… She hadn’t realized she was staring, until he looked up and caught her gaze with his own, his eyes deathly pale and still, almost perfectly consonant with the expressionless face onto which they appeared to have been sculpted, yet somehow alive and alight; in that instant, he looked so enchantedly free of both thought and sentiment, summoning a rare kind of silence about him, one that was without any innuendo.
It wasn’t the culmination of deliberate meditation; she would have recognized it immediately, if for no other reason than the palpable aura of relief that is invariably issued by a struggle to triumph over the mind.
His was an altogether different state of being, unequivocally effortless and showing no sign of means or end, origin or destination, past or future; he was simply and so thoroughly present, as he went about his morning ablutions in the sacred waters of the Ganges river at the bottom of the steps of Darbhanga Ghat, located in the town of Varanasi, his every movement precise, but not considered.
He gave the distinct impression of not considering anything at all, neither trying to question nor answer, overcome or concede, thereby calling to mind the words of 19th century existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who once opined,
“Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.”
‘If only I could be like him’, she thought to herself, for once managing to eclipse the many different voices that routinely polluted her mind, investigating her every thought, action and reaction, as if in continuous and desperate search of that elusive formula for an unburdened life, the same one that seemed to come so easily and fluently to the man she was scrutinizing with such longing and envy …
… a poor man, whose only privilege in life, perhaps, was that he had far less reason to hang onto it than she did, it’s inescapable impermanence a source of consolation rather than torment, the everyday uncertainty of his capacity to survive, antidote to the debilitating pursuit of trying to analyze and define the self, instead of just allowing it to experience life as a passing event; in short, like the majority of the citizens of India, whether by force of unfortunate circumstance, or virtue of an intrinsic belief in reincarnation and the law of karma, he was simply not afraid to die.
Indians frequently find themselves the targets of derision for how little value they place on life, their outwardly casual approach to death seen as being downright callous, if not altogether amoral, when in reality, it is what rescues them from a life sentence of a wretched existence…
… as 16th century French Philosopher, Michel de Montaigne once wrote,
“The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.”
And at last, she understood that the key to her salvation lay in being prepared to die, at each second and in every circumstance, by which she would not only free herself from the shackles of a stale identity, but also the futile quest for a lasting place in, and relevance to the fleeting phenomenon that is life…
…In the same spirit as Chinese General Sun Tzu’s military treatise on the Art of War, in which he instructs his proteges to ‘keep their friends close and their enemies closer’, is the most important principle of The Art of life, and that is to keep one’s life close and one’s death even closer …