HOW life changes! Still, the sun continues to rise, searing and blinding; the moon glistens in the charred night and the weather remains unchanged, too, hot the whole year round. So what changes?
When I was ushered off to school, I resented the sudden induction of new, bawling classmates and how I had to put up with a bratty-looking kid when she tugged at my well-oiled plaits. No teacher would put up, like my parents, at my tantrums. That was a change that had to be succumbed to.
As the academic level rose, I cursed the way my life had suddenly been consumed with just studies, studies and more studies. This stage was also accompanied by the discovery of the opposite sex. The teen years crept in; self-consciousness overpowered all other aspects of the personality of the skinny teenager that I was. Academic pressures coupled with reactions to pimply boys with breaking voices. Fortunately, for everyone, that stage was fleeting. It was at this point again that the generation gap started to rear its ugly head. It began as minor disputes over trifle matters. Mom and Dad ended up being ‘not-always-right’ and rather ‘difficult’. Gossiping with friends seemed like a more attractive prospect. Family gatherings appeared tedious formalities.
Thoughts of a career sprang to mind as a quest for identity reared it’s ambitious head. Competition, ugly and fierce, surfaced and guided university life. A labyrinth of relationships with peers, twisted and selfish, which at that point seemed like the sun, moon and stars, were to be dealt with. This was accompanied by the painstaking process of sifting out, with time acting as the sieve, ‘true’ friends — those who could be called up at any odd hour.
But all that changed. Friends left, some in the pursuit of higher education and greener pastures that are only, of course, found on the other side of the fence. Others tied the knot and succumbed blissfully to marital life (they, too, found their better halves on the other side).
Just when I had decided that maybe the marriage bit was not up my alley, my path crossed with that special someone and all senseless notions of a single life flew systematically out of the window.
Every day a relationship reaches a new level — it wavers precariously or bolsters itself firmly. With every incident dreams are modified. The future seems distant, yet every coming moment is the threshold to the future. So untouchable, so unpredictable. Yet looked forward to. But one needs to have something stable in life, something or someone who can be the fixed point of the compass of our lives, unmoving and staunch around which life can move easily. Once that something has been identified, change can be dealt with!
By the way, who was the person who said, “There’s nothing permanent but change.” Oh yes, it was Aristotle.
HOW life changes! Still, the sun continues to rise, searing and blinding; the moon glistens in the charred night and the weather remains unchanged, too, hot the whole year round. So what changes?
