Here I am giving justice to a couple of rough months and a few years of ugly writer’s block so I would like to call it. Honestly, I miss writing. I have been trying over and again to put words on paper, but boredom hits me and then I just give up that thread.
Topics keep striking in and out like waves of the ocean kissing the shore. All that is left behind is a handful of thoughts.
“Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.”
Not every quote is right, but nothing is completely wrong either. I call myself a writer (secretly) but when I talk about it aloud to someone who wants to know, I prefer to be known as the person who can write.
It is never easy to get on with life or work or anything for that matter, when you lose someone. It only gets worse when it happens to be someone who has shielded you from all the adversities around, supported you through all your ups and downs, listening to even your stupidest of stupid conversations like everything depends on it. Such people are rare and such losses are exceedingly difficult to cope with and sometimes not at all.
But amidst all this, sometimes, you start with a minimum courage of “nothing to lose”.
My recent visits to the jungles of central India have been awakening and to my pleasure I feel I have managed to reach the level of psych that my grandmother and mother had and have, respectively. Here is a food for thought – they claim they get immense happiness and sanctity when they relive the moments of the past. Dull day becomes calmer, turbulence tends to subside, and the sine wave of disturbance reduces its amplitude.
It’s believed- we get wiser by day and experience.
We today have more wisdom than what we had yesterday or the day before, and we adapt and grow every day. With this in mind and referencing the turbulent months last year, one of the many things that got me back to knowing what “The Calm” is, by relieving the moments I had in the jungle.
The Silence. Silence kills you for good by exposing you to its world. My friend once casually said, “If you are calm within then the noise around wouldn’t disturb you.” It’s commonly said but because I was already calm inside and still kept craving for that silence, I quickly for a moment questioned my beliefs . I get disturbed by the amount of noise ‘we the city people’ experience. The running taps, utensils in the neighbour’s kitchen, two wheelers, construction work especially roads, and so on and so forth.
All this made me realise the need for me to find the ever-elusive happy place. Happy place for me came from an unknown preaching of our golden generations. Reliving the moments that give you balance in unbalanced times.
This does not imply you give up everything during a screwed-up project deployment or an unwanted conversation. It comes to you naturally. You drift into that world as if there is a force transpiring you there.
“Peace is liberty in tranquillity.”
When I think about the jungle, I start to smell the trees, the leaves, the moisture on completely dried barks, the muddy roads, the fresh air. All this together I would like to refer to as the smell of the jungle. I can hear voices of birds, I can see the unexpectedly colourful birds flying in between the greens and occasional signals of the barking deers. I can see that look in the eyes of a female tiger when she was so close to us, I can feel the same energy that I did when I had witnessed it.
It’s hard to define yet very simple to transport yourself there, apparently. And that’s one place that I would like to believe would stay where and how it is and in fact keep growing multifolds if the most intelligent animal of the planet understands that his survival is based on preservation of such serene places.
This is my happy place, a place I would want to rush to from my day-to-day hustle. The need to escape the routine, to rejuvenate and recharge yourself with an energy that nature can fill us with, just to get back to the grind!
This is my discovery. What is yours?
Dipika Pathak 