It was 2016 and little by little, my world had started to crumble. I did not know what was wrong, but something was amiss. It seemed the fire in me had ceased to exist. It was during those days of uncertainty that I stumbled upon a blog called ‘The Shooting Star’. And the one image after reading it is still vivid in my mind.
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| Pic Courtesy: exemplore.com |
On a December night, there was a girl in her early twenties, lying on the roof of a watch tower, gazing at the millions of stars twinkling above, in the lone desert of Rann of Kutch in Gujarat. It just blew me away.
The expanse of the desert was such that though well-versed with its every nook and cranny, the friend who took her to the watchtower often swerved his vehicle so that it would leave tire – prints on the land and it wouldn’t be a task steering through the desert, while returning.
The image often touched my face as a waft of fresh air and kept recurring in my mind. I didn’t know ‘why’.
I wasn’t much of a traveller, then. Though it hadn’t brought overnight changes, the image certainly kindled a spark in me which was about to blaze in the years to come.
I didn’t know then, that the sky, the stars, the moon, the trees, the plants could talk to me.
Years after, when she came up with a book called ‘The Shooting Star – A Girl, Her Backpack and the world', I pre-ordered it. So far, I have read it twice. I went looking for the same image in the book. This time, many other images tagged along. I felt I was there trekking in the mountains, scooping water from the stream, frolicking under the cascading waterfall and they kept me awake in my dreams. I always felt tranquil whenever they barged into my mind.
The Shooting Star is the story of a young girl called Shivya Nath, who gave up her home, sold her belongings at a young age of 23 and made the world, her home.
I often wondered why I kept going back to this blog. What was in it? Though I started loving the idea of travelling, I never wanted to abandon everything and take off to some uncharted territory.
Whatever my confusions were, I eventually mustered the courage at least to quit my monotonous job and took off to another city in the neighbouring state seeking new pastures. And that was the beginning. The city of dreams as it was called crushed me to the core. I felt like a fish out of water with nobody to turn to. I knew I was sinking and the city doused the inner flames and left me with the ashes of my dreams.
I came back two years later, found another job that paid me well but gave no contentment. It is often when life hits rock bottom that most of us tend to think about our purpose in life. I was no different. There were times when I felt there’s nothing left to live for.
Shivya says in her book “We tend to make big changes in life only when tragedy strikes. We tend to look for alternative paths onlywhen we have hit rock bottom. We tend to ask existential questions about happiness only when we are at our most miserable.”She also asks “But what about the tragedy of a mundane, average, unfulfilling life?”
But life is different for different people. Some realise the mundanities of everyday life very fast while some take years, just like me.
I don’t want to be a travel blogger, but a traveller and a storyteller. And for many years it remained a mystery to me that why these images were keeping me awake.
Seasons changed, the pandemic struck and I was locked down in my home. My small library became my world. I read, wrote, pondered over anything and everything under the sun. And it struck that those images wanted to tell me a different story – the story of freedom, liberation, breaking the inhibitions and many more.
She knew where her heart was. The vast expanse of the sky, the desert, the mountains, the waterfalls were asking me to look within and summon the strength to live my life as truthfully I can be.
Yesterday, in the night I opened my window and looked at the sky. It was drizzling as the southwest monsoon had already arrived in Kerala. There were no stars but I saw a firefly and it spoke volumes.
Read my another post here : How a ' Serene Place' could be haunting for some
