Epiphanies at Twilight

What is it about sitting by your window at dusk, watching the daylights dim with the evening breeze in your face and old Hindi movie songs playing on your media player, that makes you get all philosophical? Today, for reasons heavily circumstantial, my thoughts drift to ‘change’. How I always hate it unconditionally. How the prospect of an utterly uncertain tomorrow always leaves me with a void in the pit of my stomach – the size of the void directly proportional to the first impact of the change on me. It is not a good feeling – never has been. And even though most changes have proved to have been for the better in the past, the stomach never learns.

I guess it is the feeling of powerlessness which makes me uncomfortable, well established control freak that I am. Once or twice, in my lifetime so far, I have experimented with what people call being wild – but only under an overall controlled environment. And I almost always made sure things came back to my world of planned normalcy. That seems to be preferred steady state. May be it is so for most of us.

We all like to think that we know what tomorrow will pan out to be. “For the next 10 months, I am going to focus on this project.” “I will get married in a year’s time.” “The next 2 weeks are purely for you, my love.” How we like to fool ourselves with the illusion of certainty. Even though cliché says that the only thing constant is change. We all know that clichés seldom lie. Quite astonishingly, that does not seem to figure in our comfortable view of life.

Every now and then, though, God likes to remind us who’s boss. Just when the naïve thought of being the one in-charge crosses our mind. Just when we make the mistake of telling ourselves, “Nothing can go wrong now”. Just when we are happily zooming ahead on the freeway, patting our own backs for choosing the perfect track. He enjoys telling us who’s really steering, and the car takes an inexplicable turn into the thickets. We foolishly try to prevent it. In clear vain. Eventually (and this is only if we are lucky enough to realize it at some point of time), we see the lack of a point in it and watch with our mouth open in bewildered helplessness. At more than one such point in my life, I have looked up at the skies and said to Him aloud, “Boy, do I hate your sense of humor!”

Why then, comes the logical question to my mind, do we even try? If we are not in the driver’s seat, why care at all? May be its just the way we are designed –to make an effort, to take the next step irrespective. To hate, to love, to desire, to hope. To search for meaning. To care.

I write this at the threshold of another one of those points where the Boss is making His presence felt, with things whirling out of any semblance of control. Well, my control at least. It has kept me in a state of unrest for the past few days now. As the sun vanishes out of sight, it makes way for the city to come alive below my window in a blaze of street lights, house lights, traffic lights and that undying flame of the ONGC refinery at the horizon. As the car takes another unexpected turn, I toy with the idea of accepting my un-in-chargeness for once, sitting this one back and just enjoying the ride. Talk about wild!