4 AM (In bits & in pieces) - Friday musings.

4 AM on a Friday is usually a time when it is too early to get out of bed & too late to turn in again.?So I slip back under the covers & wait for the alarm.

I’ve grown to love the math of making time for time, and witnessing the arrival of the day’s probation, where inside those dark minutes lurks an extraordinary suddenness. And a lot of accountancy. I start debiting for the lost .And I try crediting for the found. Yet if I get up & sit down with a paper and pen, I can’t match it back. Or explain. I begin . I fail. I smile. I stop. I start. Again. And again. I close my diary, leaving a few blank pages. That’s my way of simplifying. Of organizing and auditing it. For, the joy of living life can never really match the expanse of thinking of it. Or the insanity of making it. In my own way. In those unwritten pages. I make. I stare. I sigh. I break. I start. Again. And again. I let go of the hour I didn’t want. That crunching stroke of the watch and the irresponsible flip of the calendar, when the last blip of sand would sob and get lost forever. That was a moment not mine. I redo my hour . I reset the chime. I steal back a new moment from time, and stow it away for good ,as mine. I settle back into my new riches, my moment from a stolen lifetime. I breathe. I rise. I love. I live. I start. Again. And again.

?I know of course, the absurdity of this. For, in an hour – It’ll be dawn. Soon I’ll wear my mask & step out. But this holy hour is mine, where between presence and absence - I sometimes meet. Myself. In bits, and in pieces.

?Because, in the world of 4 AM, one plus one always equals one. Here are some 4 AM thoughts of mine. Do comment & let me know some of yours.

• At least one day in your life, the person you became will come face to face with the person you could have become. Make sure you can look the person in the eye & shake hands with a smile.
• Youth has this scattering effect on time, where one discards the present and imagines a favorable future. Not yearning to touch perfection or eternity , but embracing the holy ordinary and creating endless opportunities within it to draw magic from. Somewhere along the way, we all become rational slaves to expectations and give up on magic. Somewhere along the way, we all become strangers – to each other, and to ourselves.
• Only in youth can you be so free on your own. Later, time shrinks up. Especially for the heart.
• When we’re younger, we look for signs of strength in people. When we get a little older, we observe moments of weakness in them. Strengths define personalities. Weaknesses expose the character within.
• Always make time to read farewell letters written by people who are leaving a workplace. Every person is a hero of the story they imagined for themselves when they were eighteen. In those last words, you can get to catch a glimpse of that hero, minus all the baggage you may have had accumulated about them during your fleeting association.
• Every Orpheus gets stuck on an Eurydice. We’re all born with customized holes in our hearts.
• Maybe Kafka got it wrong when he said that each of us is a cage waiting for a bird. Perhaps, we’re not sure if it is the bird we crave for, or the cage itself.
• Trust is the biggest deceiver of them all. All our lives, we crouch behind a self-created wall of trust, giving and asking for trust. And all it takes is a small crack for that flimsy wall to give in, for good. The first brick takes the longest to sway. Thereafter, it just gets easier and easier. Something like walking in the rain. The first drop always stings the hardest.
• Age twenty – where all your music gets archived. Too scattered to collect, yet too frozen to melt in a lifetime.
• On music, again - There is music you can reach out and touch. And then there is music that exists beneath the surface, and you need to submit yourself into it to extract its treasure. Like Jazz.
• On music, yet again, the only way to forget a bad song is to stop humming it – and go suddenly very quiet.
• On silence, like someone said, in the history of the language, silence was first ?obscenity. Have you noticed that some silences get thicker as you grow older?
• Like Linda Pastan once wrote, the happiest days in your life were the ones you hardly noticed, the ones where so many promises were made that it hardly mattered if a few were broken, where your parents still hovered in the background as part of the regular scenery, where the kids were either asleep or playing while you probably were sitting on a porch sipping coffee & the news of the world rumbled on in a faraway land, too distant to reach you.
• Once you cross an age, life becomes an almanac of loss. Bit by bit, things start getting taken away from you. Your strength, your vitality, your hopes, your ideals, your convictions, your meaning & your Gods. Soon, this consistency of losing becomes your new ordinary. Of course, you try to look for replacements in imposters . But they never work. You just carry on, permanently halted at the core, while your periphery would keep moving . Something like those Indian wheels of fortune.
• Memory is a funny place. You don’t really get involved in creating it , but it shows up at unexpected quarters, with such unprecedented ?clarity that it unsettles you. If, whenever something shows up in your memory & evokes a sense of loss, you were at fault. If it doesn’t, it means you were not.
• On reading, always read a book twice. The first time around is to grasp the book - it’s central theme, the core narrative and the objective of the author . The next time is when you unfurl its layers – subtle nuances, the gaps between words, and so many other things that you normally miss during your first reading.
• On reading, again - A good way to to read a novel is to read the last few lines of the book before you begin. Gives you an opportunity to guess the beginning of a story from its end. Something like looking through the wrong side of field glasses.. The best authors are not ones who grab you with their beginning, but ones who linger on in your consciousness with the way they end a book. Try eavesdropping into an author’s final words before you read his/ her first word.

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My books,, 'As You?Life?It', 'Life-ing it' ?& 'Once upon a someone', are available on Amazon in your country.

Disclaimers -?1. Please read this article for its essence & not the particulars. I mean no disrespect towards any person, gender or community ; 2. My articles, blogposts & short stories may not have a relation to my day job.