057 - To Have Briefly
By October the reach of sky is complete. Everything longs for escape.
Today we end this third season of letters from bombay. There is a lot more to write but the in the crisp air of the oncoming winter, the eyes are inclined to see than tell.
On a flight recently I saw a small episode of a mother and son — young kid, perhaps 3 years old and a mother perhaps my age, maybe older. In the middle of the flight, after she had put the boy to sleep, she asked a girl on her side of the row to keep an eye on him and quickly went to the restroom.
As if nature just prefers drama the kid woke up precisely as she left. Dazed he looked around and other parents and the girl next to him try to assure him, answering his yet unasked question. That seems to scare him more. He got down from his seat and sat on the aisle looking both ways. He walked towards the first class and all of us who were concerned shuffled in our seats nervously, he was safe but what exactly does one do? For a brief moment he slipped into the curtained space ahead and we all skipped a mild beat. It took just some seconds but it felt a lot longer than that for us.
Meanwhile mother comes back and is scared before being puzzled looking at the empty seat, lasted perhaps a second but I could see it in her eyes. Just then the boy came back and was visibly in tears; crying he runs towards his mother and jumps into her arms. Took a while to calm him down.
I kept thinking about that scene the whole day. A few weeks have passed and it is still vivid in my mind. To have briefly witnessed the episode felt reassuring in more ways than one.
Our rationality is necessary for our collective progress, but it is in our irrational moments that we truly find our humanity.
All our art is made when we irrationally ask what if. At work, I am mandated to ask how to get a bunch of professionals find their creative sparks again. And one morning a video came my way, an old video really, and on a channel that teaches mathematics - the very language of logic and reason. And in it Eddie Woo asks his students to think of maths as to think deeply about simple things. To first ask a series of whys till you don’t find an answer, and then ask what if.
I think all creativity, ingenuity and solutions come from the well where the answers to these two questions hide playfully, waiting for us to climb down and lift some strange rocks against all pervasive logic. That the living of life is to irrationally find something interesting and seek its truth deeply.
We need to keep our eyes open to find these brief moments of fleeting interests and hold on to them before logic and reason blinds us, and our senses distract us from going deep into them. We shouldn’t let them go. As that little boy in my flight now knows, even tiny, brief seconds become big when all we care about something, someone, deeply.
This picture takes me back to another long drive, to a lake that we never got to- "even tiny, brief seconds become big when all we care about something, someone, deeply."
Twelve weekends of looking forward to a daak, thank you for another season.
Happy Birthday! :)