A Summer Vacation
The first
thing I did when the vacation began was to make a list. I have this habit of
making to do lists that tend to be useful at times. There is always a list at
hand. Urgent tasks, pending work, small details that might slip away especially
since the time I crossed thirty-five and seem to have acquired a talent for
forgetting. It runs in the family. I remember my aunt who, in the pre-mobile
era, carefully wrote down every important phone number in a notebook—only to
forget where she had kept the notebook itself.
This
vacation, I told myself, would be different. I thought of making healthy
changes in my diet and starting to exercise. My body resisted, my mind
wandered, but something in me wanted to persist. There were also reminders of
limitations such as high blood pressure, thyroid issues, fatigue, the
discomfort of summer heat, a lingering sense of mental unrest. I thought of
becoming a fitter person by the end of this summer vacation.
Instead,
I found myself immersed in four seasons of Never Have I Ever, caught up
in the chaos of Devi Vishwakumar’s life. It may be a show meant for teenagers,
but it stirred memories—how confusing those years had been, how uncertain I had
felt. Some emotions do not age; they simply wait for the right story to awaken
them. Around me,the TBR pile kept on accumlating: Young Forever, It’s
Easy to Be Healthy, The 5 AM Club. I read about discipline, about
transformation, about becoming a better version of oneself. The ideas were
inspiring, but inspiration, I realised, is fleeting. Still, I tried.
Then my
sleep cycles became disturbed with afternoon sleep. Sleep became erratic. The
afternoons stretched long and drowsy, the nights restless. I thought about
waking early, about the idea of brahmamuhurtham, that sacred quiet
before dawn. I have always been an evening person, but I wondered if mornings
might hold a different kind of clarity. One day, I managed it. I woke early,
walked, read, and felt, briefly, a return of something I had once known—a sense
of purpose, of alignment. It reminded me of another time, years ago, when I had
first read The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. Back then, life had seemed
full of promise.
There
were interruptions such as travel, hospital visits, health concerns, unfinished
work waiting quietly in the background. There were days of complete inertia,
when even getting out of bed felt like an effort. Days when the question arose,
uninvited: What for? Sometimes it is just a dull heaviness, a lack of
direction, a quiet erosion of meaning.
My sole
refuge was journaling and I tried looking at the empty page with a new
understanding. It became a habit and
refuge by being a new way to make sense of inner turbulence. A way to remind
myself that my story, however small it may seem, belongs to a larger human
pattern. The days had blurred into monotony—sleep, heat, small attempts at
discipline, small failures. I walked a little, ate a little better, tried to
bring order into my surroundings. I thought about writing a book—The Diary
of a Female Quixote—a collection of reflections shaped into something meaningful.
The
desire to write comes in bursts and there are moments when you feel that you
want to record every passing moment and narrate stories about your existence. In
those moments, I am certain that I will write something worth reading,
something that will endure. By morning, the certainty fades, replaced by doubt,
by routine, by the ordinary weight of life.
I am half
way through my vacation and I walk occasionally and try to eat healthy. This
vacation did not transform me in any dramatic way. I did not complete my lists.
I did not become disciplined overnight. I did not solve the deeper questions
that trouble me. But I have made an attempt to write a summer journal and tried
in small ways to care for myself. I hope that I continue journaling though not
daily but at least whenever the burst of creativity reaches me.
