Beautiful things of the past, make me wander around the streets to look for the things I saw within me a few years or decades back. I believe we are stuck in a timeline that we do not want to leave but regretfully have to due to our imaginative needs of watching life grow and a person in society evolve through change. However, growing thoughts in our minds make us think that have we even wanted that ever?. The gust of wind makes me recapture moments from the past, the past that gets around too often. Usually, we often associate the past or in contemporary the nostalgic moments in our pretty or petty life however we perceive it to be. The imagination brings forward a tape of moments it knows when to play how to play and most importantly when to stop. I wander around these thoughts today when I write this little piece on my encounter with them.
The other day, while heading to the office, I observe a couple on the streets, where the beautiful lady is taking care of a man who seems not to be doing so well. The comfort a hand brings to running eyes is what we crave when we feel alone, or feel that gust of wind doesn’t seem flirty anymore. The beauty that we miss and crave is in observing the normal things in life. The emotions and passion these little things portray are what we need today. When I was a child, coming back from a nonstop day at school portrayed my performance for that day, but the appreciation always would be to be in the arms of your loved ones. The moments make you take a pause, a pause which makes me realize that maybe you are taking this too fast, maybe I am going further away from the child I am.
During our school days, post the school got over, we would wait inside the bus so that everyone can come and the bus leave in a few minutes. However, the hustle that we enjoyed was looking for that man who would make candies on the stick outside the gate of the school for five rupees. The old man would come most of the time every day not knowing that his struggle and performance bring happiness in this person’s life every day. The candies were maybe not the best if given today, but they were the tastiest and only candies I would have if given again, not just because of the candies, but because of the sense of duty that fulfills the old man’s act in this society, bringing honest value to life and happiness.
In the duty of being an actor/ performer in our daily events, we sometimes forget how important it is to be in the audience or in the crowd. My sense of realization has not come yet, whether my acts fulfill the peace or stability I seek in life but it does bring to me acts of the crowd to observe, fulfilling the need to realize the normal things in life. The old man while he swings by can see people around him running while he also observes the high tide of the sea, in his imagination he perceives that the days have come when chaos and solitude function together, the combination which always exists. The gust of wind flirts with him while the chaos is chaotic, yes, to kick him back to stand straight while he is hungover on the unconscious imagination of solitude.
Many years have passed before his eyes, events which have brought happiness for him and events which have been a downfall. However, he achieves the strength of awareness he has gained as the years have passed. He walks on the streets having his eyes on the silence and the chaos. At the end of the day, he sits down while holding his stick, looking at the eyes of people like me, who adore admiring or crave the need and sense of happiness he brings. He runs, he plays, he struggles for the gate but he observes the part of life we seek to observe all these years.
The need is for us to understand which old man are we talking about? What are the needs I fulfill in someones else’s life and the way I observe, in a constant motion of duty as an actor or in the ambiguous peace around me which makes me reflect upon the sense of observance through the act of another. “The old man we are is the one we imagine in situations contemporary and immediate, the need is of both, but who”?
The strength that we ignore is that there may be someone else observing the role I play for years and they perceive what my sense of happiness is. I crave to be an actor, but I wish I was the observer, even more, eyes on eyes with my truth and lies, bowing down to difficulties, hunting down the problems, the feeling of settling down and looking back in the mirror observing my eyes as they shiver with comfort. The observance of everything that I seek while I enact is what I need.