Who among us can forget the teenage years where things like the first crush and hopeful dreams are hidden? Yes, but then again we lose our youth to gain adulthood, and the journey continues. There is though, a message that all of us should have inferred by now. The message is that with everything that we lose there is an equal gain. We lose infancy to gain childhood, we lose youth to gain adulthood and we lose adulthood to gain seniority. This is the norm of this planet and we have only to look around us to understand that for every thing that disappears from the face of the Earth, there is an equal measure of gain. Vice versa, for everything we gain, there is an equal measure of loss.
Let us look deeper into this nonchalant piece of wisdom. I have always felt that every action has its opposite, much like science, and every emotion, too has its opposite. We have to remain in a state of equilibrium for us to survive on this planet, for only things in equilibrium are allowed a place here. Have you ever felt deep loss when you've lost someone? Yes, death does that; it takes away someone who till moments ago was with us. It becomes difficult to accept the fact that someone who we had been habituated to having around us, is now but a memory. Look around you though; it will be evident that the law of equilibrium applies here too. For it is when we lose someone that we gain eternal memory of that person. In memory we have the freedom and the joy of perfecting our moments with that person. If any of you who are reading this has lost someone very dear, you will understand these words. Aren't they alive in your memory now? Don't they have that special place where moments with them are re-enacted? That special smile, that moment where both of you burst out laughing, that shared dinner which both of you had managed to conjure. Or, the trip to the hill station which turned out to be heaven. Yes, these are now gilded gold. They are yours for ever, these memories with your loved person. Loss is not the end.
It might seem that life is cruel, especially when we lose someone very dear to us but like everything, there has to be a gain. What do we gain after someone's death? We gain understanding, we forget the wrongs of that person, we gain gilded memories which no one can take away. I sometimes imagine an alternate world where the people who have left wait. They meet each other in that domain and they wait, watching all your trials and pitfalls on Earth and silently blessing you. Yes, for the emptiness created here through loss, there has to be a gain in another sphere where we meet again. We meet again after we die. This would seem to fit right into our musing where we had discussed that for every gain, there is loss and for every loss, there is an equal measure of gain. Thus, we lose this life but we gain all who had left the world before us. This is what logic would suggest but then, is the world logical?
If this had been a rational planet, we would not have hunger, poverty, illness, perhaps not even death. We have these, so this planet is not a rational planet but one which even great minds have failed to understand. In one of my reveries on life and death, I had imagined the human emotion of joy. If we were to hold the equilibrium axiom as true, then for every smile we gain, there has to be an equal measure of tears. This would only seem rational, given that we have called this musing an axiom. An axiom is a truth, a truth that is not fallible. So, do we have to be guarded when we are in complete bliss? I have often stopped in the middle of laughter and felt scared, not in a wrong way, but wistfully sad. Have you felt this too? Imagine a situation where you are with your favourite people and all of you are laughing; have you felt that tug in your heart and you suddenly feel wistfully sad? I leave you to reason why...
The writer is an assistant professor in NERIM Group of Institutions. He is a published poet with 5 books of verse available in platforms like Amazon. He can be reached at arunav_barua@yahoo.com)
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