Soliloquy

The new year is upon us, and there is no better time than now to reset, rejuvenate and reflect on how far one has come, while defining intentions and markers. A fresh start, a clean slate, a blank canvas – these are all ideas, illusory or otherwise, that appeal to man’s sense of purpose. For there is no such thing as a promised land; even that promised land must be earned, and each man is his own saviour after all.

And what a man takes from those who came before him, and leaves for those who come after him, becomes the only legacy worth leaving. Such heritage, as may be contained within the pages of glossy magazines, offers no sanctuary to the man to whom the Self has become paramount, and who no longer lives on the peripheries of society, choosing not to abnegate his responsibilities, but to incur the wrath of his fellow men, whose sympathy and understanding he was never to expect.

Such a man cares little about what society asks of him, or the laws that his fellow men may consider to be the ‘ultimate’, for he has tasted the nectar of his own spirit, and knows that nothing can salvage his tormented soul more than his own grip on himself. The man who knows himself needs no friend to commend or criticise him, and once he crosses the boundaries of acceptance in a society wrung deep in the hollows of materialism, there is no going back.

The man who remains constant is the one who changes and accepts himself the best; he is the only one capable of embarking on this pilgrimage of coming back to himself. For he has earned the right to relinquish – not renounce – the wasp-like fancies of his fellow men, to whom all that matters is what can be seen, and not what can be sensed, and begun his journey towards enlightenment. After all these years, he has found his Banaras, Bodh Gaya, Mecca and Jerusalem. Once he is seduced by it, he is hooked for life.

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