Severed Branches

I am possessed by an Idea. I want to write about it. But she glides away the moment I pick up a pen. I want to speak of her but my lips betray me. She skips and dances - always out of my reach.

She comes to me only when she wants and always without warning. She allows me to glance at her. She comes close enough for me to savor her fragrance. She unabashedly reveals glimpses of the promise she holds. She lets me admire her delicate structure. She leaves me with tantalizing, yet imperfect, memories. She is a tease.

She makes me smile. She keeps hope in me alive. She adds wings to my dreams. But she won’t let me imprison her in words.

I have this beautiful Idea in my mind and I don’t know what to do with it.

Part I

Thoughts are not always reflections of what we are thinking. They are more reflective of what we think we need to think.

Emotions, on the other hand, never lie. Emotions reach out to the core of us and show us for what we really are. We can tell ourselves a thousand lies and eventually be convinced of their veracity. But we can’t ever get better of our emotions.

I am teaching myself to watch out for my emotions. I find observing my immediate emotional reactions very educative. Catching my genuine internal first reaction before it gets processed to fit what I think I am thinking.

Part II

A few months back I had met someone who was very successful (according to my standards). I have held this person in high regard and have been looking forward to a chance to meet her again. Around two weeks back, I accidentally bumped into her and we had a nice long conversation. I was overjoyed.

What shocked me was this - my very first split second reaction at meeting this person was not one of happiness but of aversion. You have to understand this is a person I have been meaning to talk to for a long while. So a sense of aversion is the last thing I expected myself to feel.

After much reflection, it dawned on me that my reaction had nothing at all to do with that one particular person. The issue was something larger – every time I meet someone successful my first immediate reaction is to withdraw.

Every successful person holds out a mirror to me. And in that mirror I find myself asking, what AM I doing to maximize my potential?

Did you ever do something that you knew in your heart was wrong but the circumstances were such that you decided to compromise?

Armed with artillery of notions such as ‘being-practical’, ‘there-is-no-alternative’, ‘everyone-else-does-it’, I have waged wars against my own beliefs.

I am not afraid of doing what needs to be done. That I can deal with. What scares me is that whenever in the past I have made similar compromises, these decisions have changed me. It wasn’t an overnight phenomenon. Bit by bit; one day of compromise rolls into another. And soon it doesn’t seem like a compromise anymore. I get so inured to the insult of having made temporary peace with whatever demon I am fighting against that it stops hurting.

Life decisions I took years ago have made me poor - money-wise. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. But I have so accepted the fact of my relative poverty that it doesn’t hurt anymore. I am so used to not having money that the fact that I have not used my god given talents to create material prosperity doesn’t bother me at all. I have begun to see myself as a poor person.

At times I encounter situations that required me to commit myself to things that go against what I believe in. Compromises are necessary and even advisable, as long as they are temporary stop-gap arrangements. The moment I allow myself to forget this, the compromise becomes permanent. And that will never do.

I sit here with a guitar in my hand. My first guitar. I am learning to play my first three chords. In the few hours I have been at it, my stubby fingers feel like they are going to be cut in two. And Clapton makes it look so easy!

Leaning is never easy. I find with most skills, the speed of acquisition of that skill is frustratingly slow. And it’s filled with so many potential wrong turns and dead ends. But I start most of my learning escapades with a cocky I-will-learn-it-in-a-jiffy attitude. Not surprisingly, the first few attempts at doing the act always come as a shock to me. The shock of realizing what all is really involved.

In that shock it’s easy to forget that from the moment I wakeup till the time that I go to sleep, even the most basic activities that I do are things that I have learned to do. It’s easy to forget that at some time in the past each of these acts too must have seemed horrendously difficult.

I sit here with a guitar in my hand. I can see the years of practice and patience it’s gonna take before I would be able to play like I want to. I will have to constantly remind myself the reason for doing this. I would need to constantly reaffirm my love for the art.

Learning is never easy.

And that in itself is a lesson that I am learning.