In the Pitstop of the Race...

I cannot stress on the fact enough that life has changed after working. Well, it should because what good is stagnancy anyway.

After a year of working, I find myself tired by the second half of the day. No wonder, every time I take a flight I doze off even before the flight takes off.

I remember, I was traveling on New Year ’s Day and the flight was delayed by multiple hours. That was the first time when I woke up from a nap on a flight and didn’t find myself on air or on a different city. I woke up and we were still at the take-off area. But I had a good nap anyway.

It was last week when I took an afternoon flight but couldn’t fall asleep for some reason. Like most journeys I was seated near the window, but unlike my previous journeys, this time I looked out of the window. We were just a couple of metres above of the clouds but the view was great. A blue horizon on a sea of clouds. I was lucky enough to spot a rainbow amidst the cirrus; the hues getting clearer with each passing second. Oh, the things I miss when I am asleep!

The last time I saw a rainbow was some good seven years back on a flight home, back from Mumbai. A busy life had ensured that I forget that rainbows didn’t only appear on children’s colouring books.

I am on a flight, now that I write this. It’s three hours to midnight and the city I am leaving behind is looking like a plate full of stars- densely populated at some places, scarce and dim at others, but lit up nevertheless. And maybe the moving vehicles on those giant highways are tiny comets that move in an organized fashion, one after the other – paths we have set for ourselves.

I wonder if Civil Engineers feel proud about the massive structures they have created- those larger than life highways, the beauty of which can be seen only from a certain height, the strength of which is so easily ignored in our daily lives while we rush to our workplaces or curse the traffic that jam our ways.

We get so busy in our daily environments that we forget to simply sit and look at the sea of stars we have on the ground, what we have created for ourselves. I wonder if electricians feel proud when they light up someone’s house and pass the same house by when all’s done, on a peaceful night.

How happy can we be from the savings we cannot really see, sitting in some bank account far away from where we live?

It’s difficult finding meanings in everything that we do. But the meanings I can see today on works of those who build houses, and highways, cars and trains, I hope they see the same too.

And all I can see for myself is where I stand in this beautiful world – just a grain of sand in this endless beach.

I am afraid if I do not keep myself awake in the future flights, I would again back to taking a nap and conserving my energy for other tasks-at-hand waiting for me to land. And slowly I would forget that the world itself is a miraculous place but we just can’t stop looking for miracles. So we ignore the amazing things that happen with reasoning, with the knowledge of how things work but not why they do what they do.

He would know how he built the bridge, she would know how she designed the interiors, but would they know why they did so.

Maybe everything is just a disguised way to find immortality – the sculpture one leaves behind, the impacts people leave on other people’s lives, the books one writes, the work one does passionately. 

And maybe no matter what we do, we will always remain grains of sand on the deepest pits in a vast sea of stars.