The Beginning....

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.