i2I.

Being born in India and growing up reading stories of swamis and mystiques this one question had stuck in me for a long time. “Who am I”.

Who Am I ?

I have never seriously tried to answer this question or pursue for an answer. It has always been reading this in a book or listening to some one in a video.

The standard answers like “I am not this body” or “I am not this mind” were there in some corner and had cluttered my ability to answer this question. The more I had thought in the lines of some one else’s thinking the more I felt I was away from finding an answer.

For several years now after having gone through what I call a phase of my life, working, travelling, marrying, fathering it was clear to me that there is nothing significant in this life unless you decide to make it that way. And whatever I had done before is like a hazy distant dream fading away with this person, me, left behind.

It is almost like I was washed away by a stream of water and now standing with no drops remaining on me. You are back to where you were. However I should say there are still drops from the past on you but it is no longer a stream.

I guess it was during one of my morning jogs ..

When I felt how distant I was to the childhood image of me. As a child going to school, strictly obeying my parents and teachers, spending time with friends, reading books in the library, playing cricket…where is that guy?

Later into college, the late night discussions on varied topics with friends, the occasional intensity of exams, the pressure of coming out unscathed…where is that guy?

and on and on..a million times …the so called me in various places, various avatars

None of them can be what I am now except in photographs and the quaint smile of people who have seen me in those avatars.

10 years from now, this ME, will just reside in the photographs and a new ME will fill me.

In fact if I carefully observe I am being undone and redone every moment of this life. Every little emotion adds a colour to me, brings a new dimension of me.

Small nuggets of information about me is constantly updated by me from others, from the world every moment.

If I look at this phenomenon, every thing I have identified as myself does not hold. Some die immediately, some stick on and die later. There is nothing I vigorously defend as ‘I’ is true about me.

What I think I am simply does not exist anywhere unless I decide to acknowledge it. Almost all the time this happens automatically without me.

The true ME is the decider. The one, who if I start being that, will start deciding what can be ME.

Hard as hell. But the realization will get you there some day.