Monday, November 26, 2018

If Life is a game of 'Snakes and Ladders', for me most of the Snakes are my Anxiety 

Anxiety is a disorder not a disease,  it can't really be cured. One has to learn to live with it and work around it, try to tame it a little so that it doesn't hamper your day to day functioning but the fact is that its there, it's never really gone. One needs to be mentally prepared to deal with it when out of the blue it raises its ugly head and goes out of control because in such a situation you can't tame it you just need to be strong enough to bear it and survive the torture. It's like a game of snakes and ladder just when you think that over the years you have mastered the art of controlling stress, anxiety will be there like a snake ready to swallow you at 99 and take you back from where you started. The key is to know this might happen often and you will have to start again from scratch because the snakes(anxiety) will always be there they are not going anywhere, you might be able to dodge it at times but at times they will get you. 


Monday, November 5, 2018

Eyes are windows to the soul but it was a window that made me see through her eyes!

That little window which opens to a view of a dumpster has infinite stories and memories attached to it....stories of that summer afternoon when the little me was sitting by the window, eating a mango and I fell off the window screaming and crying and my aaji rushed towards me....stories of little me waiting at the window for mom to come back home from work and running towards her the moment I saw her enter the lane....memories of the same little me looking at the window with a grumpy face and giving angry looks to my aaji because she made me go to school with that annoying gurkha every day (not sure what was more annoying,  the school or the Gurkha).... And when little me grew up the same window had the same aaji waving 'hi' and 'bye' every single time I went home - yes aaji's  house was always 'home' and my home was 'eksar'.
As I grew up I lost the child in me who understood the happiness of waiting at the window to see the first sight of your loved ones walking towards you but she never lost that excitement, aaji was always at that window everyday waving at us with the same enthusiasm.
With age we think we can look at life more logically, saying ok to doctor saying 'she has 10% chance of survival',  ok to the fact that she is very old, ok to the fact that it's the best time for her to leave the world for otherwise she would suffer but all that logic crumbled when I looked at the window and didn't see aaji waving at me. I didn't care about what the logic and the reality was, I just wanted to see my aaji waving at me through the window.
When they were taking her away from me forever,  I ran up to that same window to wave goodbye to her and the first time I saw what she saw through the window. I had never understood what she felt when she kept waving at me all her life until I was there at the window waving goodbye to her. Aaji liked sitting at the window with a view of a dumpster for hours and I didn't get what beauty she saw in it. She didn't see the garbage, she was just seeing people she loved walking towards her and even when they left she knew they would come back soon and she would be there waiting for them at the window.