Moving on from Timelines

We live our lives in ‘Phases’ or ‘Stages’. Most profound storytellers would like to call it ‘Episodes’ or ‘Events’. These are merely stages or phases of our lives right from our childhood till today, which have shaped up our experiences. Whether it was our first experience of failure, the cognizance of beating our competition at school, the stages of understanding the vagaries of our fantasy minds caught up in fairy tale infatuation and then finding an anchor in mature balanced love, stages of understanding why we chose certain jobs and not the others, our strongest suits and our kryptonite, or it could be our gradual awareness of who we are becoming and what we have left behind. All of these experiences come in chapters or phases. As we keep moving from one timeline to the next in phases, we embrace a new being within ourselves.

Every chapter has its own quintessential honor and taste, from the microcosmic level to the macro. Even if it may have been something that scarred us and left us with nothing but cold embers. Every chapter has its meaning. Sometimes, the meaning of a certain chapter leaves us baffled and we spend a riveting period of our lives questioning the intent of it, which essentially gets unraveled only, like they say ‘in hindsight’. Sometimes, we keep coming back to a certain chapter again and again, like a voracious book reader, trying to untangle some knots of meanings which weren’t demystified earlier. In metaphorical terms, spiritual or philosophical lingo, we say, we keep coming back to the same truths again and again, as life is cyclical. The more we come back to a previously visited truth, the more it becomes jarring and unavoidable.

Sometimes, we may be in a rush to end a phase and move to the next one. We often stay frustrated because a certain chapter seems repetitive or seems unending. And sometimes, we notice we may have physically moved to the next one, without fully closing the previous one in the dimensions of our minds, leaving loose ends of the threads unattended. Then the sudden realization that we haven't actually moved on from the previous timeline, smacks dab in the middle of our heart. As hard as the red pill goes deep down the rabbit hole, we know that moving on doesn't come by bending over backwards in a yoga mat, or by meditating on one foot, nor does it come by choosing to pack our bags and leaving a timeline in sheer desperation. ‘Moving on’ from a phase or a timeline, comes only when the mind is fully aware of its lessons and significance. When the mind reaches a certain level of understanding and acceptance of an event, it prepares its initial flight of moving on. It comes full circle when we have lived a timeline throughout, in all its entirety, choosing to inhabit every nook and corner of the home to feel the sharp jagged edges of its lessons in every cell and fiber of our body till the time when the mind signs a treaty of peace with it. When we are in a timeline, there is a huge purpose behind why we are made to stay in it. No matter how it looks, tastes and feels. We are made to live and master a timeline so we can gather all the moorings of the story: The sunshine, the abysses, the follies and frailties and everything that is meant to be so that the pendulum of our minds can stop its duality and reach a center of neutrality. The center of neutrality in a narrative offers a healthy detachment and the gift of moving on from it, in the realest sense. And even when things in the immediate surroundings may not have changed much, we know we have jumped to a different perspective as we notice the powerful shift in our thinking.

There are times when the mind stays in denial, or it may not have received all the moorings of the story, bringing the boat ashore. We need to wait for all the moorings to come home within us, not at one go but in different timelines, different phases, travelling back to the same truth albeit with a deeper awareness of it, like different dots connecting in a larger landscape of the mind. Hence, they say, do not rush the process of knowing it all. Once this is achieved, detachment from the timeline becomes a cinch. Moving on from a timeline means achieving a healthy state of detachment from it, where the mind has gathered all the key characters of the plot, understood its twists and turns, understood the rationale behind the knots, accepted the ending of the story without any attachment or blame-game on how it should have been.

That essentially is called ‘Moving on’ from a timeline. It tastes neutral. It tastes like a blank centeredness devoid of any extremes, extending a sense of beauty and completion to it, while the next timeline shows up with all its glory, its differently put together mazes, waiting for us to decode them to reach a new thread of understanding of our selves.

- Dharmista