One of my friends posted in the Facebook:
Mind of the young has arrogance
Different from the insolence
Of the rich, the powerful and the clever
It is born not of accumulations, but of potentialities
Mind of the young has special energy
The energy of its thirst for the experiences
That makes him old
In a while it freezes in the confusions
Of individuality, competition and comparisons
The triple promises blazed in the neon lights of our being.
I liked the post, and wrote on his wall, quoting Russell:
An individual human existence should be like a river
Small at first, narrowly contained within its banks
And rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls
Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede
The waters flow more quietly
And in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea
And painlessly lose their individual being.
My friend thus responded
The river merges with the sea
Which evaporates to become black clouds
With heavy udders condensing into salt less water
That nourishes the life on this insignificant earth
At the fringes of a minor galaxy among the trillions floating in a fathomless world
A proud life which crumbles to dust to make way for the new life
Sprouting from dust, water and sun
What an exhilarating mystery
What a cosmic celebration
And in the eons of the universes upon universes
Greater than all the grains of sands, the saga is not even a blink
The individual was NEVER important.
I wrote back:
In everyone's life there comes a time, like a waterfall
Tagore writes thus:
One morning I stood on the veranda and looked
The sun was rising from behind the leaves
As I stood there and looked, suddenly, in a moment
The curtain fell from my eyes
I looked, and saw the world and this earth enveloped in an astonishing glory
Everything swaying in joy and beauty
My entire inner self was scattered in the light of the universe
On that day, Awakening of the waterfall seemed to flow out of me
Like a waterfall
That very day the poem, The Awakening of the Waterfall
Gushed forth and coursed on like a veritable cascade
The poem came to an end
But the curtain did not fall upon the joy aspect of the Universe
And it came to be so that
No person or thing in the world seemed to me trivial or unpleasing
A thing that happened the next day or the day following seemed specially astonishing
It was the beginning of a continual stream of poems
It was his waterfront moment
Waterfront moments are important for all
These are individual moments
In it are wrapped the individual
Unless seized, there are no individual moments
Don’t let go the waterfall moments
There is no splash unless there are individual spikes.