I had been wanting to re-read Papillon for a while now. There was a quote in it about judging; rather, about not judging. Something that Papillon tells two other escaped convicts when they inform him they had killed their mate. I don’t recall Papillon’s response verbatim but from what I remember he said he was in no position to judge them because, after all, he hadn’t been the one in their situation.

As I type the above line, I recall something related but entirely different now. Decades ago, when I was a restless teen going through a long string of crushes, I once asked a friend (though I don’t remember in what context but it could have hardly been anything other than heartbreak), “What would you do were you in my situation?” She laughed uproariously in my face and said, “I can never imagine myself in your situation.”

Well.

But back to Papillon. So anyway, I started reading Papillon last night and I reached the bit in which Papillon, Clousiot and Maturette arrive in Trinidad … as free men … Two sentences caught my attention and I take them to be messages from the Universe, something I needed to read right then.

“What intrigued the charming ladies most was how we planned to remake our lives. Nothing about the past; only the present and the future.”

“We must forget the past and think only about the present and future.”

And along with the reading of these lines came the realisation that chief among the myriad things about the past that keep weighing me down are all my unrealised desires, my unachieved ambitions, all the happenings and events that hadn’t unfolded the way I had envisaged and hoped for … And now as I look back to my scattered dreams and aspirations for some guidance on what to aim for (or avoid) in the future, I think I want to focus a little more on the simple short-term endeavour of writing one post after another, one word next to another, without the restrictive definition of a long-term goal or vision. The blogging equivalent of taking life one day at a time without getting lost for too long in the whimsies of the past or fantasies about the future …

And why does it have to be about something extraordinary? I shan’t lay claim to any niche. I am no expert. I am not an avid traveller. I write the occasional poetry but the word to be underlined here is “occasional” and I have learnt the hard way the untold perils of foolishly believing that I’d somehow be happier if only I could spend more time doing more of what I love. I am no parenting expert (despite my vast experience of two years and counting as a stay-at-home mum of a solo child). I have zero art and craft skills. I know nothing of pets, so no funny cat videos or dog videos are likely to emerge from this fragment of the cyberspace (though I do hope in the years to come by, I can facilitate for D a childhood with a dog for a companion). I can’t cook to save my life but somehow I have been whipping up a variety of healthy meals and managing to keep my little family of three well-fed and alive … that doesn’t make me an expert though.

Which means, all that I am really left with is the ordinariness of everyday life …
The humdrum and monotony of everyday-ness, records of the disappointments and not-so-great stuff to cut through the jubilant highlights that crowd my FB feed. The long-winded, reflective prose that is the anti-thesis of Twitter brevity.
Words, words all around, and not a picture to post on Instagram.

For snapshots do not an entire story make.
Moments of triumph and achievement and accomplishment are only brief punctuations that mark the profound poetry of life … points in time that call upon us to reflect and wonder, to look around and ponder …
but the bulk of life lies in the middle, in the days that appear dreary and slow and in which nothing seems to happen,

not in the twilights and daybreaks but in those afternoon lulls when babies nap and bees hum over flowers and butterflies flutter their wings …

not in a painting ready to be hung nor on the canvas when it is spotlessly blank and full of promise but when it is mottled with colours, a patch here, a splotch there … seemingly disparate, disconnected, a colourful mess, the final picture far from revelation, and who knows if we'll even get to the final destination …

not in the moment when we first pick up the violin and marvel at the veneer of the wood and the tautness of the strings, at the shine of the rosin and the fineness of the horsehair on the bow, nor in the moment when we play a tune flawlessly, but in the endless hours of practice in which the violin only wants to bray and our fingers just won’t move swiftly and smoothly over the strings and it seems impossible we could ever transform such cacophony into something mellifluous …

not in the beginning of the story, surely not in the first sentence, no matter how enticing or gripping, and certainly not in “The End”, but in the middle, in the thick and gloriously messy middle when the future is still unknown and the past makes no sense at all …

not in the moment of falling in love or losing a loved one, but in the routine of waking up together and starting yet another morning afresh even if only to spend the day apart at work but to come back home for a quiet meal … and to do this day after day for months, years on end … with as much love as can be held in two beautiful hearts …

not in the discovery of a pregnancy nor in the birth of the child, and not in that moment of teary-eyed departure, the moving out of home moment, but in all the days in between, through all the diaper changes and nights of fitful sleep, through all the emotional roller coasters of growing up, of living, of discovering another being and rediscovering oneself …

It is only in the writing of all this that I am able to see how ruthlessly I had been assaulting life, mine and that of my loved ones, by trying to picture it as a string of great moments, focussing only on those beads of extraordinary celebrations, wanting to rush past the empty lengths of string and looking for more beads to add to it and hide those ugly, drab gaps of grey, whereas even the string has a whole lot of beauty to offer if only I would permit myself to open my eyes and behold it … without any expectation of all that is yet to come … without any longing for all that is long gone …