My mistake, My eternity.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
- - - - W. H. Auden


***

I guess I was about 8. It was a particularly bad summer, even for Tamilnadu. I would dress in my favorite skirt and sit squatting on the steps of the terrace with a comic in hand, every evening. Not facing the road, but the mangrove behind our house. Sometimes reading, and at others dreaming.

Though never in that one year I got to see the grove, I trusted that there were yellow ripen yummy mangoes in there. I believed those mangoes would stay there for a long time. I believed I will relish the smell of the alphonso, and dance with my umbrella skirt during those occasional summer drizzles, all life. That such promise of tasty mangoes is eternal.

This is my first memory of embracing the illusion of eternity. The idea of eternity is reflex, it is a part of the “script” we prepare during our childhood. And since I use Transaction analysis here, it would imply that we seek to then grow out of “childhood scripts” and become “adults” that each of have the capacity to become.

However in real, such an illusion only gets intensified with age and time.

So, what is wrong with believing in eternity?, you might ask. After all Satre has to say “Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal”.

Here is the problem. When one presumes time is eternal is, one gets uncannily snug and takes life for granted. If that continues for a prolonged period of time, one runs the risk of stopping to stretch and search or regards hard work.

Unpleasant changes in life impels one to seek refuge in the comforting concept of eternity, as we often fail to fathom if changes occurred with passage of time or if time infact brought such changes. Eternity then becomes escapism. The idea of eternity I believe, encourages sloth and indiscipline of the first order. Or that what it did to me.

Such an illusion of eternity is also false skin, and only a transient feel good factor. Only is not is not clouded by the assumption of eternal, one can achieve the objectivity necessary to observe, experience, ideate, reason , learn and thus evolve.

You would then view life with fear or faith, you will stop believing everything you have today will stay forever (though your subconscious very well knows otherwise) .So, what about fear and faith?

Faith is beautiful. I don’t know about the faith in time heeling (or leap of faith, for that matter), but time surely has the immense potential of possibilities that can transform life to an extent that past can become extinct. And immaterial.

Fear is also beautiful. Constructive action resulting from the fear of the freedom in hand to choose from limitless choices (In reference to ‘Man is condemned to be free’) can also transform life to an extent that one’s baggage from the past be removed and insecurity of the invisible future also erased.

However, what is more important and necessary to be analyzed is how can one accept and acknowledge that eternity is only an illusion. How can one unlearn and disentangle from childhood scripts?

By realizing that when realities overwhelm us, the only way to face them is; to face them. To accept defeat to the unknown and the impossible. To completely and genuinely acknowledge change.

The faith that change is possible is an extremely positive belief that can guide one through life ( it ofcourse sounds clichéd, but its worth pondering over and over again); However no such change can last forever is also the bitter truth one has to learn. It is extremely easy to delude oneself with hopes of ever lasting happiness. After all we grow up on stories of “living happily ever after”. Another line that got added to our scripts.

A truth I long failed to internalize is that change doesn’t only mean newness, it also means perishing of an “old”. Of a truth, from the past, that is dead. That as we move towards our “ideal” self, there will a part of the present self that dies. That as future unveils itself, it pushes us to destroy the past, even abandon the convictions held closely in a time that is now gone.

The reason why we easily slip into the idea of eternity is also because we are constantly deluded by movement from past to present to future.

A past that exists within us, but doesn’t in present and future ; not physically.

A present which is every minute slipping into the past and influencing the future.

A future which is not there yet, and when reached becomes the present that will eventually slip into the past.

It is in the movement between these states that trigger the variety of intense emotions within us; from ecstasy to melancholy. And it is in being able to erase the illusion of eternity, could one stop moving between the past, present and future like a pendulum. Thus attaining a more stable and level headed state of mind.

May be i would have liked to write:

He is my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I don’t know about forever!
But my love will last.