Joys of fishing in a bathtub

Illustration from 123Greetings

Simple things can give me heights of joy. Small things can move me to depths of grief too.

A draught of whisky with a fistful of cashew nuts can drive me crazy enough to hum a romantic song. A good book can enthral me till its last page. The little girl waiting at the door of her classroom in the morning with a smile and a greeting fills my heart with a vigour that sustains me for a long time of the day.

Life is full of small delights. Life is full of bigger disappointments. The small delights are life’s compensations for the big disappointments. Can joys surpass sorrows in human life? My experience doesn’t vouch for an affirmative answer.

One of the questions that someone raised rather casually and that gripped my fancy for quite a while was: Did Jesus ever smile? Later on, I replaced Jesus in that question with the Buddha and many others of the religious-saintly type. I could never imagine a smiling face of any of those religious personalities. They knew, I believed and still do, that human life was essentially a sorrowful affair. If you take life seriously enough as they did, your smile will vanish too.

I don’t take life so seriously. So I can smile in spite of the disappointments that visit me with relentless loyalty. I have been a staunch follower of Albert Camus’s view of life as absurd. One of the jokes that I have repeated with unfailing zest belongs to Camus:

An inmate of a lunatic asylum is sitting with a fishing rod beside a bathtub. The hook is in the tub. The psychiatrist is intrigued enough to start a session of counselling. He asks, “Hey, Martin, are they biting?” The lunatic responds instantly, “No, you fool, this is only a bathtub.”

That’s life’s absurdity, Camus argues. I know I am that lunatic trying to fish joys in the fetid water of life’s bathtub. The awareness makes me smile. The awareness makes life’s disappointments bearable, if not amusing enough.

This brief reflection has been engendered by the latest topic at Indispire: Share any recent happening that has sparked joy in you. #SparkJoy. Okay, let me share one instead of being very generic. A text message I received yesterday from a former student who was responding to my last blog post, Lost Sheep, sparked an extraordinary joy in my heart. The message went thus: “I admit the fact that u spread peace to everyone which I used to feel during ur class and every moment I spent with u sir… Ty [Thank you] for all those wonderful memories… Miss those days… Keep on spreading ur magic to the world…”

My classes are a world apart from my blog posts and so those who are not familiar with my classes but read my blog may not really catch the essence of the message above. I caught it, obviously. It gave me a spark, a much needed one at the time it came. Sometimes, the bathtub does give fish.