Spice of Life: Chronicling life through its ups & downs, one page at a time

‘Writing is the distillation of one’s thoughts’, this oft-quoted sentence by my father inspired me to pick up a pen at a very early age and tether my thoughts to the pages of a diary. Ever since, a diary has been my constant companion with whom I share my innermost feelings. To me a diary is not just a diary, it’s a love affair. Needless to say, one has amassed a trunk full of treasures, capturing events, emotions and desires of the last four decades. We are, after all, a sum of our memories.

In inking while thinking, my pen transmits the voice of my soul. There is no fear of being judged and often it acts as a catharsis as the ink drains out a significant amount of negativity off my mind. While spoken words cannot be retrieved, written words can be preserved and kept alive for posterity. A diary hence becomes a de-facto autobiography of non-descript pen pushers like me.

Browsing through the pages turned yellow with age is a travel back in time. I could sense the changes over the years in my thought process, priorities and personality. Apprehensions, which appeared so years ago, look so inconsequential in hindsight. Ambitious plan prepared so meticulously failed at the first contact or had to be modified with age. Life, as they say, is like a spiral staircase, where every step you take changes your view, both in range and direction.

My diary has been a witness to important decisions taken, when life was at crossroads. It has logged the regrets for making wrong choices, heeding more to impulse than wisdom, as also the jubilation for taking the correct courses of action, patronising intuition over experience. I have been my own teacher as also my own hero, so tells my diary to this compulsive introspective person on his voyage to the interior.

Having documented all the important milestones in this journey of life, the fragrance of those emotions gets back in a jiffy, as soon as I turn the pages. The thrill of getting commissioned, my first solo sortie, becoming a father and various professional accomplishments brings a smile to my face even today. The pain of losing close buddies, failed aspirations, setbacks in career and making unpleasant hard decisions in life moves the ‘emotion pendulum’ in the opposite direction. Life’s ups and downs recorded as mere events have acquired philosophical magnitude with time.

I find my solitude in my writings even though words are always in my company, at my beck and call. A diary once written acquires a life of its own. What started as a hobby has now morphed into fine print of newspapers and magazines. Many of my articles have germinated from the diaries where I have scribbled all these years. I can attribute a fair share of my immortality to these pieces I shall leave behind.

What have I achieved with this pedestrian writing? I often questioned myself till I read musician Morgan Harper’s quote: “Tell the story of the mountains you climbed; your words could become a page in someone else’s survival guide”.

The writer is a Mohali-based freelance contributor.

echpee71@gmail.com