THE JOURNEY

“Life is the train, not the station.” (Paulo Coelho)

Everyday at around dusk, life and death meet each other in the silhouettes of light and darkness as two strangers coming across each other in a desert mirage. As their eyes meet they take grave decisions without uttering a word of pleasure or distaste. Death decides to live and life decides to die, though only for a matter of hours. The compromise is reached without arguments; the covenant agreed without dispute. For a moment nobody knows who is who and what is what. An immaculate peace facilitates the transformation and nothing is rushed to eventuality. The sun, radiant and just, endures its death with patience and grace. It falls from its attained heights into an unfathomable abyss of nothingness just like a Buddhist monk slipping away into a spell of meditation in search of nothing but himself. Slowly, silently, unnoticeably, it extinguishes itself and dies. But, is it death after all? The darkness, on the other hand, spreads itself gracefully and soberly like the gown of a bride. There is nothing alarming about it; no rustling, no haste. All this happens everyday. For some of us it takes but just the wink of an eye; for others, it takes ages. Yet there is a method and purposefulness that catalyzes the whole process. The hesitation and the deliberation must impart that the sole purpose of life is not death itself. And, that of death is not to sustain till eternity; that there is no chaos in the thing that we fear to be “the end”. If not the beginning, the end must be the transition to the beginning. Life cannot simply be a mere wastage created out of human neglect and folly. To “pass out into nothingness” can never be its purpose. Its destination does not lie in the abyss of death but in what is beyond this valley of shadows. The station is never the end of the journey; a new expedition starts after every station with a different taste, different companions and different landscape…..the train never stops for good.