Thoughts on a winter day

Here is an excerpt from my latest book "Thoughts on a winter day" which is due for publication in September of this year.

"Each day that passes makes me sadder. Yet why should it be so? I have reasonable health given my age and afflictions, enough resources to get by, a loving family well settled in life, each with their own careers.

But lately a feeling of sorrow seems to permeate my entire being. There was period of deep depression when I would even smell the smoke from the chandan of the funeral byre and worry about how my family would handle the cremation ceremonies. Thankfully that period has passed but even then it seems I have become an onlooker of my own life. Things and events seem to occur outside my control.

As days pass I become more and more conscious of my mortality. Strangely even good new brings with it a tinge of unspoken sorrow. Why I don't know? Perhaps it is because I realize that I have but limited time left to enjoy the good news?

In the past I never thought of every piece of news in that context. But now. Strange. I look around and become conscious, perhaps overly, so of the essential transient nature of things and pleasures
Or  is it a feeling that gradually I am no longer a part of life of the daily struggles of people I love.

Advice I gave others now rings strangely hollow. It was the same advice Dylan Thomas gave to his octogenarian father, whose eyesight and general health were failing, when he urged his father to "burn and rave at close of day"--rather than surrendering meekly to it.

“Do not go gentle into that good night, 
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” 

Fight, fight I had told my friends when we discussed what we should be doing at the dusk of our lives. But then why was I myself falling a prey despair and despondency?

When I look around the only thing that brings a sparkle to my stride is the thought of my little grandson. Today I saw him jumping with joy, clapping his chubby little hands having outwitted his father--it was the purest joy and my heart stopped for a moment. How can I leave this behind how I ask you? The thought of leaving him, of not being able to see him is almost more than I can bear. Even a little glimpse his every day gives me a hint of eternity. So as I return to my humdrum life, these little snippets of joy serene keep me alive.

I remember that after my heart attack and the prognosis of an early death, I had prepared myself emotionally. I was sad but resigned. But now the thought of leaving wrenches my heart and I can barely breathe. Lately it has gradually dawned on me that it is these very little bursts of bliss and insight that truly give life it's meaning. A look at my grandson should convince me of the daily joys and new things to be discovered. I rarely saw him downhearted. I too could look at the world the way he did. I just needed to see things through his eyes!

So now in every column I search for that sudden illuminating insight or a revelation that captures some wisdom I may have normally missed. So writing each column also has become for me a voyage of discovery. it is this little insight that keeps me goings and which dictates my choice of subjects- from infants to old age blues, from new innovations in technology to fascinating social  customs. One cannot fight old age, one must learn to live with it.

In Longworth’s immortal words

“Whatever poet, orator, or sage

May say of it, old age is still old age.

It is the waning, not the crescent moon;

The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon;

It is not strength, but weakness; not desire,

But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire,

The burning and consuming element,

But that of ashes and of embers spent,

In which some living sparks we still discern,

Enough to warm, but not enough to burn. “

And yet as Longfellow says, “nothing is too late

Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.

Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles

Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides

Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,

When each had numbered more than fourscore years,

And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,

Had but begun his Characters of Men.

Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,

At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;

Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,

Completed Faust when eighty years were past.

These are indeed exceptions; but they show

How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow

Into the arctic regions of our lives.

Where little else than life itself survives.”

In any case, what choice do we have as old age

approaches?

“Shall we sit idly down and say

The night hath come; it is no longer day?"

Or shall we say instead that

the night hath not yet come; we are not quite

Cut off from labor by the failing light;

Something remains for us to do or dare;

    Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear;

    Not Oedipus Coloneus, or Greek Ode,

    Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode

    Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn,

    But other something, would we but begin;

    For age is opportunity no less

    Than youth itself, though in another dress,

    And as the evening twilight fades away

    The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. “

I  Inspired by the poet’s words and by my grandson, from on every column shall be a voyage of   discovery. And every day a new beginning. I will continue to search for new gems and insights in all I write.

So readers join me in my new voyages!"