The klutz and courage

The five hundredth time she tripped, he finally sneaked in a snicker or two. What could she do? The mysterious roadblock seemed to have cropped up from nowhere. Or was it those invisible cables?

Amidst her protests of "Jalega, jalega" (it will burn, it will burn), he joked, "Baby, you give an entirely different meaning to baby-proofing the house."

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To say life hands out important lessons like people hand out advertising pamphlets on street would be a cliche one must avoid. More than that, at each iteration, every single definition one has ever learnt gets trashed. One constantly reinvents, redefines. What I am yet to figure is, as one starts paying attention to the little details, does the learning get more trivial, more ordinary? Or is it just that as the greatness of old tasks seems extremely easy one gets more time to fret over the inconsequential stuff?

Take for instance, courage.
At a certain point of time, it's no longer about whether after a nasty fall, you can get up and walk back home, blood streaming down your face. That becomes easy. As trivial as it may seem, it seems to be about whether you have the courage to go to work on Monday morning, and answer the gazillion questions about the scab.

The blue horizon

Sitting amidst the leaning tower of cartons, the house empty but for these boxes which have our life, our belongings carefully wrapped, I watch the memories of belongingness running amok.

We loved the view, loved the blinds.
Here we were, you and I, hoping that life would be a cake walk and discovering that switching the oven on causes the mains to trip.
Here we were, being careful as we clinked our precious crystal, wiring up the microphone, singing freedom on Fridays.
Here we were, yo-yo-ing in and out of faith and trust and invoking the Gods, as our washing machine gave up on us.
Here we were, you and I, curling in a corner waiting to grow up, taking decisions for our lives and our hearts, like which cooking oil is healthy.
Here we were, locking our knees, carrying the weight of the world and your prized Marshall half-stack across to the study.

Nothing was easy, as we, you and I, sharing the same space, got hooked to looking at the world outside.
We learnt and we learnt, not to cook when angry, and not to sing out loud at 3 am. And how to tell the sound of the others footsteps downstairs, on the broken tile below the window.
We gained pounds and lost our dollars and cents, never quite learning how to deal with change.

And now, though we are not reluctant participants to this change, there are some things which will perhaps never let us forget the first big challenge in this house - that our toothbrushes were of the same colour.

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Unbeknown to me, you brought some of our mess over.
Unbeknown to you, I left some of our nostalgia behind.