Thursday, November 25, 2010

Scrapping the paint....

Back in Delhi and the two weeks have been faster than life in Mumbai. Clearing the mess at home and getting into the new job seems to be taking a toll on my mind. I complained to myself of not being able to think and look at the mundane things in life with an acute perspective. I thought I lost my wistful lenses and found them as the mess in my home cleared.

As I stood at the doorway watching the ready to paint walls of my room there was interplay of unflattering colors on the wall. The painter had scrapped the old coat for the new paint to last longer. I couldn’t imagine my room was green sometime back or even purple and my mind raced back to the memories associated with each previous coat. I obviously couldn’t remember the details but some thoughts surfaced to make me smile. The house I was trying to fix felt like home.

All of us have several yottabytes of memory from our lives. As we tend to experience more things we “scarp” a part of the memory to accommodate the new one. The unflattering colors may be retained but are hidden with a fresh coat. Good or bad-it is all in the wall.

While “scrapping the paint” we uncover the part of our life we lived and triumphed. Some of us look at it as comfort…I know I do. It is comforting because it is the familiar territory. The criticism, the praise, the smell of the fresh paint has been dealt with. Change sometimes can honestly be a pain in the ass. Sometimes you like things static and it doesn’t bore you to have it that way.

This year has been incredibly twisted. I have had my best and the worst moment the same year. And it’s all a part of the wall (quite literally because of Facebook). When you can’t hold on to things and pray for them to remain static you discover the freedom of choice- to pick the color of your wall.

So with the New Year being right ahead my static self will pick up the paint brush to coat, un-coat.