A Journey

Illustration by Copilot Designer

The weekend carried me far. I travelled by Kerala’s state-run buses to a place 250 kilometres from home on Saturday and back home on Sunday. I was going to attend the wedding of the daughter of an old friend. A few other friends were coming too. It was going to be an old pals’ meet in a way.

We, the pals, lived under the same roof from 1975 to 1978. We were teenage students then. Now we are all in our mid-sixties. How much has life changed us? I was curious to know that. Life had transformed me in ways I wouldn’t have imagined back then. What about them?

The bus journey became quite bumpy and rough as I crossed Trissur and moved towards Kozhikode. The highway was being broadened. A lot of work was going on all along and the dust rushed into the bus prompting me to cover my nostrils with my handkerchief which became a mask. I closed my eyes too. The bus moved on and my mind moved inward.

I have already reached the last stage of personal development in Erik Erikson’s framework: age of 65 onwards. This is the time when people take a retrospective look back and feel either satisfied with their own life or regret the bad choices and missed opportunities. My bus journey was taking me on that retrospective trip.

I did make a lot of wrong choices in life. Committed a lot of blunders. I knew it could, my whole life could, have been a lot different, a lot better, if I had kept my ego under control.

But I have not ended up in despair, as Erikson argues. I have learnt to accept me with warts and all. I underwent a lot of changes in the last few years because of the self-understanding and self-acceptance I gathered somewhere on the way. I learnt that regret made no sense. I learnt that falling is part of the journey called life. What matters is whether you continue to lie in the pit and whimper or get up, wipe off the filth, learn the lesson from the experience, and get on. I did that second thing though a bit late in life. The earlier you learn to do this, the happier your life will be.

I learnt it all rather late. Never mind, I tell myself. Life is actually this: a series of blunders and subsequent learning of lessons. I was a good learner in the latter part of my life. That has made all the difference. A good learner has no ego hassles. He doesn’t judge others; he tries to understand them.

One of the sentences that helped me change my attitudes was this: “It is God’s omniscience that helps Him to endure the sorrows of the world.” It’s from a short story of Francois Mauriac. The protagonist is a self-proclaimed ‘man of letters.’ The title of the story is that: A Man of Letters.

This Man of Letters is a modestly talented writer with grand ambitions of literary fame, driven by his ego and desire for validation from the Parisian literary elite. He doesn’t achieve success, however. He neglects genuine human connections, including his family, to pursue his aspirations. Bitterness and disillusionment catch up with him eventually. In the end, he is left alone, surrounded by his unappreciated writings, a symbol of his unfulfilled dreams and wasted potential.

I could have ended up like that man, feeling bitter and disillusioned with my mediocre writings. But I didn’t. I accepted my mediocrity. I accepted me for whatever I may be worth. Because I had stopped thinking about myself and started looking at others, like Mauriac’s God who is a perpetual learner. Omniscience is the readiness to learn perpetually. And learners don’t regret; they make decisions and move on.

My bus made its final halt in a prodigious cavern which is what Kozhikode KSRTC bus station is. I managed to find my next bus which took me to the lush green village of my friend. This part of the journey was like an anticlimax: from the dusts of development to the serenity of the village.

I spent a long evening with my old pals. The drinks kept us in good cheer till about 2 am. We recalled those old days. Without bitterness, without regrets… Age had mellowed all of us though in unique ways. Probably we have all been as good learners as we could, moving on towards divine omniscience. And serenity.