Aacharya Anita wants to share a very interesting childhood experience.
We were in fifth standard. He was a small, thin boy with a mole on his face.
The Moral Science teacher had assigned the class homework – to pen an essay on ‘happiness’. We all thought it was quite easy. When we started to write, the problem we faced was our own limitations.
Some of us wrote about the happy moments, of the emotional highs on getting first in the class, others remembered kites and whoops, some remembered the lush green fields in the afternoon after a brief drizzle, the smell of the wet mud, etc. But the thin boy saw nothing interesting in the events that excited others, just nothing at all. He was completely uninterested.
Yes, he was an oddity. Although he appeared calm, he was often lost in his thoughts. He asked too many questions, answered them himself. He seemed to be searching for a friend and found one in himself. His essay on ‘happiness’ was strange, at least it appeared so, at that time. I didn’t know how to respond to it nor did our teacher.
After so many years, today, I recollected his essay. He had written, “I do not know what happiness is. I can’t define it. Is it a mood? Is it a thought? Is it about innocence? It’s difficult. But I did feel happy last Wednesday when I opened my window. The atmosphere was nice and bright with light breeze. There was a cashew tree which was swaying gently. Something was building inside me. And then a bright yellow leaf, detached from the tree, circled and fell on the ground. I don’t know what happened but I felt nice. It was a positive feeling. I smiled. Yes, you can say, I was happy. I had never felt like that before.”
The class was certainly dazed. Happiness? Leaf? Small, thin boy with an unusual attitude? If there were any doubts about the eccentricity of the boy, the essay had put them to rest.
Years have gone by and I still think about the falling leaf and my classmate. Do we see magic in the ordinary? Or are we wasting time chasing the extraordinary? Are we searching for something that is inside us? Have we found it? Are we taking our lives for granted?
Just imagine what the lonely leaf has set off. It is a symbol of life itself, a friend tells me when I recount the incident of the small boy. Another interprets it as childlike innocence. “The falling leaf, life like, is serendipity”, says another friend. “It is everything… and it is nothing.”
Indeed, the boy was explaining cosmic serendipity in his own way. If life is an accident, then let’s view it that way. Let ‘living’ be a moment of happiness, however small or large that moment is. At the end of the academic session, I had numerous meetings with the boy. One day, he was very frank with me and began saying, “I often wondered what it’s like to experience a world without life. I have tried it and found it extremely disturbing. Even if there is a moment of happiness in watching a leaf fall, there is sadness in experiencing a world without a leaf. And I am just beginning to understand it.” He continued, “Reasoning, intelligence, wisdom, are all fine. But will they ever help you experience what you feel when you observe a falling leaf. It has to do with awareness”, he concluded.
I realize now that he was referring to his own consciousness. It is an inner voyage that he had undertaken at a very young age. He had realized then, that a leaf is not a leaf; that we must understand ourselves to understand what is beyond us; that awareness delimits our mind, and that awareness, unlike memory, is self-effacing. For there can never be individual awareness.
Yet, many years later, I only remember one cosmic individual and a falling leaf.
