Journeys and Destinations

Practically all through my life I have been known as the chap who walks. (No, no the man with the mask and a skin-tight body-suit, that's the GHOST who walks.) It can get tiresome (NOT tiring, tiresome) really, like during those times in Delhi when I used to walk 8 kilometres to office every day. I used to reach office drenched in sweat and, every single day, there would be someone who would ask me, "Is it raining outside?" and expect me to be in splits. It is stretching a sense of humour too far to be expected to find the same joke funny day after day after day. Except, of course, on the days on which it actually rains...but in Delhi that happens probably once a year if you are lucky.

The thing, though, is I seldom got asked why I walked so much. Not that I would have answered honestly if asked. That type of honesty in office would have got me shunted to counting pins, without a salary if they could manage it. The answer was, actually, that that was the only time I could procrastinate without guilt.

I mean, the moment you hit office there is such a lot to do. Files keep piling up like some tectonic plate movement was building the Himalayas on my desk. (The world was quaint that way, then. We used to really use paper to do office work.) People keep popping in with queries, phones rang...it was all too much. Once back home, there is the new set of jobs which I have had reason to cry about before in this blog. Clothes accumulate artistic stains and beg to be washed; dust keeps coming in as though I had given it personal engraved invitations every day; and the damn spiders spinning away industriously.

So, you see, the moment I hit any destination, there was too much work to do. But when I am traveling between them...ah, bliss! There is nothing I can do till I arrive, anyway. So, the mind is silent about my idling, for I am not idling am I? I am traveling to or from work, which counts as DOING. So, is it surprising I wanted to prolong this period when I could just BE and not DO? Which is why I also preferred train journeys to flights. Who wants to arrive in a jiffy and be plunged into all sorts of DOING?

That idea is also a quaint one, apparently. That there can be something called 'BEING' which is not associated with 'DOING'. I mean, even when you come back from your dratted vacations, you get asked "What did you do to enjoy yourself?" Huh! You cannot even enjoy yourself without DOING? Sounds too much like work to me.

I don't know whether I am all alone in this. Most people are always in a rush to hit their destinations, the journey being considered only a necessary evil.

Well, Life is a journey towards one final destination for all of us. Death! So, if you never learn to enjoy journeys...