a wish to be forever young

Lost as always I am, in a whirlpool of thoughts, some coherent, others eddy, discrete and diverse. Don’t know why these random thoughts even occur. However, this phenomenon, the triviality has been along forever. How can I forget those numerous trivial topics I used to discuss with my friends? We used to stand on opposite sides of the gate in front of my house, every evening after the day’s cricket session during my school days. We spent hours at tea shacks late in the nights during examination time in college days. While I recollect those days, I am still able to see my friend standing across the gate at dusk, or sitting on wooden bench under the gas lamp at tea shop. I recollect how much involved we got into such topics during those discussions. But the topics somehow may seem very unimportant to me now, in my present. I rekindle some of those topics now, when alone, and the maelstroms of thoughts take over, often leading not any further.

My manager had an interesting way of explaining this deadlock of thoughts, in a kind of technical approach. He said, thought processing progressed like a flow chart, branching to different 'YES' and 'NO's. However, different people traverse in this flowchart differently. Some prefer to mostly traverse along the YES branches. Few others encounter mostly the NOs. But in my case like a many others, he says, we tend to move either ways and at some point down in the flow, get into a indefinite loop of YES and NOs into some complex algorithms ending up with a ‘Not responding’ message from our limited ability processors.

Tracing back two nodes above in this flow of thoughts, to the trivial thoughts; thoughts about people we see, some whom we remember in our cherished memories, some whom we may forget due in time, a few who inspired us, thoughts about events unanticipated, decisions we had taken etc, all these thoughts perhaps are not really trivial and unwarranted.

I try to get into a new pool of thoughts, and try to evaluate the former in a new perspective. I try to understand and reason some patterns in my thoughts. Some thoughts seem be directly coming from my memories or stimulated by them. Some seem to be related to my aspirations, ambitions. But there are so many of them, I am unable to classify so clearly. I place them into a third category which I assume is what we call the Present. A Present, that must help appreciate and evaluate the past, and bridge past to the future which is shaping up in my aspirations. But these thoughts of the third category rarely stay long. Some of them are so exciting, interesting and apparently important, but hardly last. Why don’t these interestingly important thoughts last longer? Or, are only the ones that last, actually important?

This uncertainty reminds me of a few lines about a lonesome young man, by Forester, in his ‘A Passage to India’ – “…his belief in life to come would pale to a hope, vanish, reappear, all in a single sentence or a dozen heart-beats, so that the corpuscles of his blood rather than he seemed to decide which opinion he should hold, and for how long. It was so with all his opinions. Nothing stayed, nothing passed that did not return; the circulation was ceaseless and kept him young…” That can be so relieving!! It is normal. It’s a symptom of youth. A part of growing up (or a signal to those like me, who are yet to grow up :o) )