Long Vacation, no so long ago.

Note: Digging through some old docs I have come across this incomplete gem from 6 months ago. I couldn’t just let it be lost, I apologize for the incomplete post. I didn’t tweak it or try to complete it because I could not recollect my thought process behind this and was not willing to risk tampering with it.

It is not so easy now a days to have months of vacation in our lives. But here I am stuck with three months of vacation, I am nearly half way through it and I can’t wait for it to end and start working. Before all you folks working on a Saturday start judging me I am as laid back, lazy, peace-putting and free-riding as the next guy but trust me a month with nothing to do will go from exciting to boring and then to frustrating pretty soon. First and foremost you start breaking all your ‘I can’t have enough of’ myths, everything you have assumed is fun and awesome becomes lame since you start binging on it during a vacation this long. You get bored of sleeping till late in the noon as well as watching tv series, movie marathons, serial gaming and what not. The saying ‘too much of any good thing becomes bad’ is something I started deeply appreciating. Anyways I am deviating from what I set out to write.

Today I went out in the summer heat to roam around in the city and my 25 something age got reflected everywhere. I soon felt a strange sense of nostalgia as my idle brain started noticing how much things have changed in the past decade. When I was 15 and in school I used to be happy having samosa chat which was 10 Rs after a lot of messing around with friends at school and tv at home. Today I spent more than 60 times the same and I could not be half as happy as I was. I could afford the spending but I cannot find the same kind of childish content anymore, somewhere something changed for good or bad, only time will tell.

I roamed in malls for the entire day because what else can a guy without a vehicle do on a mid-summer day in a polluted metropolitan city. I tried to window-shop after hearing so much about the fun involved in the activity from friends of the fairer sex. But having carefully developed the habit of going to shop with a clear idea of what I want and picking it up in no time for years of my adult life made me give up on window shopping very early. I went on to browse second hand books a favorite hobby of mine after a good half an hour although I did not find anything worth buying I was not disappointed but strangely grateful for the store. I still had a major chunk of the day still left. I had the option of going back to a cozy bed, a super fast computer and some great books in an ac room but the option made me more nauseous than the polluted air I was breathing on the road. I ended up watching two movies back to back in a multiplex with a short break in between for lunch.

The thing that I took away from all this experience is as we grow old there is a cocoon that we tend to build around us. We tell ourselves ‘I enjoy my lone time’ or ‘I can’t get anytime for myself’ how strange is this, as children we hated to be lonely – there was this innate need for company. As a child we found happiness in the simplest of things and sadness for the most silly whims not being fulfilled. Today my view and expectation out of life has become pretty complex, there is a lot of external influence in my outlook.

But hey! we can’t be a kid forever, but we can nurture the inner-child to feel the same excitement and realize that ‘fun’ can be found anytime & anywhere around us.