Days and Nights: Or How You’d Like to Spend Them

Days and nights do not ever remain the same. The harrowing thoughts and unfounded fears do not just go away. Finding the time to play with a dear child of your own never happens. Your ideas of pure, simple, inexpensive happiness never materialize.

You are left wondering whether all this is what you were put on earth for. Sometimes you beg God to put an end to all of it and permit you to live a simple rustic life, like you have always wanted. Does He oblige? Ha!

Worries and problems galore would be exciting enough, even satisfactory. But hell no! You cannot have that. You have to do things that others dictate to you. It’s not as if you’d allow them to do so. But it is also not for you to stop any of it.

Your days and nights wither away in the scorching sun of the need to earn. Would you not love to just live off what your fingers can create? Hell knows, you’d live off charity if you could only be rid of the endless dissatisfaction.

A mundane existence – the occasional gadget, the rich food, the mindless commutes, the same old conversations – it’s quite the mind-numbing experience.

Billions of people all around but not a true friend in sight … thousands of rupees in the bank but never enough to purchase that sleek laptop (!) … a loving family back home but hardly a soul to speak to unless you want to try your hand at sycophancy … over 35,000 kilometers of car travel but only 400 of them memorable enough … and to think that you are so comfortably placed in life, you almost have it all.

Your days and nights are more precious than all the security and its attendant comforts can ever measure up.

You want to make a bid to reclaim the life that you have always wanted to live.

You want to sculpt some days, grow plants and trees, tend your own cattle, take the cows to graze in the morning and return with them at dusk, play gilli danda, street cricket, shoot basketballs the whole day, read philosophy and literary criticism and movie and play scripts, record poetry in authors’ own voice, build a tree house, live in a coconut leaf hut by the sea, go exploring into the mountains, hunt and forage for food – and peace of mind …

and live humbly in God’s own care without pretending that you could, in the least, be responsible for your own lot …

immediately exposed to various dangers but never pining for safety

suffering pangs of hunger every day but never going without a meal

owning next to nothing but having the world at your disposal.

— Not for you the artificial remedies such as pain killers, laxatives, soda, and aspirin.

— Not for you the artificial air of the AC

— Not for you a life among strange strangers

All you want is a few glimpses of the best that Nature and Life can offer … All you crave is a few months of an idyllic, pastoral life and … then … long slumber.

Tell me, dear reader, have you ever found the time to think on these lines? And if you have, can you share some of your thoughts with me? Click the following link to answer a poll question: How are you positioned in life?

Glory be to thee!

For thine alone is the decision

To God’s asylum flee

Or murder soul bits with precision.