There goes another year!
If I consider the sample of a few dozen people I have met in
the last 10 days or so to be a representative sample of most of us and also
consider that the winter chill had not allowed their brain to be fuzzy despite
their attempts to intoxicate themselves with all kinds of mixes of drinks etc.,
the general consensus is that the year 2011 has gone past really fast!
Most of my friends completed their fourth decade of life and
some of them, like me, are staring at the most deserved mid-life crisis. We all
have been told so many times that just before we die, our brain replays our
whole life in a very quick flash. However, no one told us that this happens in
the middle of your life as well, albeit, in a much slower cue mode.
It has happened to me. My brain has taken last one year to
replay my last 40 years.
This great video was full of many events like hitting a six
while playing hand cricket at the school bus stop, learning counting in Hindi
as I played marbles, the last set of the final of my first tennis tournament,
the last lap of my first swimming race that I won, greetings of my friends as I
came back from IITD getting the JEE results, the imaginary chair that I had to
sit on while I sang during the ragging, reaching late for an exam in 4th
year, hosting of the party for my 40 friends, teaching my sister to drive,
driving to the top of the world, smiling at countless people who came for our
wedding reception even though I did not know them, driving around Lucknow to
get medicines and glucose drips for half of my batch struggling with severe
food poisoning, carrying my new born babies out of the labour room, the first
kiss & few more after that and so on.
There were too many scenes and a host of characters. It was
really difficult to remember each and every event or even the reason for them.
Forget about the names, even the faces were not recognisable. What I was shown
by my brain video player were the moments that I remembered. The excitement of
achievement, the ecstasy of the heart, the spike of happiness, the pain of heartbreak,
the height of embarrassment, the feeling of emotion – that’s what I was shown,
that’s what I remembered, the moment of the extreme feeling.
This is, I now believe, what life is made of. I do not
remember the sweat, the heat, the cold, the pain in the ankle but I remember
the ecstasy of jumping from a cliff in Ganga.
I remember all those momentary feelings but not so much the momentous occasion.
I believe that it is these moments that have carved out my personality and
created my destiny.
Recently my wife, Sujatha, told me about the first song she
sang on the stage. She remembered it when we played Christmas Carols for our
kids last week. Now, the momentary feeling to be noted is that when people
clapped after her first performance, she had this ecstatic feeling which made
sure that she is going to sing more on stage. Now, if people did not clap or
she did not feel encouraged she may not have ever sang publicly again thus
reducing our chances of ever meeting to almost zilch. It was this moment that
framed our destiny.
I do believe that life is like a string made of these
momentous moments. One should strive to create more and more of them. They are
created when you are doing something new, something you love, and something
extra curricular & creative. They just spring into your life when you are
following your passions and your dreams. They hit you when you are ready to
surprise yourself, when you are looking for some thing extra ordinary. They
abstain when you are checking emails or taking con calls.
So I promise myself to strive to create more moments like
these and make the string of my life more momentous, more memorable.
I also understood that it is these moments slow down the
time. These momentous moments have the habit of playing again and again, taking
you back into the past and hence making present slower. On the corollary, if
you do not have these moments, present just rushes into the future. So this is
what has happened to most of us. We have been too busy doing the basics and
have not let ourselves feel the moments that flew past us.
Next year, I am going to let my life bring out these moments
more often than not. I will slow it down. I will drive with friends, I will
dive in the deep sea, I will dive from the sky, I will write with my son, I
will play harder! These are my resolutions. I will share my momentary feeling
at the end of the momentous year. Will you?
