Fears and lurks!
shadows & shapes change but never leave
This is about fears and lurks.
More like the Dark Forest on the edge of Hogwarts. Or like the areas near the Burning Ghats in your village - where you were asked not to go when it was late in the evening. Or like the feeling you must have had when you stepped in a yo first-rate restaurant for the first time ever. Or the feeling which you got on the night before the dreaded JEE paper.
Now I don’t know if the above mentioned situations make any sense to you - yet I exactly remember how I felt in the stream of the moment. Kind of gooey in the tummy, adrenal in the feet, you could feel your breath - those kind of things tbh!
And as Mr. VJ James told me in my middle school - time flees. All things aside, I am now a grown up, married, rushing through the early 30s and run a small business which I am turning into big and heavy.
Still every once in a while that feeling comes back - it starts with what if this is all going to make no sense at all! What if the chosen path is not the path I should have chosen - all those Robert Frost kind of things. What if the spices I picked for the chicken is adulterated. And million other what ifs. And amongst those what ifs, these fears and lurks come back - as if it was just hiding in the dark, waiting for its change to prowl. Anyway!
How often do you wake up in the morning and feel that there is a train you might miss? Or that you are on the railway platform and the train is snaking away - and you are running with your trolley behind you, the wheels jumping and jangling once they hit the uneven tiles on the platform?
Or that you happen to fix yourself a coffee, had a sip and opened the morning daily and come across a news related to something untoward - and start thinking about finality, meaninglessness, rootlessness and what not? Or that ‘do heck with it’ - this is not working - you should be doing something else?
Some of these fears are fleeting. They come and go. Some of these fears are products of past choices. Some of these fears are figments of imagination. Some of these fears are off-springs of placed/misplaced hope. Some of these fears are constructs of reality and unpaved path. And then there are some which are born out of your own doubts.
I am not sure which of these are to addressed first. To be honest, I can’t even sort them.
And then there are lurks - lurks remain constant only becoming more real and animistic. It is like that dream where you are riding a bike in full speed only to crash in a large body of water or that dream where you witness a torture or something. Sometimes the lurks are like that feeling of popping of ears when on a flight. Or that sharp thing you feel when undergoing an acid reflux. You just know that it will come back. Anyway!
Overtime I am realising that the only thing to fight against is time. It is the only game - yes it is multiplayer, often multi stage and with variable amplitudes. This is not a complex metaphysical thing, it is simple to be in and tough to play.