words of Edith Wharton, “Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.” Now that’s a real insight into the state of things.
All said and (remaining to be)done, there’s no denying it is a beautiful world out there.. to be experienced in its entirety.
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