Hitchhiker

I wasn’t like this always. I was usually an early riser. I would wake up by five in the morning. After the morning chores I would go about searching for new vistas for my eyes. The vast expanse of the sky and the earth would never fail to surprise me. I would wander until the time that I was left with none and I had to rush back to complete my duties of being a father of two and a husband to one.

Today I was behaving very strangely. I was watching the roof of my room for a long time, well awake and wide eyed. Some days ago I had gone through such a state, as part of training on meditation. It was called gazing. Looking at one spot for hours together and wandering within your mind till you drew a blank. I felt that I was non-existent. But on the adversary, my teacher had been stating to the few of us there, that it was a state of inner-consciousness. Even now I still don’t understand. But, drawing clean blank, I enjoyed those moments. Easily said, reaching that state I understood from my fellow pupils, was the difficult part.

Today, it came in very easily. I had happily allowed myself to gaze for a long time, I can’t say how long it had been. I really didn’t feel anything. Very similar to that meditating state, this time, I wasn’t sure whether I was breathing. It began with very light hearted thoughts of jokes with the young ones in the family of the previous days. I was thinking about every one, near and dear. Turn by turn, taking time for details about each. Then, digging deeper, thoughtfully plotted on what lay ahead for them. Slowly, moving above, and trying to make sense of a larger design in their co-existence. During all of these, I didn’t know why I wasn’t thinking about myself. How much time I had spent that day brooding over these thoughts, perennial and never seem to end. I understood that I was appreciating the Grand Design of things around me. Along came in the fear of being alone. Like a child, I wanted to have someone beside me, who could see what I was seeing. I was waiting for a long while. To my dismay nobody came for my company. The child in me wanted both. The thrills of this experimenting experience on the one side, some company who can relate to what I was going through on the other. I wouldn’t mind if such person would dismiss all of these as wasteful wandering. Yet no one had come.

I continued to gaze the roof above. I wasn’t really seeing anything. I realised, I couldn’t feel anything. There weren’t even sounds, smells. Slowly, all those images of the dear ones melted in vast expanse of deep blues with intense darkness. Abyss – of another kind, neither had a beginning nor an end in sight. Feebly, very far away, I could hear someone say in a faint and weak voice, ‘Hitchhiker – he was, would now be gazing at us from the skies above or wandering in another world’. ‘Gone in his sleep.’

Something dawned in me, I’m now gazing the light.