One morning I woke up to a knock on the door. A book on my doorstep with a neat little note on top greeted me - “I present to you the book of your life, everything that you have done, are doing, or will be doing is written in this book. Be fairly warned, it could change your life, forever.”
I felt amused by the kind of pranks people have started to play on fellow beings and that too on a fine Sunday morning. How can there be any completed book which could be a record of my living self? I believed that there could be no book that could tell what is going to happen to me, or anyone for that matter. Just to prove myself right, I decided to read the first page, which yet again said “This is yet another chance. What is it going to be? In or Out?” I was part amused and part apprehensive when I turned over to some random page.
“I am torn between the idea that makes sense and the sense of judgment that it stalls by its incessant carping about the choices I make - lavish, powerful, changing, and inefficient. Need, heed, greed, bleed, plead. I know it doesn’t matter, but why can’t I feel it in my bones, in my blood that it doesn’t. Let’s put it to test. Best guesses are as good as the eye can see. What do I see? That it doesn’t matter.”
I comb through a few more pages and find “I didn’t understand what is so difficult in it, if I can see it what is his problem? He’s being stupid, and willingly ignorant. Ass. Darn, I am wrong, he’s just like a baby in learning this. I am committing the same fallacy which I find is the problem with others, elders. This isn’t how this is going to be.”
Makes sense, I wonder, it is much recent. I prod further, and come across these lines, not for the first time
‘One morning I woke up to a knock on the door. A book on my doorstep with a neat little note on top greeted me - “I present to you the book of your life, everything that you have done, are doing, or will be doing is written in this book. Be fairly warned, it could change your life, forever.”
Being the cynic that I am, I felt amused by the kind of pranks people have started to play on fellow beings and that too on a fine Sunday morning. I believed that there could be no book that could tell what is going to happen to me, or anyone for that matter. Just to prove myself right, I decided to read the first page, which yet again said “This is yet another chance. So what is it going to be? In or Out?” I was part amused and part apprehensive when I turned over to some random page.’
Nice trick, I mused, never realizing that these were exactly my thoughts which were never aired. Here, I was in a make belief that someone must have snooped on me, and then, just in case I leafed through to the last page surmised that I would read what just had just happened. Amused, that the book is fairly a faithful representation of my life so far, even without reading much of it, I leaf forward and yet again I see it
‘…not for the first time
“I present to you the book of your life, everything that you have done, are doing, or will be doing is written in this book. Be fairly warned, it could change your life, forever.”
Being the cynic that I am, I felt amused by the kind of pranks people have started to play on fellow beings and that too on a fine Sunday morning. I believed that there could be no book that could tell what is going to happen to me, or anyone for that matter. Just to prove myself right, I decided to read the first page, which yet again said “This is yet another chance. So what is it going to be? In or Out?” I was part amused and part apprehensive when I turned over to some random page.’
I almost choked out when I read it again. What a cruel way to destroy a Sunday morning. Hesitatingly, I turned the pages and it started all over again. I was scared to death, but in those fleeting moments of terror, I saw light. I did what any drowning man would do to a life threatening situation, reject it, kick harder. I shut down the book with a thud and heaved a sigh of relief. The book didn’t look thicker, but it didn’t seem to end while I was reading it. It just kept happening over, and over, and over, and now that I had shut it down, I remembered what the book said at the very outset.
“I present to you the book of your life, everything that you have done, are doing, or will be doing is written in this book. Be fairly warned, it could change your life, forever.” And “This is yet another chance. So what is it going to be? In or Out?”
I was out, but was I out? I returned to my senses and it dawned upon me; I laughed like a madman, half drenched in sweat. I laughed like it didn’t matter, heck, it didn’t matter. If I keep looking, I’ll always keep looking and always keep looking forever and find absolutely nothing except finding that I’ll always keep looking forever. The book, if by any account was true, was in revealing that I have often been stuck and the only way out, is to stop trying to figure out what happens next. This, as I write, I suspect is written in the book, exactly where I had shut down the book, but now I cannot reopen the pages and corroborate just for the heck of it. My book isn’t meant to be read by me, or anyone in my lifetime. If anyone should read it, it is someone who is from the future, and not me.