A Mountain and a Thousand Questions

A week ago, around this time in the night, I came home with a head full of thoughts and a strange quiet in my heart. I was trying to fall asleep. I knew I had to wake up to reality at some point. A reality far from snow-capped mountains and the clearest of skies one could fall asleep under. I was coming back after a week in the Himalayas. 

This was supposed to be a soul-searching trip, a trip that would find me in the greatest revelations of my life, a trip that would help me figure everything out, once and for all. It wasn't. It was tiring and exhausting, the 12,000 foot climb. I returned with a nearly frost-bit toe and my body was struggling a bit to get comfortable with the sudden change in temperature. I almost couldn't breathe normally for a day in the office AC. To cut a long story short, I didn't quite find my soul. Not just yet. 

For a week, I kept a note open on my phone in order to write something. I wanted to write, not because of my almost non-existent writing prowess, but because of the number of thoughts and questions I was trying to dissect and understand. I kept asking myself why I had to go all the way to a mountain to find peace. What is it about the mountains that should help you figure your life out? We're quite strange, us human beings. 

We tend to deal with our shortcomings, pain, insecurities in so many different ways. Mostly, we tend to our ego and think that if the ego is happy, we will be happy. We let people praise us, we let them tell us that we we are beautiful and intelligent and so capable. And if they don't, we tell them. We show them our fancy degrees, our pay checks, cellars filled with cars, limitless friends, our parties, our sarees, our shiny salon-groomed hair, those diamond earrings we bought on a whim, that restaurant bill that we proudly, entirely pay even when offered to share, the brand new phone, our houses, our juniors at work, the cash in our pocket and everything except the story of our souls. 

May be that's why we want to find something away from our seemingly real lives. Something that distracts us from everything we have been distracting ourselves with. A getaway? May be that was why I had packed my bags and left for the mountains. A place where nobody could see what I was trying far too hard to not show. 

A week passed. A week of staring into the Himalayas and sitting in the snow in the middle of nowhere and trying to understand the strange dichotomy of silence and chaos. I had heard the most wonderful and truest thing the other day - "There are no little events with the heart, it magnifies everything. It places in the same scale, the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove; and almost always, the glove weighs more than the empire." I finally understood this, every word. No matter how irrelevant the mountains made me feel, it was the smaller things in my life that made the mountains seem insignificant. 

For another week, I waited for all that to sink in. To finally make some sense. 

And then, out of the blue, it hit me. I was stuck in the noise of my life. Like a submarine under water. I was struggling a bit too hard to get out and find my way. To find solutions. To fix my problems. To deal with pain. And there is no getting away. This was MY submarine, my life. What I had forgotten all the while was that every submarine has a periscope. I did not need to travel that far to find my way. I only needed to find my periscope. All I had to do was to stick my head out and keep a watch. Just like that, everything changed. Everything made sense. Well, almost.

Now, your periscope might be different than mine. But do find it. And when you do, even under all that water, you might find a new direction, or a few moments of queit, or a tight hug from a friend that will always come in abundance or even just a new song. Through that periscope, you might find life itself. Or yourself.