Life is....

Life is fragile.

'Fragile' is its most descriptive word, I think. The only other word that remotely qualifies is 'elusive'.

Now I speak of earthly life, that is to say, 'creaturely' life, and not Divine Life. The Divine Life is anything but fragile. And yes, the Divine Life is different from our life.

And I use the meaning of the word 'life' as in statements human beings make such as 'life is....' - that is, in a kind of descriptive sense, not definitional. 'Life is a shortbread butter cookie', though most formidably unanswerable, can hardly be definitional, I think, even if expressed by a two-year old.

Life, someone famously said, is what happens when you're not looking. I might say, of the one who said it, 'a famous person once famously said, with insight that I had not thought him capable of'.

Anyways. Somehow I agree. The moment I start trying to 'catch' life or distill it into repeatability, it hides or dies. It happens surreptitiously when no one is looking. And once it happens, it might almost said, it's almost impossible to simulate or repeat, even under conducive conditions, like death can. You can go on killing someone, for example, when the circumstances are favourable, such as no resistance, and so on. But you cannot go on creating life. Once life dies, it cannot be resurrected.

Now I must say again, I speak not of the Divine Life, nor of the Divine Life in some of us. I speak of the stuff of earthly life, creaturely life, in a descriptive sense.

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Will I ever be able to play the piano quite like I did, on a specific occasion? Will I always be able to find the words for each successive situation, as I did for a specific one? Will I always be able to express myself with the scalpel-sharp precision and blessed economy of words as I once did?

Will she always look at me like she once did? Will I always have the 'absolutely right' friend to be with me as my circumstances need as I once did?

Will there again be an hour before sunset as magical as yesterday's? Will my favourite mountain always look the same? Will the clouds be as magical tomorrow? Will the light catch my garden as magically as it did that day? Will the rain be as absolutely delightful and opportune on another day as it was on that day?

Will my two year-old always look as loveable as when she was two? Will my teenager ever ask a question with the same maddeningly bewitching innocence as he did once?

Will this life be as enjoyable if I had it again? (a big 'if', as it usually turns out)

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Yes, it is like catching a soap bubble to weigh it on a scale. Like a mad scientist who once weighed a man just before and after he died and concluded that the human soul weighs 21 grams.

Life is unique, unrepeatable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. It will have its way.

You can alter it perhaps, but you can't have it again. Opportunities for adjustment are not infinite, nor will they be available forever.

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There is one thing we can do, however. We can NOTICE. And once we do, we can enjoy it. Life may be a moment, but what a tragedy if we fail to notice.

Since it is what happens when we're not looking, let's make our looking count.

This could just mean taking a half hour to walk in a garden between 4:45 P.M and 5:15 P.M on a day when it rained in the afternoon and then the sun came out. There were still dull-grey clouds in the sky, but every one of them had a silver lining and the dappled sunlight touched every single green leaf. You missed it today? Okay, you tell yourself, I'll see it tomorrow. And then..... it rained all day for years after that and the sun never came out.

It could mean spending an hour with a two year-old without trying to change him in any way. Letting yourself be and letting him be. So what if he wrecked the house? So what if he put the ice cream into the chicken broth and insisted on drinking it? And what if, in the middle of all of that, he called your name just once, plaintively, melting your resistance? Yes, there is tomorrow. But this happened today, and you didn't notice? What a horrid little lifeless creature you must be!

It could mean catching a ratchetty 85 year-old in a particularly reflective and chatty mood. You thought she had just gone senile, didn't you? What if the time you spent with her helped her stay in a good mood for many days afterwards? Yes, there is always tomorrow, but why are you counting on it when you know better? How many tomorrows anyway?

It could mean making paper planes in the office for ten minutes. It's a scientific thing, you know. It's not easy to make those turning planes turn. Yes, there is tomorrow, but what if there's no more paper, or no more time?

