It baffles me how casually we perceive time, even though we know it is the only thing that makes life go round. It may be make-believe, but so is most of what we do. Time passes, for better or for worse. Fortunately for me, it has passed for the better, and I could not have asked for more. But I must not take this casually for whether I prefer it or not; the clocks will tick, the calendars will change, the months will roll, and the years will go by, and I must learn to adapt when it happens. I must not watch it carelessly. This moment, there will be no moment like this one. I must preserve it all in memory. If possible, I must make an inferior copy in these words.
The coffee will never taste the way it does right now. The sky will never look the way it does right now. Three birds sit on the sill of my balcony, engaged in perhaps a conversation of the highest importance. The sheets of grass are still wet from the rains over these past few days—an odd sort of comfort when I walk about on the balcony. We have been blessed with a brighter day today; with it, the sky has changed to the bluest of blues and responded in kind. The white clouds slowly sail over the blue like ships on the sea, and the hills have never looked greener—islands, interrupting the blue, cutting it short at the horizon. The trees stand tall in the orchard after a bountiful season. The sun shines on us graciously today. A quiet expression of joy is spread on everything as if this landscape understands the flow of time and how it must savour it in its way. What a day to be alive! What a day to experience everything. For all my loss and all my gain, I would not have it any other way; I would want everything to stay the same.
At about one in the afternoon, I come back inside to start working on this and that to pay for odds and ends. The room smells of burnt coffee. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast lays half-read, calling to me, carefully covering the Book of Disquiet. My gaze moves to the plants, which have turned towards the window light as they have grown. I have turned toward it, too, in my own way. All it took was time. There is nothing casual about it.
A lot can happen between two monsoons.