Wishing Away The Past

Wish I could relive my childhood. Wish I could taste those summer mangoes again. That bliss of licking my fingers, sitting in front of that old khus cooler, watching those world cup matches on that tiny black and white TV ..magical. It can go on and on.Wish I was in college again and relive all those canteen moments, class bunks, late nights, gossips, rumors, and misadventures. Wish I could relive the celebration of landing up in my first job. The training, the first salary, first shopping, first flight back home…Oh this feels magical.Do we notice that our selfish and pleasure-seeking minds naturally take us back to the wonders when we want to dive into the past? We keep revisiting those high points. But what about the ebbs? Let us not leave the unpleasant behind. It is either all or nothing. If ever it becomes possible to do time travel, the totality of experiences will have to be rerun. One leads to the other. Happiness to sorrow and vice versa. Failures to success and reverse. The beauty of completeness lies in the black, white, and grey. Nothing happens in isolation. Let me not overlook the “dark” days hence.Coming back to Happy Childhood. How can I leave out those high fevers, school tests, morning risings, and exam madness? How can I forget all those times when I had thundered “let me grow up once, the world will see what I do to it. Let me escape this kid zone asap.” And the college, the less said the better. Those heartbreaks, encounters with life’s insecurities, compulsive competition, and the dark truths of life.And after those initial euphoric days, even that first job started itching. Not to forget the dumb clients, funny appraisals, never-ending client calls, wasted weekends, and house hunting expeditions.Time to be back to the present. What did I achieve by this ride into the past? Am I already dead? Is there nothing meaningful or engaging right now that I have to, again and again, pick and choose some random moments from the book of the past? This nomadic mind is doing me no good. Not a time to see the dead. The ghosts are buried with the fairies. If I am alive, let me play again. Let me taste those mangoes again. Let me find some life in today’s life. For I can’t recall any page which I would like to relive completely. Let me leave this travel to another day – when the body is frail and the limbs don’t obey. If there is nothing in the present there is nothing in the past. If I survived the past I’ll survive the present. If it is to end, let it end by the virtue of me writing those pages, mere reading is too passive. If there is no happiness here, it was never there then. Signing off with a Mahabharat quote:-“What is here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere”. Let me be alive. Time machines can wait.