It might mean that I visit Kilimanjaro before I die, for example. Or Jerusalem.

The stuff that life is made of - all of it, comes with an enjoy-before date. And you can never know or change that date to suit yourself. If you missed it you missed it and you can only hope you make it before the enjoy-before date, while there's still time.

It amazes me how much time I've spent trying to make people 'see'. In the words I use. In the pictures I paint. In the photos I take. In notes I play. I've not always been successful. Part of that is because I am a farcical bungler and a bad workman, but an equal part of that is because people are as obstinate as mules, blind as bats, short-sighted as tyrants, jaundiced as prejudice and bigotry, unforgiving as granite, or just plain unwilling to stop and notice life.

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There's another type of person, who wants to CONTROL life. This kind of person wants to capture it, cage it, auto-play to someone else so he can gain from it and extort the price of enjoyment from another.

This kind of person also wants to see how much life can be squeezed out of every situation, every resource, every person, every enjoyable thing, every pleasure.

This kind of person gets drunk on repeatability and return on investment.

This kind of person will just never understand that life is free, that it can be given away but never hoarded, profiteered from, captured, bought, sold, monopolized, patented, branded, and so on and so on .........

It never occurs to such persons that life cannot be captured. It will not be caged. You don't create life; you just enjoy it. And a huge, huge part of that enjoyment comes from helping others enjoy it too. There can never be any "net" life. All of it either gets noticed and enjoyed (and so used up), or a good part of it is wasted. No one sees and no one knows it, so no one can enjoy it. It can never be created again, at least not by human beings.

Do you find yourself spending all your waking hours doing math, even perhaps for a living? Being fascinated by constructs and contrivances (read as technology)? Solving problems? Casting a leering eye on any hoard-able, profitable thing (including people)? Measuring everything? Trying to put 'life' on screen in a 'reality show'? A shameless opportunist? Caged by your own desires for yourself?

THAT. THAT is what the famous someone meant when he said life is that which happens when you're not looking. Life WILL pass you by, because it is fragile. Perishable. You cannot HANDLE it and make it malleable like a tangible thing. You cannot measure it or engineer it to happen again.

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If we would come to our senses, we would treat life tenderly, because it is so fragile. It is seriously hampered by short-sighted people, and disappears altogether among empiricists. We would stop trying to 'make it pay' and 'valuate' it to justify its existence. Our touch on the world would be a divine touch, an imprint so soft and beautiful that we would indeed leave this world a better place.

I've met far too many whose touch on life is crushing, a weight it cannot bear.

Go gentle.

Ode to mirthless smiles and those who don't ever feel sad, ever

Every single one of us fails at life.

I don't view life as a test, and somehow I am not a "religionist" trying to ram Christianity's doctrine of "original sin" down anyone's throat.

Soberly considered, I say again, every single one of us fails at life. We express our sense of this failure (those of us honest enough to realise and recognise it) in ways that are so colourfully diverse, unique - our individual imprint on the canvas we call life.

Surprisingly, the full unabated force of the pathos and scope of failure strikes only very few of us, and this is coloured by religion and religious thinking in many. In others, a stubborn, tottering pretense at dignity is often made, pathetic in its foolishness, yet heartrending in its courage. Some of this is vehement, some nihilistic, some so broken that only unalterable stone remains. Some of us go to The Divine, credibly or incredibly. Some reject The Divine and scoff incredulously.

What was demanded from us by life? Was it just to be a good son or daughter? A good wife or husband? A good father or mother? Or was it to be more than anyone else, more in every possible definition? Ironically, no matter what we expected to be, realistic or otherwise, we know that in the end we fail. "Success", as we define it, is short-sighted, and happiness illusory. All our achievements are indeed the stuff of Shelley's Ozymandius, no matter how belligerent (Julius) Caesar might have sounded when he conquered Britain.

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Why do I sound so depressing on this blog? Why can't I be happy? Why does the weight of failure fall so heavy on these pages?

