Happy Birthday to Me…

I wanted to write something about childhood when I realised it was Children’s day on November 14th. Today is the 23rd of November and It took nine days for me to actually sit down to write something. I see the tendency in me to judge myself for taking this long to act on my impulse. I wonder why I am so judgy about a case of casual procrastination. I guess this is something that has been engraved in me since I have been a child. It was part of the propaganda run by the cooperative society consisting of family, friends, school and media. Today as I almost turn 37 years old I am beginning to recognise the many definitions and conditions that I have been programmed with as I was growing up. It feels like the beginning of growth all over again but in a different dimension. A dimension in which the definition of time as it was gets challenged. 

Talking about the notion of time is so intimidating. The moment I want to acknowledge time as a concept I start imagining scientists in black suits staring down on me asking me if I was qualified enough to talk anything about the concept of time. A human collage of Oppenheimer, Scrodinger, Bohm, Bohr and Heisnberg pointing a stick at me with an expression that prevents me from having the confidence to indulge with those thoughts. On the other side of the gallery of the royal concert hall inside my mind I see the philosophers and thinkers like Nietzsche, Plato, Socrates, J Krishnamurti booing me as I stand on the stage alone staring at the crowd consisting of friends and family and various acquaintances. Some are enjoying my embarrassment on the stage, some are concerned and I see a handful who are cheering me on. 

Till very recently this scene inside my head would play out by me withdrawing my thoughts and myself backstage with a great sense of inadequacy. If this was the atmosphere inside my head, you can imagine and some of you could relate to the struggle outside. The outside is another story altogether. There are complexes added by our lack of vulnerability, peer pressure, our need to be liked or the desire to sound and look intelligent.  However today I don’t feel like shying away from the stage. I don’t know if it is courage coming from an understanding of a 37 year old or fatigue of a 37 year old. Whatever it is,  I want to stay here and state my thoughts and feelings knowing that it might sound like blasphemy to some of the characters I have created inside my head. So here it goes:

The thing I would like to talk about is not time, it is time signature. It is a term generally used in music and it defines the rhythm of a musical piece. A rhythm is basically the time interval between two beats. Translating this concept to life in general, for me the rhythm of life is the time interval between two acts. By acts I mean some significant act which we use to mark our journey of life. Birth, school, college, degree, Higher Education, finding a partner, career milestones, buying property or properties, having children and so on. The cooperative society that I mentioned about earlier, the one consisting of family, friends, school, media and now social media, tries to define a set of standard rhythms or time signatures. Most of their programs are about creating standards and convincing people to match these standards. Most of us rate ourselves and our success as human beings in comparison with these standards. The standards have not been the same throughout the history of human life. While it has been changing according to the social trends, I feel there has not been a time when there was no need for a standard. I guess standards have existed as long as humans have unless someone convincingly tells me that there was a time like that. These standards have been driving people to do things that they are doing. These are like the grips or climbing holds that people use to climb the treacherous monolithic rock called life. These standards exist because time exists. Time seems to be a standard of standards. The graph on which these standards are marked. This confines life to the dimensions of time and space. 

Until this point inside the gallery of my head Einstein was cheering and now he looks confused and that is shaking my confidence. Therefore I won’t go into the physics of it. These standard time signatures have acted like an assembly line to create individuals who are built to serve the society’s demands of that time. Each time in history has seen some vocation occupy a more popular and sought after position in the society. Priests, pastors and evangelists, Philosophers, scientists and artists, soldiers, generals and politicians, reformers, activists and rebels, Scientists, engineers and doctors, entrepreneurs, content creators and investors. The last one is the latest one. These are some of the many standard time signatures that we have been presented with to choose and rate the quality of our life. What I want to say is that not all of us are able to harmonise with these standard time signatures. A big percentage of us do not enjoy the rhythm being enforced on us. Some of us would like a faster tempo and some like to go slow, also different things at different phases of our life. Each individual has their own unique time signature and they need to be given the time and space to discover it for themselves. Someone at the age of 37 might want to figure out what to do professionally and someone at 45 may feel ready to have a partner in their personal life and there need not be any standard for them to evaluate their life against. I wish this was one of the main intent of education: to enable students to consistently be in the process of discovering their time signatures. The rhythms that make their heart groove. A tempo whose ups and downs make their own unique ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Not difficult or easy, simple or complicated, our lives need to be the songs that we would love to listen to. If others happen to like it, that’s a bonus. 

So this is what I wanted to share on Children’s day. A message to all the children. The literal ones and the ones who have the body of adults. I have a feeling that the messaging narrative looks quite patronising. Let me put it across this way: Here I am as I have just turned 37 years old a few days back. I took another five days to write this last part as I am trying to discover and honour my own rhythm of doing things. Professionally this might be more challenging than personally. However as a society we have successfully made both of them quite challenging. I have set out on this journey of discovering and honouring my rhythm or time signature and this journey has been a mix of meaningful rewards, some humiliation, a lot of insecurities. I sometimes wish that this journey of mine started much earlier. Better late than never for me and everyone else who is contemplating on similar lines. Is there a message I am trying to convey here? I don’t quite know. Do let me know if you could endure reading this piece till here. 

P.S : My birthday happens to be on one of the days between 23rd and 28th of November. Hence the title. 

Love

Skanda 

28/11/2022

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