Friday, July 26, 2013

Renew, Regrow, Reboot.




There are moments in everyone’s life that define and pave the path to his or her own personal quests. Instances that change who you are or sometimes even bring out what you really are deep inside.

Eight years ago, on an idle Saturday I walked into The Crossword store in Bandra, Bombay and as if destiny was pulling me, for the first time in my life I entered the travel section.
It was shouting out to me with its 1500 pages – The Lonely Planet India. In a trance, I picked it up, closed my eyes and opened a chapter – Pondicherry.
I read with awe, it was the first travel guide I was reading despite having had family holidays twice a year growing up.

I remember distinctly, getting out of the store, calling my parents and telling them, I was going to Pondicherry, alone. I presume they must have thought I’m bonkers. I never gave them a chance to tell me that.

All the biggest decisions in my twenties were made on a whim and a call to my parents. Something that has changed in my thirties. I am much more guarded and analytical today. 

The trip to Pondicherry was no ‘Eat, pray, Love’. I didn’t find peace, my inner self or a soul mate but I became contemplative, self-assured and quiet. I loved being alone with myself; I enjoyed my own company for the first time in years. Most importantly, I discovered how traveling made me feel. Nothing has felt as joyous than travel ever since that trip. 

Since then, I have taken several trips alone to different parts of the world. I still pick a map, close my eyes and choose where I should go.

In a few days I embark on a solo trip to Holland and The Czech Republic.
That idle Saturday afternoon comes to my mind as I prep my camera and my travel bag. Each day, each trip since then has been a different kind of journey; I have evolved and changed in both negative and positive ways – as a traveler, as a person and as a woman to reach a point today where it all seems to begin again.

This time I pack my bags with things and also with a few years of toil, questions, arguments, answers, regrets, guild, resentments. I pack them all.

It’s time not just to visit another country and meet new people. It’s time to let go of some extra baggage, go back to the whim of that Saturday eight years ago. to meet the person who had that whim, once again.

It’s time to shed every thing that adorns my soul and begin again.

To renew, regrow and reboot.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Stardust


Change doesn’t happen in an instant.
It’s a process that has its own course.

If you step back in the middle of the process to look at the imprints of the journey, you see the beauty of evolvement.
You can map out the troughs, the peaks; the etchings made permanent with tears and silent vows with yourself that pushed you to reach this far.

Each process of change has an end that is the beginning of something new. Something that will remain fancy at least for a while until the waves of transformation twist the hands of destiny and change your life once again, for what will seem, forever.

I see an end now, I can see light so close that I can almost feel its glow around me and feel the warmth in my bones.

I look back to see the various layers I have shed on this path to transformation.

Bits and pieces of my skin entangled and engraved with guilt, pain, pity. 

I see myself far, far away. Is it really I? Or is it a version of I, I cease to remember?

As I adorn this new skin, all shiny and bright, I pass on some light to that woman standing far away.

Someday very soon when I will touch this glow, she will become one with the light and burst into a ball of energy leaving stardust into a time, when I was her. 

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