I'm in transit. Sometimes, when I'm by myself, I feel like a passenger at the airport who's been offloaded and told to wait in the lounge. I collect my baggage and sit down to wait for the announcement. Wondering when my flight will be announced, when I'll get on board and then fly away. I don't think of the destination just yet, it's the journey that I'm fixated on. Sometimes I feel my life is in that stage, a state of impermanence, of transience, of flux. There is no sense of immediacy, of getting up in the morning to go somewhere, of a deadline to catch. Each day has its own rhythm and I allow myself to succumb to it. Some days I am in control of it but some days I just give in. I feel like I had a life, a job, a sense of rush and then someone deplaned me. I got off the bus, and I sat down, I slowed down. And I waited. Now, I'm still waiting, not for an external announcement but for the voice in my head to tell me that it's OK to get back on the plane. To fly. I don't know where to, but it's the journey I'm interested in. It's not as if I'm completely lost, with no work to keep me busy. You know how you walk to the book store, pick up a couple of magazines to kill time, grab a coke... it's the same feeling. Killing time, passing time, bidding time, all in an attempt to concise the waiting. It's a temporary relief but it's not your calling. Your heart and mind and your ears are still tuned into another frequency. You're reading the book but half of you is elsewhere, waiting for that announcement.
A part of you knows this is a good life, you're at the lounge, you're reading, you're sipping a coke, and getting on the plane is only going to put you back into the rut, the same old mundane routine but you crave it somewhere deep inside. It's a part of who you are. You know your baggage just got a bit heavier but does that mean you leave the old bag behind?
You aren't even sure of what you're trying to say any more. Or what you're thinking. It's not just about the work. It's as if you've reached a point where everything is running in slow motion. Like a Hindi film you were watching at the airport lounge just froze on the telly. With no attempt to defreeze.
You feel you're in the chiller. You need to take no decision whatsoever. You will neither freeze nor remain the fridge temp, you will stay in this half freeze mode, subject to the vagaries of the electricity department.
Even your analogies are lame, at best. Time to switch off.
4 comments:
Well hmmmm…
Inter…est…ing bloooog. Slo-mo can actually be refreshing from a sensation point of view/sense. Having no particularly defined schedule can grant space for undefined brain patterns/waves, for example.
Why should life be a frantic last-lap dash to the chequered flag? Even routine activities that turn ritualized, such as shaving, can be refreshed by simply altering the pace. If Gillette’s “Mach 3” has a feel of soundbarrier-busting speed (guess more pushbutton aftershave moisturizer can be sold this way), a languorously conversational approach would nicely invert the prescribed paradigm.
A brand, after all, is just a sound. It can stretch ad infinitum (if a monosyllable can…). Even as a label, Coca-Cola frinstance can wrap itself fully around the bottle, and run into itself again, nicely blurred, to circum-locute forever.
Anyhow, it’s amazing how time itself (its pace, its linearity, its cant-mess-with-it-ability) was held so sacred before Relativity knocked it off course. Now we know, or think we know, that time is ultimately no greater than mankind’s other fond conceptions.
Google 'YouTube Honda City (India) - The Race - 60 sec - Director's Cut - MAGIC HOUR FILMS.mpg'
Adrian Mendonza, and old advertising hand, is the creative director of this masterpiece, though the product it self is superb in its very conception and design. Perhaps the most fabulous TV commercial I have seen in a long time, and I mean the way the man has layered it. Self actualisation, in a sense.
Though, Pepsi's SRK ad with the cricket placard 'Dil maange more' remains a classic, no doubt.
Time, indeed, is what one makes of it
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