To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Monday, October 29, 2018
 

Aane waala pal, jaane waala hai,
Ho sake toh ismein, zindagi bita doh,
Pal joh yeh jaane waala hai
(The moment that is coming, is about to go,
If possible, live your life in it,
The moment will pass anyway)
 
I always feel a wave of nostalgia when I listen to this lovely Hindi song. It makes you think about the fleetingness of time ever so poignantly…makes you want to stop time in its tracks…but then  you realise that you can’t….and time is flying anyway…all you can do is to live it to the fullest.
The funny thing that happened when this song was playing in the background while I was washing dishes a few days ago (yes, that’s my time for listening to music!), is that I felt like I actually registered the third verse for the first time (though I have listened to this song gadzillion times)…. It goes like this:
 
Ek baar waqt se, lamha gira kahin,
Wahaan daastan mili, lamha kahin nahin.
(Once a moment fell from time,
There I found a story, the moment was nowhere to be found)
 
I have been reading a lot about ‘time’ from a sociological/philosophical perspective these days. I never really thought about ‘time’ in a theoretical sense before or the fact that what we refer to as time in terms of clock time or calendar time is simply a human construction of time. In reality there is no such thing as ‘time’ at all… what we have is just fragmented recollection or memories of events. Which is why we remember a lot of things not so much by the day or year they took place but in connection with other events or other things that we remember. And even past/present/future are not three separate buckets…like this song so beautifully puts it… the moment that is coming (which is future) will become present and the moment that is present will become past almost instantaneously… Also it captures the theoretical concept of ‘time’ so well when it says that a moment once gone cannot be found as a moment at all… but in its place may be a story or event to serve as a reminder of its existence…
It seems to me that all good art is born out of a deeper or philosophical engagement with ideas… no wonder then that even these simple phrases have such depth of meaning and insight…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 6:31 am 0 comments
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