Reflection

This is one blog post that has taken some time.

Perhaps because I also have taken some time. Maybe lots of time.

As I sit writing this, I cannot but help reflect on the time gone by. Seventeen years !!!!

Holding aloft a banner for sixteen years, I had asked myself and ask my friends as well. Am I being unfashionable? Holding aloft the same banner for sixteen years is perhaps in today’s context considered quite unfashionable. But many friends wrote, texted, called and told me- “keep going. You’re doing fine.”

Within a few hours of my writing this, the seventeenth year shall get over. And the question popped up again some time back. Am I still being unfashionable?

There is a difference this time, though. I am holding aloft not one, but two banners. Without any bias, and as anybody would agree with me, there is always a soft corner for your more familiar terrain, older associations and those small little things that you hold on to for years and years. But there is this new banner, a bigger one, the supposedly “all-encompassing” one. I have manfully held it for the last four months or so. I seem to be managing.

That is why I decided to call this blog post- “Reflection”. To look back a minute and count all the milestones, the blessings, those little feelings of achievement and satisfaction. To also count the more grey hair, if at all the total count remains the same !!

But at the same time Robert Frost comes to mind, with his most famous four lines. Those four lines that not only inspire, but also guide, make anyone think. Perhaps the best last four lines any poet or any thinker would have written anywhere in history.

And even as I think about the last four lines, it is the last two lines only that seem to matter now.

And miles to go before I sleep

And miles to go before I sleep.

There have been many occasions in the last four months that the situation would have looked daunting. But perhaps the sixteen years prior to this loom before me and seem to guide me, coax me, cajole me, and push me into looking at things with a new eye. A stronger will. And at times even with a newer sense of humour that I may have developed over the years.

Seventeen years. Almost the same old banner. AND ONE WITH NEW SHADES.

Miles to go. Before I sleep.