Journal: The Peno-pause
“I spent a lifetime in a garden one afternoon.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough
The year starts with the usual vigor to wrap up last year’s poetry reviews, leading to the curtains on Ponder 2023. I haven’t put together the pieces of my writing that would make the book, but I know it would be one of the most exhilarating endeavors I would have undergone. If you know that there is a bit of gardening to do, and therefore, a bit of gardener in you — where you can till the soil and smell your hand — the smell of dead foliage with the living little creatures in it, including the earthworms — those ugly looking nymphs that are angels — you would realize that you are holding the universe in your hand. A fist full of universe. I haven’t paused through last year and tilled the soil or smelled the roses, but I want to do so this year before I endeavor to put the book through. This is unexpected, for life takes a little corner most unexpectedly, and there awaits something — somebody who has been the missing piece of your life.
Then, a door opens and another shuts. In that moment, I walk in and out of my past, and into the future. I find myself alone again — that familiar feeling. The moments of imaginary intimacy go away, and then finally, it is the time when I realize that I have been doing the thing that I love most — writing. But this time, I pause.
I usually have long breaks without writing, mostly due to work priorities. But the urge is to get back to writing because I don’t like to see empty pages, and there are too many stories to tell. But it has been a while since I have stopped along the way, and read my writings. It is not a bad idea, for sometimes it is great to look back to starting point, and then traverse the path. It won’t take long to reach where I am at present.
I wrote my first blog — my first ever coherent piece of writing just a few days after the person’s birthday. My ‘laziness’ was not exactly laziness, but a homonym referring to this person. I may not mean much to the person anymore, but here is proof that started my journey. The missing ‘T’ is metaphorical, yet, it turned out to be literal. Now, almost 13 years later, I have discovered the missing T, and I want to enjoy the company of laziness. If the blog took me back to ‘more than a decade’, this blog should take me forward from here on.
I remember showing this to this person, and she was dismissing at first, and concerned later that the shadows of the past have crept in. But for the darkness of the shadows to flow into the blackness of the letters in my screen, is the magic which I have created. All that came to a pause when the person appeared back in my life — still with the same confidence, smile, and grip in their life — but, this time, with a key. A door opened. I peeped inside that door.
I had my version of this person, but on that day, the whole thing came together. I saw their perspective. Honest, straightforward, and without a mince. The missing pieces came into light, fitting into the pieces I held on, like a jigsaw. Then, the door was firmly shut, and this time, forever. We went there, up to that point when things ‘could have been different’, but we also knew that things cannot be changed.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
The guilt and the unknowns of the past are behind that door. The enigmatic pieces of history in my life have gone. Now, a new door opens. I hold this door, open and firm. It is the entrance to a new place, a whole new world — a still, deep pond waiting to be stirred. We decide to dip our toe, we don’t know how deep it will go. One toe, and another. It could lead us to a place where there is no right and wrong, and that is where we want to be. The greys are coming, both on us and in us.
I don’t want to write about this anymore, let us call it the peno-pause. The blog that started about this subject on August 21, 2011, now comes to a logical closure.
‘August 21, 2011 — March 13, 2024’. What a journey it has been.
A little piece of us
That we all want
Lies there somewhere
That makes us
Incomplete again
In an otherwise complete life
Like the moon
Searching for its shadows
A dash of lemon
In a pot of honey
A glint of sunshine
On a crack in the glass
And the joy of that search
Taking you places
Back in time
Forward in life
And…
The joy of the unexpected.
Let me now pause, and enjoy this moment. I want to cherish this till the final epitaph appears on me.
~Ashok Subramanian, Bengaluru, May 14, 2024.
