Life Is All We Have

The world exists for me because I exist here. The world will continue to exist for me as long as I continue to exist here. No sooner than I am gone, nothing else will matter, what goes on here.

Being of reflective disposition, I did ponder about the origin, the continuity, the end of life, pretty often, these eternal mysteries which capture our imagination. However, today I was having a closer look at MY LIFE, my space in the endless scape and my role in it. The reason being a narrow escape earlier in the day and I have lived to tell the tale and I would want to tell the tale.

I was incidently in Connaught Place, New Delhi, where an explosion ocurred. Since we Indians are relatively new and unexposed to such incidents (a legacy which we are unlikely to pass on to our future generations), our responses are primordial, instinctive, untampered, untempered by learnings that are imparted to people who have to encounter it pretty often. What surprised me was my absolute lack of response..for a couple of seconds, the moments that demarcate survival or perishness, I was stunned, numbed and frozen.

Jolted back to my senses with the chaos around, I still could not decide my next response. As if the cognitive mechanism had failed, my abilty to decipher, to interpret my surroundings and act had left me. Almost absent mindedly I followed the crowd, which obviuosly enough didn't have any plan of action either, following their own instinct towards exit, to avoid getting extint.

It took some time before I could be coherent again and decide for myself. The only thing that was on top of my mind was to get out of the place, like everyone else was attempting to.

It was on my way back that the frigidity inside me thawed and what followed was an unending chain of thoughts. Once I had spoken to my near and dear ones, ascertained their locations and safety, my thoughts returend to myself.

How easily it could have been curtains for me or for anyone else who was unfortunate to be present there and fortunate enough to survive. The trauma of having witnessed the incident, having shared the agony and helplessness of everyone around me, the relief of having survived, the reassurance of unscathed fellow travellers on the way back, was too heavy a mix.

Then my mind went back to the split second just before I heard the explosion. I had been thinking of something so trivial as the shoes that I had just bought and how would they fit me..and then blank.

All the world with its riches, its myriad offerrings, its immense pleasures, its innumerable problems could not have matterred aymore. They matter only because I am here, because I am alive to see them matter. In the truest sense, life is all we have...nothing else matters.

Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.