I’m learning…
1: That sometimes your hands can say the things you have no words for.
2: That someone studied tears under a microscope and found that each tear is unique. Tears of grief look different from tears of joy and onion tears look different from all of these other tears. And I’m learning that when we cry our tears hold entire landscapes within them.
3: That kindness is only kindness in the absence of motive.
4: That certain songs tend to outlive certain relationships.
5: That there are people who stop and stare at the world. And these people can identify the many colours in the wings of a single hummingbird, they’ll find optical art in Bombay cabs and love letters in borrowed books. Keep these people close, they’ll find what’s best in you too.
6: That cruelty cheapens a good joke.
7: That connections are fleeting and incomprehensible, based on chance and mood and sometimes the number of glasses of wine and at other times a certain vulnerable ‘something’ that cannot be defined.
8: That
the Himalayas were once underwater,
and the Sahara desert was green
so how do opinions ever matter,
when nothing’s what it could’ve been.
9: That when you eat food cooked with care and find its caramelised onions, its hints of ginger, its touch of nutmeg and cinnamon — you are truly living the lengths, breadths, corners and folds of a moment in the present and past. The present of what has been made and the past of how it all came together.
10: That maybe there’s no one left in the known world who has never, ever been photographed.
11: And that maybe we are everything and nothing all at once.
Because when I see a close-up photograph of the eye of a blue whale, I find a glimmer of the universe within it. So much in our planet replicates the universe; the neurons in our brain form an intricate network exactly like the cosmic web of galaxies. And astoundingly, the cosmos is believed to work in the same pattern as the human brain.
And I know this can only mean that we may be specks in the cosmos but we carry worlds within us.
