I clicked this photo on a bright sunny summer day somewhere in Europe. I noticed this gentleman in the window quietly watching the world pass by, something that we yearn for all our life, and I envied him.
A train of thought ran through my mind …
Childhood is full of fun and play. Before we realize, the childhood is over. We are grown up. All our dreams of personal independence (financial and otherwise) and self-reliant living are now ready to come to reality. We want to pause and rejoice the moments of carefree childhood and quietly watch the world pass by before stepping into the next phase of our life. But the lure of personal independence has already put us on the path of working life. There is no time to pause and watch the world pass by. We keep yearning….
The working life is full of ambitions. We love, live and thrive on the ambitions. The ambition to be somebody, the ambition to reach a certain position at work place, and the ambition to reach a certain level in society. The struggle on the way is very exhausting yet fulfilling. The work always takes priority over life. Our ambitions, to reach somewhere, make us firmly believe that one who stops is finished. And so, though we want to, there is not time to pause and watch the world pass by. We continue to keep yearning….
Somewhere down many years of life, we reach the position we strive for. We have saved the money we wanted to save to buy those precious moments to pause and watch the world pass by. We are now standing in the window on a sunny summer day like that gentleman. We have nothing to achieve, nowhere to go, and nothing to live for except watching the world pass by – something we yearned all our life.
As soon as this train of thoughts flashed through, my mind transported itself into the gentleman’s body and I started watching down the window. And suddenly I received the shock of my life as I realized, that actually, I am being bypassed by the world – the world that I yearned to watch pass by! That shook me to the core and my mind was thrown back into my body.
BUT, that realization now keeps gnawing me every day.
From the Periphery 