There are as many different people in the world as there are expressions; each expression - consequent to some thought, settling on as many numbers of faces as it may on another set elsewhere. Situations could keep changing while people would essentially remain the same. Their reactions and approaches to a problem just as varied as they are similar.
It’s amazing, that in a sea of faces, one could watch and decipher the lives of perhaps a million - go back years and places! Position another set of faces there and you could still chart their lives, in another time, another place, with another set of props around them; lives remaining the same – a package of time leading them into the same joys, sorrows and the same ambitions (or the lack of it) but nevertheless, just the same patterns of growth; the same predictability amidst a crowd of unpredictability. And yet, one couldn’t stop watching them!!! One can watch them for hours, from roof tops, verandahs, at a traffic signal, in the market place…anywhere and they would all be the characters of a single play - changing as if only in cast, costume and colors – moving towards a single climax, losing as many heroes and fighting just as many foes. Such unfathomable entertainment in their predictabilities!
Watch them from somewhere and you would live each one of those million lives in a short span. I have watched them too, moving towards their day of work, speaking with their companions, conversing in silences, hands and legs moving towards the rhythm of an order, mind elsewhere, and eyes cautious yet trying to address emotions left behind!! And I have drained my energies over them too, fighting their battles for them, feeling their sorrows, wondering if they chose the remedies I chose in that situation – stories unfolding before me, while on my balcony, sipping on my tea, or my coffee, my hands stealing from the mug the warmth that remains.
I compare them to the rain, or the mist or then the heat of a humid day – as natural, as unchanging and yet as unpredictable in the next droplet, or the shape it takes as it touches the ground, or the motion of the ripple, or even the ease with which it vanishes into the banks of the puddle. The nature’s unending quest for harmonizing the contours it builds itself on, harmonizing it in colors and feel.
Man couldn’t be too far then. And yet I fail to understand how we got here - simply getting by, going on in a direction not of harmony, but that of an undetermined lethargic monotony. We have dithered from what we were naturally born into. There is more order than we need around, more pathways echoed to get on to, more chores we have imagined needs doing than necessary. Because further than the mindless and bored beauty in watching people pass by, there need to be lessons that talk of going a step beyond ‘getting by’, more spirits to acquire strength from, more to look inside oneself and find one’s own truth, more that calls for individuals before teams; so that achieving would mean more than the order designed by the jargonized text books and limited visionaries of the day.