Portrait of the blogger as a dissatisfied being

This morning on my way to work, while navigating the usual obstacles on a typical street in these parts  (cows, dogs, cow patties, dog poop, garbage heaps, humans  spitting, loitering, moving along), I saw two tiny women lugging two huge bags between them.  At first, I didn’t really look at what they were carrying. And then one of them dropped one side of the bag she was holding and the other set hers down to help her companion. That’s when I saw what their cargo contained – flowers. Fresh, fragrant,radiant yellows and reds looked ready to spill from the bags. The sacks contained blowzy red roses as big as small cabbages; rich yellow marigolds almost as big as my fists; tiny, clean white jasmine. It was the sight of those flowers that pulled me out of the funk that I’d fallen into.

I am not saying that my path to work in the morning has no redeeming qualities. It does. The temperamental  morning sun; the tall trees lining the road that sometimes perk up with glorious blooms; the morning hush (despite the idiot who must honk loudly on a relatively empty road); the whiff of incense from the temple I pass – these do alleviate the drudgery of a path often traveled. To be fair, it is more likely that the ‘oftenness’ of the travel has more to do with my ambivalence toward it than the actual path.

This has often been a problem with me. I go out of my way to avoid routine even if the routine is a comfort and even if the routine has a purpose. Let me make it clear here that I am NOT an adrenaline junkie. I like my adrenaline in moderate doses and occasionally. But I need novelty constantly-even if the novelty is constructed into a routine.  I remember attending a meditation session with a Buddhist monk at a monastery in Indonesia a couple of years ago. The one thing that he said that actually comforted me was ‘Nothing remains the same and everything changes.’   This morning it was the flowers that changed everything.  There was a time when I would have thought that those flowers meant something – was a portent of something wonderful about to happen. But now, they are simply a moment when something beautiful fell right in front of my eyes and made me forget for a brief instant the filth and the chaos that were poised trembling over the next instant ...

Flower power : Blue lotuses at the Temple of the Tooth Relic in Kandy,Sri Lanka.