July 15, 2021: When you are open to opportunities

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July 15, 2021: When you are open to opportunities. Good things happen. COVID-19 has changed my life. I can see things in a different way by overcoming the sense of statis that comes from habit. I was content last year. Things were settled into a pattern of habit. The eye was stabilized into partial blindness. Everything was as they were expected. Because I was lulled into a sense that everything was OK, and things are as they should be. Then in March 2020 everything changed. The terror of a lockdown, not being able to do the familiar, was instilled. My most cherished activity – travel – was halted. My sense of contentment was shaken to the core as I remained static in the screened porch waiting. Waiting. This is what COVID-19 did to many people, and as I sat in the living room with two amazingly creative persons working out the intricacies of a documentary film script, I realized that without COVID-19 we would not be having this conversation. I took the leap out of contentment in October 2020. No more statis. No more screened porch. Through deserted airports, masked and caped with sanitizer I reached the other side of the World. And started building relationships and rekindling ambitions. Thus, I stood today on the balcony of the club today and dreamt of a future where I could be working with a bondhu, equally as restless as me, and planned how the business of that person could scale heights that is only restricted by our collective imagination. COVID-19 did this. Once I realized in October 2020 that the restrictions were in my mind, the fear was serving no other purpose than statis of “contentment,” the flood gates opened. January, March, April, May, July. Masked and moving. Armed with a laptop, a tablet, a camera, and endless energy I hit the real road while remained in the virtual. I was awake again, out of my slumber of so many years was broken. A new life is possible. New memories can still be built. In the heat of the night, sitting on the verandah, equipped with collective imagination that only the dis-contended have, we built a script, an idea, worked out the kinks just as earlier in the day, driving around Newtown I realized that the future was open and can be in my control. For too long I have been living in the bliss of habit. Now it is time to make the new connections, work out the kinks and build again – ideas, things, relationships. Everything is possible, COVID-19 gave me the opening and it is time start again, as I did way back when I went to another shore to build memories, today the shores have joined via WhatsApp and it is only up to me, and the like-minded people that surrounded me, to mess up the opportunities. Never be content, because there is always something new, as in the cliché, “you snooze you lose.” In a metaphoric way I am with Uriah Heep this July when “at the sound of the first bird singing I was leaving for home,” A new flipped home - “I will be looking for you.”

Comments

MURALI said…
a very honest self reflective essay !
July 15, 2021 at 7:48 PM
Ananda the White Haired Teenager said…
Many thanks Murali for the comment. It is indeed, and the tenor of these would be shifting a bit. Hope you still enjoy them.
July 16, 2021 at 7:50 PM
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