Many of my friends believe in God. I believe in God too. So, doesn't God hear these words? God is indeed touted as the solution to all of life's ills. The trouble is that, true as that indeed is, there are always the remains of the day. The trouble is that the claim for the Divine is somehow offered too easily. God is more than merely an answer to my own failures and humanity's failures. How do you cram Someone like The Divine into the brains of slugs like me? Help me understand that. Of course school was easy; because what we learned there were merely lessons. We forget that in the innocence of childhood, most of us never seriously thought that what we learned was indeed true; that the world really was like that. The mind was trained, but the heart wasn't. Many of us got into life with unprepared hearts and bursting minds.

I will never say I don't believe; I wrote earlier that I have no illusions I can make it alone. In the darkness of the hour, I pray with tears.

I guess we may indeed say that somehow, through our stained tears, God has become irrelevant because the pain has consumed us. We are almost not ourselves; we hurt so much that we cannot receive help even if it is at hand.

How can The Divine be irrelevant? History itself has proven otherwise, contrary to the many philosophers who ridicule this claim. I'm not so concerned here with PROOF; I'm just soberly trying to understand how our failure has made the only help we can get irrelevant to us. It is, indeed, a cosmic tragedy. Whereas I myself have taken help from The Divine, and can attest to it firsthand, I know, I feel and I hear the groans of human beings who feel that God is irrelevant. Can you see how great the pain must be? Am I exaggerating it? Am I making too much of it? You tell me.

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Our drivenness to do things, to "achieve", as it were, is really at its root a mutant reaction that we use to salve our brokenness from the plain facts of failure. Our "will to achieve" has brought many words into our vocabulary - words we use to describe, perhaps, how each of us individually deals with the enormity of having failed.

Dictator. Self-made man. Fierce individualist. Positive thinker. Optimist. Self-made evangelist. Humanist. Philanthropist (as if being moved by humanity's plight is an IDEAL and not default), Conservative. The "good person who harms no one". The list goes on.

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Tell me where you go to escape responsibility. You're a miserable liar if you tell me you haven't failed. When you go back to whatever miserable hole you crawl into at the end of the day, when you're alone with yourself, tell me you don't cry. Tell me and have it be true. I dare you.

Tell me you didn't harm someone. Tell me you learned someone's language. Tell me you touched another heart. Tell me that you tried, at least. But did you? Or are the scars such wonderful healers in themselves? Do you wear them like badges in the show-window of your life? Tell me!

Tell me you regret nothing. Tell me you failed no one. Didn't you fail yourself?

Tell me you succeeded at life. Liar!

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Now I will tell you what I've done. I gave in and capitulated. I admitted I was a miserable ne'er-do-well dressed in filthy rags. I failed and I did not lie about it. Not to you. Not to anyone. Not to God. And most importantly, NOT TO ME.

I told you before. I pray. I believe in The Divine. I don't believe knowing The Divine is a miracle cure, an acquittal in court, or a light switch that merely happens to work. I don't believe, even, that there is a sword over my head. There's no feel-good about it, really. How can admitting failure 'feel good'? There's no fear of hell in it - can the way I feel now be any worse than hell? In one sense I've been there already. No, these ideas are constructs. Empiricisms. They reduce the truth to something like it, and rip its heart out in so doing. Believing in The Divine is the end of me, but it is my only hope. This is one death-dealing Rubicon that must be crossed. There is no abdication of responsibility, integrity, intelligence here; and there is no blind faith. Believing in God is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. It is also the wisest thing I have ever done in my life.

What's it like for me to admit failure? I learn to leave myself alone. I learn to be heard when I cry, and be fussed over. I learn to speak the truth, even to myself, even about me, without a sword hanging over my head if I didn't. I learn. I cry. I learn. Sometimes I laugh, even though the happiest thing in the world is tinged indelibly with deep throbs of underlying grief. I learn to listen. I hear cries for help; I learn someone's language so I can help them.

