A new year is coming. The people are waiting for the blessed moment to usher it in with a frenzied joy. like everybody, I also share the prayer of Alfred lord Tennyson-“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, 'It will be happier’...” Many would, however, say that a year’s end is neither an end, nor a beginning, it is a going on. Yet, a new year is a new year. I am one of the multitudes, yearning for a year during which I would make mistakes and try new things, learning, changing, striving to ‘ring out falsehood and ring in truth’, inevitably failing in the endeavour, but undaunted, rising up again from the relics of my shattered resolution. Yet, somewhere deep within, I was feeling disturbed a few days before the advent of the new year while staring at the sky on a night when the moon was just a day off the full. The thought that the ushering of a new year meant my life getting shorter by a year was troubling me when I was gazing at the beaming moon and the glittering stars twinkling in their incredible innumerableness, (rarely visible in the city’s firmament) hanging from the canopy of a brilliantly- lit infinity. They appeared so near, shedding warmth and light, on that chilled night! I felt that the end in the abyss of nothingness, was stealing its way with unerring steps, slowly, stealthily, taking me unaware, through the years I welcome and bid adieu to with a bubbling expectancy of the fulfilment of the unfulfilled. I wondered over whether there was something which would help me keeping afloat on this thriving infinity, peopled with the mystery of the deeps, timelessly, where I can live in a timeless time, enjoying something which knows no end and no beginning, an eternity, an ever- new moment, which does not need a new year to savour a newness that is old.
As the nocturnal ambience was turning ethereal, transporting me a far-off fairy place away from the mundane into a supra-mundane, I went deep into things. Was this stable point the Nihil the Buddhists conceptualise, something reaching which the flame of the living, burning through countless births and deaths and rebirths, springing from the Karma, is put out once and for all, ending all that I am in a Sunya, a vacuum, a voidIJ If it were so I do not want to lose myself in that Sunya. I want to enjoy life in its multitudinous joy, in life and after death, returning to life to die and to live again... It was then that the inspiring theme of the Upanishads flooded my mind which speaks about a supreme existence to which we can go back, casting aside the veil of the fleeting things which we take for our real self. I felt convinced that bewitching night that there is no way other than falling back on the Upanishads which affirms that we can not only get a glimpse of a pure existence but we also can draw back into it and live from it, a supreme experience of the stable and the eternal in us, the Purusha. But at the same time, Upanishads says that the energy, the movement, our continual coming and going is also a part of the divine play. Both Shiva and Kali are real, perfect consort to each other, Kali representing the movement in time and space while Shiva embodying the timeless and spaceless pure existence. Kali is the dance of Shiva and the objective of the existence of Shiva is to enjoy the joy of the ecstatic dance of Kali, creating, destroying, new-creating the cosmos, our ceaseless coming and going while enjoying the multitudinous experiences through the ephemeral lives following one another, as we are part of the joyous dance of Shiva who is the One dancing in All.
TS Eliot says, “For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice and to make an end is to make a beginning.” Nothing ends; from what seems an end starts a new beginning... I cannot help quoting my favourite poet more when the new year is quivering on the threshold, growing impatient for its advent. “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” The same Upanishadic depth, bringing a whiff of the “Immortal’s air in life’s closed room”.
