Archive for November, 2017
Cusps of Life
Last year we moved to Sydney. It was a move that me and my wife had been planning for more than 3 years. The idea was to move to Australia and get a job.
I wouldn’t go into the details, as much has happened over the last year and a half: job, setting up a home and our daughter started going to pre-school. Suffice to say that we feel settled.
The one thing I often wonder about is how I don’t find myself missing Bangalore. I lived in Bangalore for close to 12 years and it is the longest I have ever been in one place. I do miss “things” of Bangalore, the coffee, the darshinis, the food, the vibe of MG Road but that’s about it.
You generally don’t miss a “city”. You can’t. It’s as if, if I were to be there, in Bangalore, at this moment, will I derive the satisfaction that I used to derive, say, in 2008? So what I am missing now isn’t the city, it is the time I spent back in 2008 and it won’t come back. Nostalgia aside, cities, like people, like you and me, change (often for the worst). You can either love them, live them or you leave them.
Being in love with your surroundings, at any given time, is when your “level” of evolution is at a point that matches of everything around you. So my time in Bangalore and the things they were during that time were at a cusp and that, sort of, defines my time there. Such is the case with different phases of our lives, our times and our surroundings. I like to think of the external surroundings and factors that affect our lives as “arcs” and our own life as one big arc – that of a circle with a much bigger diameter. The smaller arcs touch the bigger arc at various points, forming many cusps. Where those cusps are formed are the most important, if not critical, times of our lives. Those three years in Bangalore, between 2007 and 2010 were such years for me.
How big a cusp will form, with our lives here in Sydney, only time will tell.