A Lost Photon
These are my innermost feelings expressed in words. This piece tries to capture the awe of existence, the acknowledgment of knowledge of self during my early childhood. The title relates a photon, which is a fundamental unit of light, to a unit of conscious existence in the form of a human being. The below post may seem like a rant of a lunatic, pondering of a poet, musings of a maniac, stumbling of a child, introspection of a fool or a pure narcissist going on about himself.... Yes, it is all that and more. So proceed at your own risk, you have been warned!
WORLDS WITHIN
A Journey Begins….
...back in time when a child was born and was lovingly given the name Someone......
Though my remembered journey started on this spaceship Earth more than 40 years ago but it seems like the oldest memories of my childhood are already quite dusty and lost
somewhere.
To grope and search for them above the closet, below the bed, in the cupboard and finally finding them somewhere above and pulling them from afar throws so much dust on me that momentarily I forget the unstoppable flow of time.
The particles of dust gain a life of their own, shining in the varied hues of sunshine above my head, the photons infusing electrifying rainbows when jumping from one to the other, and me mesmerized seem to be immersed in a pleasant dream, an unknown reality of the once experienced, yet now forgotten, world, this same World which had been left empty long ago for time has moved, Earth has moved and I have moved on.....
Birth of Consciousness...
...the Self awakens
Standing beneath the shower of multi-hued specks, I absorb the ephemeral moment and I’m transported to the nights when I used to sleep under the twinkling night sky counting the uncountable stars on the roof of my parental house. Probably those were the first moments, when the "I" surfaced, thinking Who am I ? Am I the one lying under the wondrous night sky feeling the cool breeze brush against my cheeks then who is it who is lying here contemplating? Yet if I so desired I could still shut out the “feeling of self” by closing my eyes and dissociating my-self from that moment, "I" surfaced again projecting itself, immersed in water yet not wet, illuminated by light but not effulgent enough to radiate. The "I" recedes into blackness again as I lose to the physical sensation of cool zephyr. Probably I would have been 4 years at that time. Then again, the "I" kept a low profile but did keep surfacing again and again whispering inaudible sounds or placing vague clouds of thoughts in my brain. So I considered myself as Unique, different from others in my school, my class, my friends..... Quite narcissistic....!!
The textbooks did not interest me, yet I read all the books in my school library, voracious appetite for more, read anything or everything I could lay my hands on except the textbooks.
Probably the compulsion of reading the textbooks suffocated me and reading others was a liberating rebellion against the decided mores of the system. Searching for a signal, for something to happen which never happened or did it....?
The Moment...
…leading to The Quest happened when I was in my tenth grade.
One of my classmates got a book "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. I borrowed it cos he talked so highly about it and I simply could not resist. And was I blown away! The soft wind caressing my cheeks became a gushing thunder blasting off all the closed windows of my mind. A realization dawned that I was only as unique as any other human being on Earth; But just a little more aware than them. Their "I" had simply forgotten its existence, caught in the daily delusion of survival.... I committed myself never to let this Allspark die with suffocation under the daily grind of survival. there was somebody in the World, after all, talking sense, talking in my wavelength, talking in my frequency, and there would be many more.... I was not alone.
A path lay before me beckoning with open arms and "I" stepped on it. The inner turmoil and confusion still reigned supreme yet there was solace that I was not alone in my quest..... The Circle Completed.
You may say it is quite vague what is said but that is the limitation of human communication. It is too inadequate to convey the thoughts, the feelings, the overwhelming emotions which means the World to us and makes our Worlds go around, but these surreal feelings are only mine to experience and come what may no-one else can understand or live them.
It has indeed become a busy life when we are so short of time,
have even shorter breaths and in spite of that are always late.
Sometimes I miss the days gone by,
the beauty and charm of which I can never forget.
Very aptly Gustave Flaubert says in Madame Bovary:
"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."