time

Receiving time.

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I am not busy. I am relaxed. I am working but I am also receiving Time.

Feels like a renewed relationship with Time.

After decades of chasing it, I am ready to stop and enjoy it in all its fullness.

Yes. The present Time is uncertain. Even ‘interesting’.  But it is ours. Yours and mine.

To live in, live through and live to tell the tale. Live well.

Create and claim small, simple joys.

Here are some things I tried-

Candle light in every room.

Bask in the glow. Notice how you slow.

Be a hopeless romantic and

Dig out some books of poetry, old and new.

Maybe create a card or two

For someone who loves you

with silk ribbons, floral fabric and sticking glue?

Write a long love-letter to you

From your higher self, not as a ‘parent voice’,

But as a compassionate friend.

Make cinnamon, raisins and apple stew,

Have it with great dollops of double cream.

One … or two.

Find a picture of yourself when you were 5.

Look at it. That’s the real you.

Find a perfect frame for it and

Share it with those who want to know you.

Last 12 days have been a break-through.

Si and I have finally started to enjoy Scrabble,

After 10 years. And 2.

Now, we are a proper couple. Woohoooo!

Treat yourself to flowers.

Repot some plants.

Tend and nurture them

And your soul. Pay attention to sunsets.

Watch ‘Out of Africa’ again.

Or ‘Modern Love’ on Amazon.

Listen to Dido or Norah Jones. Breathe

Create a sacred space.

Yes. It may sometimes feel like the world is falling apart

But keep yourself together. Informed, connected and centered.

Enjoy your time. And your company.

It’s a boy!

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4th May 2018

It’s not a tranquil lake. It’s a torrential flash flood and it’s fast approaching. It’s coming towards me and I am putting up a big fight but not winning. I am being pushed towards it by the boulder of time. Another turn of the wheel. The approach is a rough zig-zag path with exhausting ups and 3G downs, jagged corners and innumerable pot-holes. It goes thud-thud-thud. My brain hits the hard inside of my skull multiple times as it comes closer and closer. Am I going to hold my breath when it happens?  Am I going to be submerged for longer than I can hold on? I don’t know how to swim and my limbs are pathetic. What am I going to do when it hits?

6th May 2018

It’s here – the 24th birthday of a man-child who didn’t reach his 21st. It’s a blessed day. A happy day. But it doesn’t feel that way. A painfully long weekend filled with his absence. A trip to the local park. An ice-lolly. Carrying his djembe around in the sun like a mad woman as if it’s my baby. Baking raspberry, pistachio and chocolate brownies. Holding back tears all day. Being with ‘it is like this’. A visitor. A long evening. A nice meal. An enormous hole. Massive nothingness – a vacuum that my love wants to get into but there is no way in or out. It’s sealed like a submarine.  Not a drop of water or a molecule of love can enter or leave. The void sits in the middle of my living room. My life. Starving my love of all expression. Suffocating me.

7th May 2018

It came and went. I lived. But I am not getting anywhere. I want to be someone I am not while accepting everything as it is. How can these two positions be compatible? It’s like being night and day at the same time. Not dusk or dawn – they are too serene. Do I have a realistic hope of ever getting there or am I delusional?

Does unconditional peace exist? Apparently, some folks have experienced it. I have too, for brief snatches of time. To have it as a native state of being – unblemished, pure and vast consciousness. It seems unachievable. But they say it’s possible. May be. Some day…

(Buddhist teachings by Ajahn Anando: ‘Knowing in the present’: https://www.amaravati.org/speakers/ajahn-anando/page/2/)

 

Day 984

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arms

Wonder what Saagar would have made of Brexit. He would have wanted easy access to France. He was a die-hard Francophile. He loved the intricacies of French language, food and wine, girls… He wanted to work there at some stage, to practice his French.

Trump would have been extremely amusing and concerning for him. I think he would have had fun making a cartoon character of him and imitating his mannerisms and speech. He used to mimic Bush Junior a lot, to our great amusement.

He would have had some strong and interesting opinions about gender  identity politics and ‘safe spaces’ in Universities, which mean different things to different people. I was told that in his first year at University he volunteered as a student counsellor for LGBT students but in the second year he withdrew from that role. Did he not feel well enough within himself? Was that an indication that he knew something wasn’t the same?

Burning Middle-East, migrating populations, global tensions, towering infernos and erratic climatic phenomena – I wonder what he would have thought of all these things.

The passage of time is dragging me away from the point when he was alive. I grieve the widening gap between then and now. That time is receding further and further away like a very low tide. Physically, the current keeps flowing in one direction – away. Mentally, it dances, twirls and circles, touching many points over the past 24 years and gathering up as many gems as possible, folding them neatly and putting them away safely, to be revisited again and again and again… What if I forget everything? What if it goes too far away and then disappears? What if I can’t touch that time ever again?

 

Day 900

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Nine hundred days! 

I didn’t think I would make it this far. I vaguely remember Day 100 in Pondicherry. That seemed like ages already. This is unbelievable. I couldn’t fathom how I carried on at that time. I still can’t. So many days have passed without him. I still hold on. Not one moment has passed without him. I still mourn. 

Making each day count, working through the pain, celebrating the good times. Excavating words to express feelings that can’t be spoken out loud. Dissecting through ‘stuff’ with fine forceps, making sure nothing is damaged. Connecting. Realising that the colour of blood is the same for all humans everywhere. Hunger feels the same for all. Bones are a shade of white for everyone everywhere. Shame, courage and love are experienced in the same way in Lebanon and Syria as in London and New York. The pain of loosing a child is universal too. Indescribable, potentially unsurvivable. Yet, so many of us survive. 

I wonder if he’s counting days too. Does this mean anything to him? I wonder what he would be like at 23. His birthday is coming up soon. I wonder how we would have celebrated it. I wonder how time will mould itself and me as time goes by. I wonder if any of the lessons that need to be learnt from Saagar’s story will ever be properly learnt and implemented. I wonder when my silent inner screaming and constant frantic searching will stop. I wonder if he has an exact duplicate, who will bump into me one day and things will seemlessly go back to being how they were. I wonder how long his friends will want to stay in touch with me and talk about him. I wonder.

Nine hundred days. Unbelievable.

Day 848

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calabi_yau_formatted-svg

Three centuries ago, Newton thought that reality had 3 basic components: time, particles and space. This model didn’t explain everything. Soon other forces that govern movement of particles came along like electromagnetism. Photons, gravitons and gluons emerged yet the essential ingredients of reality remain a mystery.

To explain gravity, Einstein merged space and time into a composite, space-time. Michael Faraday added the concept of a classical field that carries forces through empty space. Quantum Theory showed that all mass and energy are really excitations of underlying quantum fields. Quantum fields and space-time are incompatible, so perhaps there is a more basic component hidden beneath.

In the late 1990s, String Theory was proposed. I don’t understand it fully but basically it says that elementary particles emerge from the vibrations of one-dimensional strings. Therefore, an electron is not really a point, but a tiny loop of string. If it oscillates one way, we see an electron. If it oscillates in another way, then we call it a photon, a quark, or a …

Julian Barbour, a British physicist believes that space and time, united by Einstein must be uncoupled. The only way to define space is to consider it as the geometric relationship between observable particles. He argues that the universe is a set of possible configurations of the 3D geometry of space. He believes that these configurations or ‘snapshots’ exist in a space of possibilities. Time is not real but merely something we perceive – an illusion that comes about because the universe is constantly changing from one snapshot to another.

Spiritual masters have been teaching the concept of everything being an illusion for thousands of years. Physics seems to be catching up.

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
– Albert Einstein

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