Grey Love

“You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.”

Khaled Hosseini, from The Kite Runner.

We Indians love one thing unitedly, after our country, which is chai. Milk tea. Or black tea but tea in general. And if you know the process of making milk tea it requires boiling the milk with the tea leaves in it to the brim then lowering the heat then again increasing and continuing this process till you smell the flavour and the milk is a beautiful red/brown colour. This process occurs all while the heat is in your control. It is like a game controller you handle while watching a liquid boil up and down in a container and its colour slowly changing.

I feel life is quite alike. We live in a space we consider our own while life regularly goes up and down at an uneven pace and through the process, we change colours, we change ourselves. And during our time of stay in this vessel, we meet new things, and new people, that add those colours into our life. Once we have met them, we are never the same.

Humans have this exceptional power of feeling and communicating impossible, heightened, euphoric, emotions. We are capable of changing and romanticizing what happens around us. And we do it in such unique, mindful, ways that during the time someone is alive, they can never say they haven’t felt. Be it love, joy, pain, void, enlightened. But none of us have ever not felt. Humans also have this exceptional power of bringing and enduring change. Growing up I’ve realized change is the wildest of emotions that we fight through, accept, and choose to live with. Sometimes it only takes moments to come and sometimes it happens over years, while sometimes it happens constantly. People say change surrounds us but I feel we surround change. It’s like we orbit around this huge mass of unknown, unthinkable events and each moment we pass one we endure it. That’s a crazy thought. But that also makes me think that in reality, the thought that our life is all about us, is so untrue. Each story that happens in every moment around the world, to each person, is not solely about them. It involves the people with them, who love them, despise them, and tolerate them. We experience a life that somehow already exists and happens on its own. We’re travelers in our own life. And we have so much more to learn and so many more changes to endure. Isn’t that absolutely crazy?