The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Wednesday 31 December 2014

A YEAR GOES BY..REFLECTING ON..

COLORES INFINITUM

It was 365 days ago, the Tuesday on December 31, 2013, the day of symbolic transition of time, from one to the next milestone, from a year to the next, on the timescale, designed to keep track of times our lives pass through, that I was writing a poem, ‘A Year Goes By’, musing on the days the year had for me.

Doing so is always existentially individual. And here is the Wednesday of December 31, 2014, with an hour left.

Like any other event of life, it is for the perspectives that what we think on this day, how we reflect on the days gone by. Practically, it changes nothing much, apart from the psychological symbolism that gives us the frame to look back, to reflect on - on what was a year in life, a capsule of time, adding to the story of our existence, adding stories as the year proceeded, adding elements as the days changed the calendar entry.

And it is never a zero-sum game – positive or negative, you gain something, in terms of experiences – vital enough to guide you if you can hear the call.

I had not thought of any resolutions on December 31, 2014, like I always did. Yes, I had my reflections and accordingly had certain stopovers to head to, but there was nothing in the realm of ‘pinned’. Instead, it was living life fully, my way, every day.

How successful I have been? Now success is a relative term and should be left to personal, intimate considerations. Like every life, I had my share of good and bad and routine but I didn’t see any point, like always, to assess my life in ‘gain or loss’ terms. I could do what I had thought to do. I could not do certain things that were in my mind. But I could continue doing certain things that I needed to do.

I wrote freely, extending and building on my way of life, going deeper inside me, on the journey to reclaim me that had its origin on a day, exactly four years ago, December 31, 2010, a setback that first pushed me to question my identity vehemently, setting me thus on the path to find who I was before the reason of the setback had taken over my thinking, and later on, became the light to guide me to go even deeper inside, in my own company. Yes, the identity crisis was over a long ago but identity is a lifetime love.

2014 saw definitive development on my books, two of them I am working on. The flow was good initially and I had thought I would be able to finish the drafts by the year end. But, then the writer’s block crept in (if I can claim to have one J). So, while the thoughts kept on building and finding space in my notes, the drafts didn’t progress to completion. Anyway, the block is over now and I think I am going to take it with the same love I had.

Meanwhile, I could finally bring up my website – www.santoshchaubey.com – to extend my blogging experience to a formal and diversified content platform. Some of my content is already categorized there and as I am going to take it as extension of my notebooks, it will see constant experiments and updates.

Writing is relief and release and I explored the canvas for newer realms and blogging continued to have some of its share through my regular blogs - http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/ and http://santoshchaubey.wordpress.com/ - and my themed blogs - http://www.banarascalling.com/ and http://santoshchaubey.tumblr.com/ - with 550 posts including – articles, poems, photographs, experimented images and quotes. For my first blog, ‘Beyond This Life’ or ‘Severally Alone’ (http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/), it was also the third ‘no breaks’ calendar year in a row.

During the course of writing, I did something that I had not done in years. I don’t remember the last time when I had watched a full movie in theatre. I prefer the home video option, even if it means some wait. I am not a film buff but I admire and revisit the good cinema and home videos give me the liberty to do so at my own pace while at the same time help me in building my library. But 2014 had the final episode of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth story, as filmed by Peter Jackson, scheduled in December. It was capping the second Middle Earth trilogy of Jackson’s stint with Tolkien’s land of fantasy after 11 years when the best of the lot, ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’, a landmark in narrating a book on screen, was released in 2003 and there was an urge to see the trilogies side-by-side, in their totalities, on how the craft of filmmaking had performed comparatively.

Now the home video would not come before April 2015. So, for my urge for the comparative study, I decided to take the route long forgotten when I picked up the movie in a theatre on Saturday, December 13.

Now, in few hours, the 4 of 2014 would transition to 5 of 2015. So, while the three digits would remain the same, the fourth different one would cause the next cycle on the timescale to begin, like the eternal message of living that says - ‘tomorrow is built on today with learning from yesterday’ – remember, life is never a zero-sum game.

It would be another calendar year with 365 new days to explore, to write, to read, to travel, to create new ideas, new stories, rewriting the oldies, clicking and capturing the known and unknown while continuing on the inward journey.

With the freedom of ‘no resolutions’ - with the freedom of my commitment to my conscience to live every day meaningfully liberated – with the freedom to make every day an opportunity!  

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/