Post date: Nov 6, 2013 10:36:10 PM
It is challenging to observe our-self, the kind of life we are living, and how slowly we change. We are the best critic of others, and we observe the lives of others better than our own. ...but once we observe a 'similar life,' Like a mirror, somehow we also see and compare it with our own lives. It can also be a movie, a story, or someone living a similar experience. I feel I observed life in some parts of India better when I visited as an outsider after a long time, not on vacation but for a somewhat longer time. There was nothing that I didn't already know, but I felt I "saw" for the first time what I already knew.
Recently, I lived with a very good friend for a few days, and I observed his life. He is such a good friend that there is nothing that I didn't already know. But what I saw was... a routine and monotonous life. ...a day in life repeated again and again. Waking up with alarm at precisely same time, preparing tea and breakfast, getting ready for office, calling home, catching same bus and train every day, same people at bus stand, in those buses and in streets, wife waiving hands from window, wife calling at exact same time to ask if he got the bus.. and so on. I don't know what was missing from a perfect, happy life. But I felt the monotonicity and stagnancy. I felt what I wrote long back if life is like a lake; it is better with waves than a calm one. I tried to see how a new day in their life is different from the previous day, and I was unable to see anything. Weekdays were passing with work and waiting for weekends, weekends worrying for next week... even they talk similar things again and again!
Then I thought about my life... isn't it more or less the same? ! Aren't most of us repeating the same day again and again? I remembered the movie 'groundhog day.' I wish I can re-examine my life and start living the way Phil does after a point in the film. Well, I want to re-examine sooner than later and without trying to commit suicide, as he does :P