This is perhaps the most personal among my blogs yet. There have been others where I have been able to laugh at my misfortunes with the benefit of remoteness across time. Not so this time.
This relates to a period of time in the past that I shall not specify. It has not been long enough that the wound has healed for the pain to abate. Yet I am able to look at it with the sort of objectivity that only the passage of time allows.
It makes me ask many questions that come from stuff I read long back and did not understand the meaning of. How do we end up inflicting pain on ourselves? Is it something that we have a choice about?
I never related to Gibran's idea of pain that I first read when I was in junior college. "Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self." I read Gibran because it was fashionable to do so. Like reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead was. Like reading Kafka or Koestler was.
And then some years later I went through an experience that came close to what Gibran probably meant. But my super rational observer ego came to my rescue and asked me: Was I really sure I was in pain? That is when I realised the sense in Gibran's line. Pain is after all self-chosen.
But it was not the pain that healed me as the bitter pill that Gibran would have us believe it to be. That pain could have instead derailed my budding career in financial services if I had not picked up myself with the power of rationality and the drive of a burning aspiration and loads of the Lord's Grace.
Years later Pain came to me haunt me again. I knew I was setting myself up for it well before it hit me. The sheer impossibility of joy enduring in that situation was all too evident for any one to miss. The untenability of the joy reminded me of a poem of Vishnu Narayanan Namboodiri that my cousin used to cram in school. It was about a frog that was trying to savour the prey on its wily sticky tongue even as the frog itself was gliding down the gullet of its predator, a snake.
This time I had to suffer the pain all alone. Sharing it with anyone would have doubled it. I could not share it with those that cared about me. Sharing it with anyone else posed the risk of it hurting the person who had given me that joy, however short lived it had been. It was a perfect Gibranesque situation: (Y)ou shall see in truth that you are weeping for that which has been your delight." How could I cause hurt to the one who had given me joy?
As I suffered the pain in total emotional solitude I wondered what was more racking: The solitude in which I suffered the pain? Or the pain itself?
I am not sure I will know the answer. Not yet at least. May be on another bright day when I have the luxury of looking at this episode across time, like a mariner staring wistfully across the boat that has sailed without him into the horizon, I will be able to say: Not every voyage on this vessel was meant for me, perhaps. The good-soul thing to do then would be to wish safe passage to those that sailed without you.
Nanni. Namaskaaram.
This relates to a period of time in the past that I shall not specify. It has not been long enough that the wound has healed for the pain to abate. Yet I am able to look at it with the sort of objectivity that only the passage of time allows.
It makes me ask many questions that come from stuff I read long back and did not understand the meaning of. How do we end up inflicting pain on ourselves? Is it something that we have a choice about?
I never related to Gibran's idea of pain that I first read when I was in junior college. "Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self." I read Gibran because it was fashionable to do so. Like reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead was. Like reading Kafka or Koestler was.
And then some years later I went through an experience that came close to what Gibran probably meant. But my super rational observer ego came to my rescue and asked me: Was I really sure I was in pain? That is when I realised the sense in Gibran's line. Pain is after all self-chosen.
But it was not the pain that healed me as the bitter pill that Gibran would have us believe it to be. That pain could have instead derailed my budding career in financial services if I had not picked up myself with the power of rationality and the drive of a burning aspiration and loads of the Lord's Grace.
Years later Pain came to me haunt me again. I knew I was setting myself up for it well before it hit me. The sheer impossibility of joy enduring in that situation was all too evident for any one to miss. The untenability of the joy reminded me of a poem of Vishnu Narayanan Namboodiri that my cousin used to cram in school. It was about a frog that was trying to savour the prey on its wily sticky tongue even as the frog itself was gliding down the gullet of its predator, a snake.
This time I had to suffer the pain all alone. Sharing it with anyone would have doubled it. I could not share it with those that cared about me. Sharing it with anyone else posed the risk of it hurting the person who had given me that joy, however short lived it had been. It was a perfect Gibranesque situation: (Y)ou shall see in truth that you are weeping for that which has been your delight." How could I cause hurt to the one who had given me joy?
As I suffered the pain in total emotional solitude I wondered what was more racking: The solitude in which I suffered the pain? Or the pain itself?
I am not sure I will know the answer. Not yet at least. May be on another bright day when I have the luxury of looking at this episode across time, like a mariner staring wistfully across the boat that has sailed without him into the horizon, I will be able to say: Not every voyage on this vessel was meant for me, perhaps. The good-soul thing to do then would be to wish safe passage to those that sailed without you.
Nanni. Namaskaaram.
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