Spilling and Splashing

They say everything in life teaches you something, you just have to keep your senses receptive. Three scenes, which I have been a witness to, at different stages of my life, seem meaningful when I think of them now.

I remember visiting the pantry car of a train, as a child. In there, were two huge steel vessels with boiling water placed close. As the train moved, the tumblers rocked violently, splashing the boiling water around. The tumblers would spill water, sometimes on the floor, sometimes into the other and in the process empting themselves. That view was how stuck in my mind.

I sometimes feel the relationships in youth, be it ours or our parents when they were young, are in a way like those tumblers in the pantry. The feelings of egoism, anger, jealousy and insecurity boiling within individuals in the relationship; spilling and splashing on each other and eventually creating emptiness in them.

During a morning stroll, I saw an old couple who had also come for a walk. They seemed at peace with their life together. Their faces looked calm and serene. They must have had things boiling in them once. Maybe they had lost it all once and then built it all again.They seemed to have survived it all and radiated a peace like tranquil blue sea water after a stormy night.

The hotel I visited the other day, had a pool by the riverside. From a distance the pool looked commingled with river. But it actually wasn’t that way. The pool was separated from the river by a thin wall and was at the same level as the river. The river and the pool were very close yet appear to respect each other’s space. At times, few drops from the river did spatter into the pool, but that only added to the vista. The placidness and serenity of the view was similar what I had seen in the old couples.

Life has its own ways of teaching you about itself. Those instances though are unrelated and seem insignificant, have in way pointed to something very deep and important. Perhaps that this is how life is – you boil initially, spill a bit and splash a little and in the due course learn the art of calming yourself and your relationships.