2009

It has been a year, a little more actually, that I wrote anything on this blog. There have been moments of inspiration, of tepid insights, moments when thoughts have been there, waiting to be transcribed into e form. But those moments passed…with me having done nothing. Except procrastinate. And make the usual excuses of course…of too-much-work, too-little-time. But the truth is that I have found a strange reluctance to do anything non-essential this past year. It is the usual norm to indulge in indulgent year-end reviews, but my review of my past year can be summed up in a short sentence- ‘Did not feel like doing it’! No excuses for this, but the end result is that there has been a sophomoric kind of status quo maintained at the end of the year. Have not gone forward and nothing has happened to be termed a backward regress.

A lack of ambition has been the defining characteristic of this year. Not ambitions in just the narrowly understood sense, of achievement, success, accomplishment, but in a broader sense of aspiration... the desire to even want to want something of value. I have aspired for nothing and, consequently, have attained nothing.

Is this strange, this reluctance to seek, desire, crave? It possibly is. And it definitely will pass. The desire to ‘DO’ will undoubtedly be re-born this coming year. Till that time, I will luxuriate in this unbecoming calm. And turn my thoughts to the elegance of ‘English August’, to put my condition in perspective:

“I don’t want challenges or responsibility or anything, all I want is to be happy— . . . He wanted to say, look, I don’t want heaven, or any of the other ephemerals, the power or the glory, I just want this, this moment, this sunlight, the car in the garage, that music system in my room. These gross material things, I could make these last for ever. . . . I am not ambitious for ecstasy, you will ask me to think of the future, but the decade to come pales before this second, the span of my life is less important than its quality. I want to sit here in the mild sun and try and not think, try and escape the iniquity of the restlessness of my mind. Do you understand? Doesn’t anyone understand the absence of ambition, or the simplicity of it?”

I understand !