It's not a pretty world, since we all failed. But it isn't a hopeless one, though it seems so.

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It's possible you might be unmoved. It's possible you believe you succeeded at life. It's possible you think I'm deranged. I have nothing to say if you do. I just hope, for your own good sake, that you're not lying to yourself.

If you do, I wonder how you go out everyday, and not hear the groans of people. Sometimes the cries are so silent that the whole world reverberates with the sound of silence. Scan the faces of people on a commute. Tell me what you see, from the well-provided-for to the derelict on the street.

I wonder how you cannot hear yourself when you cry. I wonder whether you think it will just get better one day for no reason. Whether you think it's just a phase. Tell me, if being 'good' was enough, how come it didn't make the world a better place? Why do you still cry in the still of the night, stifling it so no one will hear, yet desperately hoping someone will? Why does despair hang so heavy when you wake?

"Are you happy?" is still a clincher. You can answer "yes", and gain nothing at all; prove nothing at all. We landed men on the moon, we did, but I cannot stop my heart from bleeding over me.

Our indictment in what we call life is the most important truth about ourselves, the beginning of many other truths.

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Did this post depress you? Stop kidding me. You? YOU? you who have a thousand ways to lie to yourself?Don't patronise me.

Did I really now? Oh, just go take a nap. Mow the lawn. Take a cold shower. Prepare dinner. Work on that report. Do some math. Play with your phone. Get a shave, will you? Get on Facebook. Take off your shirt at a Guns'N'Roses concert. Buy a house. Get married and have kids. Read Norman Vincent Peale. Take a vacation. Land on Mars. There's a great big world out there. You'll soon forget, and with any luck your forgetfulness will carry you through so you'll never have to feel sad again.

The remains of the day

It’s about ten to midnight.

I can hear the shrill spark of traffic on the street. It’s probably not too much because it’s a Sunday, but nowadays in Bangalore it hardly matters - Sunday or any other day. There is a relatively new pedestrian crossing right outside my window, since there is a pre-university and graduate college just across the street; and every time a heavily laden truck or bus negotiates the raised crossing, I can hear the protest of the axles and absorbers.

I came in late tonight; everyone at home is in bed already. They’re all early sleepers and early risers. As you can probably imagine, I’m neither, and proud of it. I find it obnoxious, inexcusable and absolutely mean that people rise or get to bed early.

I wonder what others do just before getting into bed. Maybe some pray. Others are buried in their tablets or laptops (worse still, their smartphones, which in any case is what they have done all day). There are those absolutely insufferable folk who actually plan their next day. Many of these are exactly the kind of people who will not bat an eyelid if nothing goes according to plan, which begs the question ‘why plan in the first place?’ Some of these will hyperventilate if so much as a fly sits in a place unplanned.

For me, the time before I get into bed is all mine. So many people make demands of me all day and they have to be dealt with, spoken to, ‘answered’ in one sense or another, ‘actioned’ in whatever way, fended off, lied to if absolutely unavoidable, or lost in some sure way if they chase after me. But the time before bed is mine, all mine. Yes, I pray. I have no delusions that I can indeed manage on my own.

As I look around the room, I see a hundred things lying about. They’ve been lying about for years and years and I wisely let sleeping dogs lie (I don’t have a dog). Some of these things lying about are my dreams. Yes, there are some crushed flowers among those. But I’d rather not speak of them.

There are other things that are simply out of place, that is, out of their proper places. They need to be restored, but for the life of me I cannot find the strength. Or perhaps I’m just lazy. Whether I cannot find the strength or I’m lazy depends on who’s asking.

There’s a curious silence during that hour before bed; things and people who spent the day screaming their heads off at me are strangely quiet. I don’t see what the point of this is, knowing full well the screaming will start again tomorrow. Why the space? If there’s one thing that kills me a little at a time it is the intervening night that allows those who scream at me to renew their strength. I wish they would spend it all at once and then be quiet forever.

