The days are beginning to look all the same and past has started to blur. Things that you could recall in an instant and seemed very important are now suddenly distant. Are you finally growing up?
Sportspersons peak in their thirties. This time is supposed to have the best balance of one’s physical and mental abilities. The thirties are the middle part of an average human life-span. A time when you have enough to look back on and enough to look forward to. If you are in a roller coaster, this is moment where you are mid-way, between two slopes.
But strangely there seems no time in your life when you are so disoriented.
You have probably been to the temperate west, where the grass is green and the sky is blue and you could smell flowers on a bright spring afternoon. In the temperate climates, the mid-day is the best time of the day. The temperature is nice and you could be sipping iced tea sitting in a cafe reading a book. But in the tropics, mid-day is when the heat is torrid. People don’t usually venture outdoors and they wear masks if they have to. If you are in a humid zone like Mumbai, you desperately need some ice cream or air-condition.
Life in India is also like the climate. When you are in the mid-day of your life, the sun is beating down and the responsibilities have all been piled up. You are probably married, and maybe have kids or they are on the way. Everyone has expectations and you stop living for yourself. You are also probably struggling in your work or feeling stuck somewhere. You are working hard for rewards that seem far away. The older ones at the top are the ones having fun and the younger ones are zooming by. And parenting is like no other job you have ever done.
You probably can’t catch up with everything thats happening and meet everyone’s expectations. Forget your own. Something has to give. First its your friends, then its your hobbies, the things you loved doing, then its your parents, then its something else. But you don’t drop them altogether, you keep juggling.
When you are growing up, you have dreams for yourself. If you are a boy, you probably want to be Sachin Tendulkar or Bill Gates or both. You play hard, you have fun with your friends and scoot past your education. You day-dream of your success and plot your way to the top. You walk through the twenties deluding yourself, thinking its just a matter of time. At some point you realize that you are not going to make it. You suck at sports and you probably won’t make 0.1% of what Bill Gates earns, never mind your clever hacks. Reality gets into you and, suddenly, you are not what you were.
There is no template for the middle ages. The film stars go directly from age twenty-one to fifty-five. You grow up watching movies that idealize teenage love or make you believe that life is all good versus evil. Or you grow up reading books about detectives or spies or romance or magic. You follow sporting icons and bask in their reflected glory. The only time middle aged people are shown in movies is when they are strict parents to young protagonists and are always running away from their responsibility. So you are left with no role models. You are too old to be young and too young to be old. Life is not romance and illusions are, well illusions.
In this age you have probably made peace with the concept of dying. You realize that time has flown by and is flying with a greater velocity than ever before. Your pile of memories like the number of photos you have clicked on your phone, making you sluggish as you have to dig through a lot more files in your brain to pull out something interesting. You realize that things are not permanent, and the world was okay before you came and will probably just do as fine after you go. You realize that your name is not yours, it was selected by your parents, nor is your language, which your ancestors or rulers spoke for ages. Neither are your thoughts your own. They are a cocktail of your experiences and understanding and those YouTube videos. You realize that all they told you for so many years was probably just a sales commercial. You will fall one day and you better start preparing for it.
But your realize it was not always like that. Your youth was much nicer like a fresh cool morning with sun rays filtering in your room. You were carefree, yet you cared. You followed what interested you though you were conflicted with what society wanted from you. Grades was a silly game they made you play so that you could stay occupied. You promise yourself you won’t waste the evening the same way you wasted the morning, staying indoors when you should have been out in the sun.
In between all of this, you suddenly feel grateful. Grateful that it all happened. For a moment you forget your present maladies, you forget you faltered, you forget you were wronged, you forget the sins you have done to others. You realize that you are incredibly lucky to have experienced all of this. This is probably the only time you will see life as a whole. From the end to end. Its like that you are on top of a mountain that you climbed from one side and will get off from another side. The fog clears for a moment and a spectacular view appears. As you move forward on your journey, the beginnings will start blurring even more. So the sight you behold is probably a rare glimpse of the universe. You smile and you say thank you.
