Palladian (II)

My shoulders felt heavy in a picturesque setting on a spring evening. A sudden, long exhale surprised me, and I said to myself, not here, not now, not like this. Do I want to open the Pandora’s box I have been avoiding to examine? What I have been, what I gave back in return, what I meant to others, and how I treated myself looking at a mirror. These deliberations were folded away in the corner of my mind but suddenly bubbled up like an old, faithful geyser. I realized the odds were decked against me to define all these.

It is a miracle, nonetheless, that my quivering life with unanswered probes has now allowed me a little respite under a jacaranda tree with beautiful purple flowers. The feather touch of the chilly spring evening breeze on my soft, wrinkled, aged skin is too comforting to welcome aches and pains—physical or emotional! Drenched in wonderment, I hushed my anxieties, shut my eyes, and lay on a patch of grass. Oh, if you could only see my delight!

Many clock-ticks later, I reluctantly opened my eyelid and noticed a sense of authority or ego dictating how things are or ought to be around me. But when I futilely fixed my stare on a bundle of fluffy white clouds, they disappeared every moment I blinked, never to find them again. In an “Anupol,” they morph into a new shape or completely disband into the vastness of the sky. If leaving or disappearing mattered to the clouds, it became a riddle in my ideal mind. Perhaps their daily lives were an endless cycle of apathy followed by aspiration. The wind always waltzes and elopes with them towards the faraway mountains, leaving me and all wanderers with the fallen purple smiles of the Jacaranda flowers. The soft petals were once part of the tree, so did the abandonment diminish their significance to the tree and the ground they fell since everything is connected in kinship with an invisible loop of a season?

Or were there messages in the clouds from angels telling the observers that the purpose of life is not to search for a specific meaning or find absolute answers? Instead, we are to seek and create unique life experiences, like a memorable tune or a tango, based on our character’s gift. However, each of our perceptions of what we gaze at differs. What I see drawn in the clouds during the daylight or the faint traces of stars at night deviate from what you could imagine. If we were both here under the Jacaranda tree this spring evening, we would be correct about our perspectives of the hue of blue or Payne’s gray sky. Only briefly! Until the cloud and sky say goodbye by covering in the shawl of darkness or the stars are drowned in brightness. The changes are an invariable daily event. That is what they do and always have done: the stars’ luminosity darkens, the breeze warms up, and the clouds change shape. Nothing remains unchanged. The land beneath our feet is constantly altering its topography, however minutely. What we can touch, smell, or hear is fleeting at a blinding speed. We are not the same individuals we were yesterday, nor will we be the same tomorrow. As we change, so does our understanding if we are mindful of the world around us. It is a good thing, perhaps the best, for it allows us to mature.

So, we can only leave journals and vocabularies of our experiences for fellow travelers, hoping they will extend the track we have traveled. Any other exertions to find an absolutely perfect conclusion or the end of a “finish line” will nowise benefit anyone. Though our voyages are unique, we reach the same destination: a point of no return, a threshold from which we can no longer return to the reality we are so used to living now.