The sum of small things.

A dreary day drew to a close. It was almost midnight, and I was planning to hit the hay fairly soon, although, normally midnight isn’t all that late an hour for me. A nice numbing sleepiness was slowly beginning to cloud my mind. The last vestiges of the first draft of a pending research proposal remained; and the raging debate in my drowsy mind was whether to plough on for another half an hour, or shut shop and go home.

And that’s when the phone rang. Someone was speaking to me in Oriya. The voice sounded familiar, although I couldn’t recognize it immediately. And then all of a sudden, everything fell in place. It was a childhood friend of mine, who had recently moved to Milwaukee. It was a pleasant surprise indeed. We had a nice chat about the world at large, about our lives in US and about the halcyon days of our childhood that seemed increasingly getting tinted with sepia and chrome.

The one refrain that crept in was the increasingly hectic pace at which life was moving, nay, hurtling along. A poem, which we read about 14 years ago during school days flashed through my mind. It’s a lovely poem called “Leisure”, by William Davies. The sum and substance of the poem was how men missed out on the simple pleasures of life in an increasingly hectic world. Somehow, that struck a tender chord somewhere within – and got me thinking about the small details which made life so fascinating.

Those were days, when a few innocent blokes would head off into the countryside, riding their rickety bicycles. And we would stumble on a decrepit building. For the next few days, that would be our fortress; many a sunsets were enjoyed together from atop the “fortress”. Today though, leave aside countrysides, I hardly ever step out of the main university campus. And when I do, it is with a chip on my shoulders – that I have to travel around. Have to. Why “have to”? Somewhere down the line, the free wheeling spirit started ebbing away to such an extent that enjoying the simple beauties of life has become more of a conscious effort. These days, we discuss nature and all its beauty. Hidden in these discussions is a stifling sophistication – a sophistication whose origins lie as much in hearsay from “sources” including colleagues, travelogues and media, a conciousness for the need to unwind, as much as from our own experience. How starkly this contrasts with the naiveté of days gone by, when the cooing of a pigeon would result in us imitating it unconsciously, even as we indulged in other tasks; when the sound of flowing water would draw us towards the stream automatically, like a magnet drawing an iron. We were nature’s naturals then, without being a Touchstone.

Adrift from nature, even the behavior patterns have changed. The small niceties of life remain unacknowledged. Today, birthday wishes often get acknowledged only through a single bulk mail; flash back to late 80s and early 90s, such a behavior would have been a cardinal sin. Birthdays were what we kids waited for all year round, and to treat a birthday so lightly was something sacrilegious. Something as simple as sharing books or music cassettes was fun. These days though, share a musical with someone, and it is often days before he or she cares to listen to it; and another few days before he/she thinks of acknowledging it, by which time it becomes hazy as to who shared it in the first place.

In a world powered on more by money and "success", we keep losing out on something which is much more priceless – namely, the simple pleasures of small things in life. The sum of small things keeps piling up. And just as the integral of an infinitesimal quantity dx equals a big finite x, the sum of small things equal a huge chunk of joy, a lifetime of joy in fact; pity, that this is exactly what we lose out on today. Oh! for the innocence of yore and Auld Lang Syne.