There are times and there are times.

The first kind of times are those when you find yourself tangled in such an immaculate mess of relationships, failed relationships, one-sided relationships, and solitude that you just dont know how to get out of it. Too many things have taken hold of your brain and you wish that your memory was a hard-disk, where selecting multiple objects and pressing SHIFT + DELETE would remove those things permanently. But at the same time you realize that life doesnt work this way. At these times, you yearn for a completely different life - a life which has none of this mess, and is completely new so that you can redesign it properly so as to avoid the mess. You yearn to reinvent yourself.

The second kind of times are those when you ARE indeed into a completely new lifestyle and have that opportunity to reinvent yourself. You do that and realize after a while that you were too used to your old lifestyle, and that getting used to the new life is a physical as well as emotional drain. Its not that you do not like your new life - you do like it, but you miss your old life as well. At these times you wish you could combine the good parts of both the lifestyles and create a new life which is PERFECT. But you realize that life doesnt work that way. So you decide to make the most of this life and try to keep it as untangled as possible.

Few months pass, and you can notice those entanglements gradually creeping in. They just dont seem to leave you, do they? The same kind of problems just take a different shape and reappear before you. It is frustrating. They are like hair on your head - despite acquiring a new-look with each hair-dressing, your face returns to its original looks within a few weeks.

I find myself in such a situation these days. My brain was full of thoughts and ideas which I wanted to get rid of permanently, but they just wouldn't go. And they just wouldn't let me live in peace. They were like tapeworms - nibbling away inside my body at whatever I tried to take in and whatever I tried to throw out. A reinvention was required. A reinvention was provided. The beginning of my new life in UK was a perfect lifestyle discontinuity. The initial euphoria-cum-shock gradually became normal life and the natural adaptation to surroundings did take place.

But as I said, the very same issues started rearing their ugly heads once again. I couldn't help but think of Mr. Iglesias's song which goes 'you can run you can hide but you cant escape!' So much for reinvention. It is at times like these that I am, and perhaps others are too, forced to take a closer look at what the problem really is. Or whether there is a problem at all or not!?

Sure enough! I am beginning to realize that perhaps what I was trying to run away from was just a part of myself. And when I took that BA-0142 from New Delhi, this other part too was on the very same flight. You really cannot escape yourself, can you? And the mess? Perhaps life wouldn't have the same meaning, or indeed the same enjoyment, if it weren't for those problems. Not for the first time in my life, I realized that running away doesn't help. Facing it does.

Ironically (or comically) it was this running away which made me realize the above fact! At least it removed the biased thinking processes that I had been guilty of giving space to within my head. It emphasized the fact that this has happened earlier too, and even then the answer lay in facing the issues head on. Thats easier said than done. The colossal break-up I went through prior to reaching here is something which still makes me grimace when I think about it. In times of solitude, I still sometimes wonder just what was it that I did wrong? Just how could something so beautiful end? But then at least I am able to joke and laugh about it now. And that is important. To realize that all good things come to an end. That all bad things come to an end too. And that newer good things (and bad things) replace the old ones.

This post is perhaps as incoherent as any post can be. But an honest writing down of thoughts is very much like this. There are too many thoughts in the mind at any given instant, and not all of them follow each other in a set pattern. In fact, this is probably the central theme of this post. That we cannot put too much order into our lives. That life's glorious disorderliness only makes it more interesting and more fun.

There are times and there are times. You like some, you hate some. But at all these times, life is just perfect. Life is beautiful. New good things will start. Till then let us savour the previous ones. Amen!