I was staring down a valley with the sun rising.

When I decided to start on a new journey, I was staring down a valley with the sun rising.?

The sunlight was yet to reach the lower trenches on the valley and the rays played out a beautiful pattern illuminating a few patches and gently nudging the others to wake up to new possibilities.??A similar pattern was also running through my awareness. New possibilities that I chose to acknowledge filled me with a sense of hope and adventure and then there was this deeper side of my being that was habituated to my old ways of living, still refusing to wake up to the sense of hope.?

For long these two streams of thoughts had been churning in my mind, like waves of a stream smashing against the rocks in a fast-flowing river. I stand here today, post a series of such battles. Each coming with its own set of turmoil, upheaval, followed by a state of calmness, only to be later provoked by sense of anxiety of not have considered a certain element of the situation.??Then the cycle would begin again.??Again, an attempt to reconsider the calculus of my situation integrating newer insights and points of views.

These thoughts have a life of their own when it comes to how they battle themselves out.They start like a ravaging raid on a helpless village or town. You will feel a set of recurring waves of thoughts streaming in without giving the other side a fleeting chance to stand their ground. These thoughts overpower your senses and knockdown defenses of your concept about self. They thread out pieces of your conception of self, piece by piece. It's like, you find yourself ambushed by a pack of wolves, no matter where you try to run to hide from the anguish, these thoughts team up to block you out.

Then there is a phase of stillness, that follows. There is this unnerving silence that follows chaos of the raid. You can see smoke rising from burning structures that are left behind to smolder in the aftermath of an onslaught. You see the structures still standing but as mere shadows of themselves. You see your self sitting helpless but there is a numbness even to acknowledge it. There is this sense of disorientation mixed with emotions of anguish, pain and somewhere deep down a little flickering acknowledgment that you are still alive.?

Once the shock has passed anger takes over, it’s time to lay out a plan to avenge. With sometime to recoup and plan at your disposal, the onslaught continues but this time the target is one of their villages.??Thoughts of grandeur, sense of invincibility, a maddening belief in ability to achieve anything sweeps down, breaking down inhibitions, role models, norms and any suggestion or figment of thought that look to underscore your newly found sense of self.?

This is how these battles continue. Each raiding and ravaging the other. It’s not like, the style of their mutual clash will remains the same. There is learning curve and mechanism evolves. With exchanges and raids becoming common with daily experiences of one’s life fueling them, each side begins to anticipate the attacks. Each learn about the ways of other and begins to fortify the routes of attack, becomes vigilant and prepares to fight back.?

Taking stock of the casualties from the clashes in term of the weak ideological, factual or perspectives that fail to undo the other side, they upgrade the logical & emotional fodder. This dialectic process of onslaught evolves and with time we see a network of watch towers and fortification develop. Each side protecting and guarding the ideas they find central to their ways of existing. The fortification protecting these ideas become entrenched and fan out deep roots to cement the structures deep into the soil of our thinking process itself.??Now dislodging them even with series of onslaught from the other side is not as easy as pillaging a hut.

With fortification on both sides in place the brutality of the attacks continues with more vigor, but the sense of preparedness and own fortification lessen the impact of the onslaught. Emotions and our perspectives no longer swing to extremes post an onslaught for either side.?With these feelings of being prepared and being safe behind fortified walls comes a sense of calmness. A sense of understanding the contour of one’s being on either side. There is a sense of security that comes from knowing and being able to predict. The sense of familiarity breeds the grounds of this calmness and our sense of self but hidden under the mist of this calmness is danger.

The ideas that have entrenched themselves on either side begin to germinate and continue to build walls that become opaque and strong, littering our mind space. To dislodge them and to build a new sense of self becomes difficult with passing days.?While you would think that ideas making yourself see your being as good is a much-needed thing, it’s always not so. Similarly, ideas that threaten your identity of self by pulling you down, tearing through your mirage of grandeur and invincibility and not always bad. These fortifications while providing the sense of security and reducing our emotional & perspectival vicissitudes, make movement on either side a precariously slow process. The calmness brings with itself the crystallization of our self, with each side dauntingly hanging on to its territory.?

For most the crystallization brings a balance, but for those who want to go beyond their present in search of better selves, the journey becomes one of inching one’s way through the maze of these fortifications. A breakthrough to revamp can now be brought about by using very deviant ways from your normal ways of doing things. Be it for the bad or be it for the good. Luckily for the society, a good majority find a haven in this phase of calmness. They settle in for the ways that are set and fall into the pattern of norms and structure.?

For those who are not satisfied with their self, the process becomes like clawing you way up from an abyss. You constantly need to find ways to break through fortifications of ideas that are weighing you down. This is not an easy for our resources are finite in this world. While we choose to invest in breaking something down, we divert resources which could be used to build something up on the other side. These choices become a central point in the thinking of those looking beyond. You spend time breaking a few with all your vigor and then at times you divert your vigor to build something new on the other side. You find yourself in dark valleys fighting to make way for hope and then at times find yourself looking out from the mountain tops to find a locus of your being.?

Then you start again …… I was staring down a valley with the sun rising.