148 Monday Musings: To do or not to do - is my business!!

148 Monday Musings: To do or not to do - is my business!!

 

Imagine you living in Mumbai for 20 years and not having visited Marine drive or imagine you living in Agra for 20 years and not having visited the Taj or having lived in Delhi for 20 years and not having visited the Qutub Minar!!

What goes through your mind as you imagine any of the above? And then imagine you living wherever you have and think of all that you haven’t visited or done or experienced for long.

Here are 10 thoughts that go through my mind.

1. Life is busy and I just got busy.Being busy is not a sin, is it - and once you are busy with some thing, you are bound to miss others. Its queer, unusual may be, but what’s the big deal - everyone misses something or the other.

2. At times I did not have the right company who could enjoy the joys of visiting something so quintessentially linked to the identity of my city, a joy that quite literally belongs to my city only - and to no other. There are hundreds like me.

3. Aren’t there more important things than visiting the Marine dive, the Taj or the Qutub Minar or any other such thing? I mean, come on, what’s this fuss about a non issue? Why dont you talk about what i did?

4. Cognitively it means not much, in the sense that I was not wasting my time - was I? I was doing other equally or perhaps more important things. But it could mean something at a deeper level. Let me think about it?

5.Lets not be judgmental in ascribing too much significance to this - I did what I had to and going to these places did not seem important in the scheme of priorities that I had then. I will go or not go to places and do things or not do things based on time available or what appeals or what is important to me. It’s my context and so shut up.

6.I might have been doing other big and important things all this while, but small, inconsequential things have their own meaning and significance. (As I write this, it’s the first rains in Mumbai and I can see over a dozen kids playing in the rains below in the society park, and a few adults too!!). There is fulfillment in innanities and more importantly they are rich source of memories for the future. Have you wondered how we seem to remember moments where we let go more than the moments we were restrained and in control.

7. Are there other things also, the joys that I have missed, inadvertently but surely, that I can catch up now on? Let me make a yearly list or a 'bucket list'!

8. Two quotes that have stayed with me for so long suddenly come back. "If only youth knew and Age could?" and the second one by Mark Twain "20 years from now we will only regret what we did not do, rather than what we did"

9.I will not be burdened by the wieght of the 'what ifs' and 'could have beens'. I will only be liberated by the possibilities of 'what can be'.

10. Sometimes poignant misses like these are important to be experienced - they reveal to us the innate imperfection of life, its fundamental nature is incompleteness; and in revealing this imperfection and incompleteness, these experiences indicate to us the struggle and joy of trying to make it perfect.

Guru