OF MILESTONES AND CHECKPOINTS

"How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man

How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand"

Although, some wise guy once compared our lives to a box of chocolates, to me the comparison of life to a journey is more apt. It may differ from one person to another on the way the journey is defined, on the mode of transport in the journey and so on and so forth, but the essence of being on the move is there. There may be so many reference frame of movement, time for me is one of the main reference. For me though, life is a combination of huge number of journeys, a few occurring at the same time, while a few are serially combined, one happening after the other.

We, at present, are in such a hurry, that we are rushing through our lives, not able to feel the effect of each of the individual journey that we undertake each moment and every day, each with its own flavour, own happiness and satisfaction, own despair and sorrow. We move on and trudge along without the slightest notion of the minute movements that we make in each of our individual journeys.

For me, life is like travelling along simultaneously along a countless number of highways, each having a different route and a different destination. Each will have its own separate guidelines and rules of travel, fast lanes, and speed breakers, and milestones and checkpoints, as means of controlling your journey, and may be sometimes terminating it. But we travel simultaneously in so many directions and in so many ways, that in many occasions we do not feel the effect, and even when we do, the effect is never permanent.

I don't want to go on with explaining about the theory of life here in more details. But as a simple proof to this theory, let us take the example of a new born baby. The situation is more visible here as the journeys are simple and their number is small. The newborn starts his journey, with simple things as just looking up, start recognising things, physically trying to understand his own self, trying to communicate, and so on. He starts a few simple journeys, each of which bifurcates, complicates and continues almost all through his life. And as he or she moves along the path, milestones let him know how far he has advanced, and checkpoints curbs the movement along that path on a temporary basis, and sometimes even permanently. Like a landslide stops all traffic for an indefinite period of time on a hill side road.

All these suddenly cropped into my mind as Debarghya reached a milestone a few weeks back. Most of the readers by the time know about Debarghya, he is our son, five and a half now, and autistic. So, in the last few years of his life, he has been facing more checkpoints than milestones. And even when we see a milestone, it has been delayed by such an extent that it feels as if he has been traveling on Indian Railways, more like Air India in present day perspective. But he lost his first milk tooth on the first week of June, that is exactly five years, six and a half months. And after a long long time, he was before time.

And to keep you up to date with the latest news, the permanent one as the replacement has peeped out through the gums. So for a period of time, the cute smile got even cuter!

Well that's all for now about my theory of life! Keep moving!