I
have a confession to make. At last, after twelve years, I have decided to let
it out.
It
was a chilly November night, and I was waiting, in my room, for my mother. The
way flowers wait for the gardener. As I waited, I started flipping through my
father’s ‘Essential Rumi’. To my utter amazement, I had stumbled upon something
that jammed my eyeballs for the next thirty seconds. My frozen eyeballs came
back to normal as the door creaked open; my mother was finally there to tuck me
in, to kiss me goodnight, and to pacify me by her presence. She left the room,
after making sure I had reached the valley of peaceful slumber, like always.
I
need to confess, I did close my eyes that night, but I wasn’t pulled over by
slumber. Instead, I was pushed in by a Rumi phrase:
‘Everything
in the Universe is within you….’
The
phrase had pushed me into a bottomless grotto of adventures, experiences,
philosophies and lessons. Yes, I was pushed into the world of thought; I was
introduced to mind; I was taken inside the Brain.
The
very first time I entered, it was as dark as pitch, but today it is bright
enough to dazzle the dwellers of the world.
I
can somewhat relate to Ali Baba. He would say ‘Open Sesame’ and the sealed
mouth of the cave would magically open. Entrance into the brain, for me, is no
less than entering Ali Baba’s cave; a place teeming with treasure.
My
seat of thought is illuminated by thought itself, designed by creativity,
painted by imagination, and charged by emotion. Its characteristics of being
beyond logic, beyond human limitations, and way beyond the confines of this
petite world, pull me toward it, the way gravity pulls us all.
My Brain is my place of retreat. Neither does
it drag me in the too-good-to-be-true domes of fantasy, nor does it, at once, make
me gulp all the bitter realities of life. It provides me with just the right
blend of optimism, pessimism, and realism that enables me to live my life to
the fullest. My visits to the Brain have made me the person I am today, because
what we think is what we do, and what we do, is who we are.
The
birth of every new day brings for me an opportunity to rub shoulders with a
variety of souls. As the day fades away giving way to night, I try on the shoes
of those souls and experience what it is to be like somebody else. With each
day, a new challenge emerges, and with every night that falls, that challenge
is faced, sorted out and given the post of a teacher. Every day, that makes its
way into my life, rains me with a torrent of questions. And each night that
follows, I rush towards answers. With each new sun, a billion new conversations
spring up. And with each night that brightens, those conversations are valued,
pondered over, and learnt from. Each new day, that wakes up, holds moments that
leave an impact. And with every night that stirs in, those moments are
cherished, embraced and cuddled. Each, blue, cloud filled sky, welcomes the
limitless sources of happiness. And every, black, star studded sky, magnifies
the trivial harbingers of joy. Each dawn brings in contentment, and each dusk
brings in a lot more.
Yes,
I have been travelling to my Brain from the past four thousand three hundred
and twenty nights. And every night my extrovert-self reminds my introvert-self,
that I have miles to walk before I sleep.