Don’t imagine the people who scream at me are all others.

One of the other curious things about this hour before bed is that this other person shows up.

He’s exactly like me, so much me that it’s scary.

What’s scary about him? I’ll tell you what’s scary about him – he never sleeps. But even so, strangely, he only shows up an hour before bedtime. When I get into bed, he won’t let me sleep, simply because he’s awake and he intends to stay awake all night, till daylight. He is all of the ones who scream at me all day long. He is them, but he is also me.

If the day had mistakes, he’s not going to let me forget. He’s going to dredge them up. If the day had some small good things or new beginnings, he will batter those things into non-existence and make me forget the good.

I sleep, externally unencumbered, but he puts all my Waterloos around me, so that I must wake with them.

Do you ever think of a big, well-fed bully beating the legs of a wobbly, malnourished child? I do.

There’s just one way to fend him off.

It doesn’t always work. I mean, I believe it always works (and it in fact does), but some nights he beats me so badly that there is no strength to use that way; and I find I’ve fallen asleep without putting him out of the room, so he’s there first thing in the morning.

I told you I pray. I indeed pray. I pray because there’s no other way. If the day has been a battle, why should the hour before bed be a worse battle than that which raged all day? So, I pray.

There is a place I go. When I go there, this other me does not follow, because it’s his Kryptonite.

Some of you probably go there too.

It’s a cross on a hill and a man hangs on it.

For all like me, who have their ‘other me’s’ beating them up all night, there is this place. This Cross. This hill.
More than the cross and more than the hill, there is One.

When I go there, I find that a grisly place dripping with heavy tissue-tinged drops of human blood has turned into…… a garden. Have you ever caught the whiff of fresh blood off a living person who is about to die? What do you think that smells like? What do you think that smells like?

Yes. A grisly place, the finest garden on earth. The cleanest, freshest winds blow there. The fragrance, quite literally, is divine. And I turn to find I am alone. The other me did not follow me into this garden. I am not alone with myself, like the hour before bed. The other me is NOT THERE.

I sometimes wonder how my mind can still bring up this picture. But it’s real; I cannot deny it because it is real. How can the other me not know the power of this place? This blood-tinged garden that wards him off firmly and surely?

And then I know I am not alone with myself, but I am alone with Someone else.

I cannot tell you what we speak about.

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Now it’s almost time to sleep. I know I will sleep, because the room is the garden now. The other me has been asked to leave.

There are still a hundred things lying about. They will be put into their places. I don’t know when and I don’t know how. And I’m not asking. And my dreams? It’s just so liberating to know someone actually understands my dreams and takes them seriously – when I think of the fact that not even I could do that for myself. There’s a line from a song I love – “you heard my dreams, while the rest of the world closed its ears”

Strange things, my dreams. I am astounded because they still live. Then I know it’s only because of the garden. The blood. The cross on the hill. And most of all, because of Someone.

Now this has brought tears and I hate tears.

My bed is a lovely place. It’s slovenly, smells like me, and is pitted and dented. All the same, I have it and I’m thankful. Today, there’s a book by the pillow – it’s called Rattigan: Plays: One. Terence Rattigan was born in 1911 and died in 1977. He wrote drama.

There’s another book too, but that book lives inside my head. It keeps me alive.

My blanket is lovely. Light purple and yellow squares with embroidered flowers.

I pray for dreams that are not tinged with yesterday.

It’s now ten to one, and the street is actually quiet. The week has begun.

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Some days. The garden. The cross on the hill. The One.

Some other days, the other me. Resourceful chap – he can never forget anything, good or bad.

Some days I am more alive than life itself. Other days, I survive.

Man indeed does not live by bread alone, I’ve realized, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the One Who gives life.

I told you before. I pray. I harbor no delusions that I can make it alone.