342 Monday Musings: The most unique story

342 Monday Musings: The most unique story

The cow was telling a story to the calf. She believed it was the most unique story. Not the way she told it, although she also relished the way she told it, but the way the story had unfolded. In her bones she knew that the contours of her story were rare. She pictured it as the story no cow ever had lived through before.

The celebrations of her life were like no others. Like rare gems. The highs were higher than the notes in a symphony. In her mind the achievements were amplified and had acquired a size larger than they actually were. She was also mindful that in hindsight the start point always appears modest and humbler than they really were and the hardships one faced along the way were always amplified to be large enough, portraying us in the image of a giant slayer. We are the raconteur of our own stories and when we tell it to others, there are often no eyewitnesses. She told about the meadows she had travelled, the plains she had grazed and the hills she had crossed over. The calf was in rapt attention and seeing this the cow could only become bolder.

She remembered what humans had to say about the past – ‘’In the rearview of the car the objects often are closer than they appear. In the rearview of life, objects are often further away and dim than they really are’’. Thankfully she was not human, she told herself with a smirk.

She stared at the starry eyed calf and continued. She told him about the predators she had escaped, the rocks she had managed to jump over and herd she had spent her whole life with, being the cynosure of everyone’s eyes. She told the calf anecdotes funny and sad, stories of celebrations and grief – the way she remembered them now. A tiny voice in her asked her if she was sticking to the facts or if she remembered the exact way in which the story had actually happened because with time memory does play pranks with us. She asked herself if she was taking small liberties with the truth. She had seen many in their old age telling their stories with a similarly misplaced sense of grandeur but she had sufficient confidence in her own ability to remain objective, although she had not checked with anyone if she did appear objective in her story telling to others.

One can always glamourize the modesty of means and the add some spice to the challenges one faced to make the story a little more dramatic, a little more compelling. She knew very well that the loyalty of the story teller is to the act of story-telling and not to the absolute accuracy of facts. In any case she knew her story was unique and it was her responsibility to make it appear unique. After all, how could one go wrong with recalling one’s own story. Who was a better custodian of facts if the facts were our own? If she would tell her story, how could she be inaccurate!
A tiny voice in her had felt that after a few times the way she had told his story, the narrative and words started to acquire a sense of permanence. The embellishments started to look truer. After a few more renditions the truth and the embellishments fused together. There was no way to distinguish between the two. Even she could not tell the difference.

The agonies of her life were also unique. The pains, the grief, the disillusionments and the regrets even more unique. When she sat to ruminate on the years gone by she would relish the victories small and large but she would she would relish the falls, the slips, the bruises even more. The dense forests she got lost to come back, the close shaves she had with crevices big and small, the herds she mistook for her own only to be rejected and the long days she survived of thirst until she found a stream worthy enough to satiate her – all her life experiences she talked about in which the circumstances were always different but the ending was always the same – she emerged out of the shadows just in time unscathed to tell this story. She recounted each of those stories almost self-deprecatingly – the hint of humility manufactured so beautifully that it almost appeared to be genuine. The calf was young and listened without blinking and in this moment that is what mattered. If only the young knew the tales the old weave!!

The cow believed in the story. She believed her story was unique. What she did not know as she told in all earnestness this story to the young calf, that just at this very moment in the same jungle, there was a lion, a tiger, an elephant, a grasshopper, a bee, a louse, an earthworm, an eagle, a parrot, and an amoeba who was telling a story that they believed was the most unique. The jungle had enough patience for all these delusions.The jungle was also wise enough to know that if for not for the delusions of such uniqueness, each one of them would go insane by the burden of meaninglessness of those stories.

Guru