I Like The Ordinary Life

2024-02-03

This awareness, this stopping to see something insignificant, the overwhelming desire not to look at my mobile for long moments - I sometimes think it’s aging which is doing this to me. The fact that I have seen a bit of life, of tragedy and joy, of the big events of life and some, and no longer wish for the large and the loud. Now what stops me are things which seem to happen in passing. A snatch of music, the stitching of a happy conversation, a stray comment followed with a comfortable silence, the sound of laughter drifting out from a st...

Now what stops me are things which seem to happen in passing. A snatch of music, the stitching of a happy conversation, a stray comment followed with a comfortable silence, the sound of laughter drifting out from a street-level window. Suddenly these seem important. Often, when my dad and I stand in his room’s verandah, and watch a decaying sunset, the rays reflecting in the three lakes in front of us, his arm around my shoulder, my chest swells such that it seems it will burst open.

I just know these are the things I will think of on my deathbed, and these are the things which will help me drift away serenely. So I am going about collecting these moments hungrily, as if there is no tomorrow.

Somewhere in our desire to see life only as movement from one high to another or as a remembrance only of the photographable, we lose sight of the infinitesimal, the mote in the sun-ray, the buzz of a wasp going busily about its business.

I’m just glad I’ve fallen in love with my common uninteresting unadventurous life.

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the preciousness of the passing moment -