Saturday, June 08, 2013

Alternate reality

All this week a thought has been running at the back of my head, the thought has been trying to make its way on to paper but I have been withholding the thought and preventing it from reaching its fruition because I am not sure if I really realize what the greater implications of the thought might be. I have finally decided to give up the resistance and start putting down the thought on paper because past experience has taught me that I writing is the only mechanism that allows me to understand my thoughts.  So here it goes -
Over the last couple of years and especially in the last week I feel like my life and the life of everyone around me is being lived in two spheres. My friends have joked about me being like Alice from the Alice in wonderland series. I actually feel like that right now. The other movies that come to mind are The Matrix and the Truman show where an alternate reality is created and people living in them start to believe that is actually the real world.
Everyday I drive back from work I pass by 4 to 5 bus stops. The scene on every single bus stop is identical, people peering into their smart phones and looking at something busily. I often wonder what it is that they are all deeply looking into? My glare then moves on to fellow drivers, each one of them eagerly trying to get home in the engineering marvels that they dearly call cars. And once I do finally get home, my husband and I peer into our laptops and watch a soccer game or an interesting episode of Scrubs. We discuss application programming, the new windows phone vs. the android phone and the pros and cons of Windows 8. Once in  a while when we do get fed up of technology we discuss people and the so called first world problems that each one of our friends/family are going through.
This rigmarole goes on day in and day out and we enjoy most of it. Newer technologies at work, newer relationships, occasional celebrations, some upsets and so on. Most of what we all call life!

But then a question pops up in my head once in a while, what is life? Isn't life the fishes in lake outside my house, the lady bug crawling on my balcony, the stars shimmering in the sky at night, the intelligence in nature that makes every season come on time, sun rise, sun set, the brilliance that makes the moon disappear every 15 days and then reappear again. Ahh well that seems to be life, but then where do I fit in. With my latest smart phone, my laptop, my latest facebook update or twitter feed, where do I fit in. It almost seems like my reality does not mesh with this other reality. It almost feels like an alternate reality. Is it the same life that runs in me and all of this wonderful world around me. We are all made of the same atoms, live on the same earth, breath the same air and ultimately die and mix into the mother earth. We are all connected in some sense but our current way of life just seems to be taking us away from that connectedness. Nature is something that we drive down an hour or two to visit. Nature is not something that lives and breathes within me.

But then I get a message on my smart phone and I forget all about nature and me and about all of it being One.