Hello Dear reader,
I am one day late in sending you my Monday newsletter, but here it is nevertheless. I am currently on my puja vacation.
I’ve come to my maternal home in Kurseong, a small hill station in North Bengal, India.
The puja holidays are on, but it’s going quite boring because of the rainy and foggy weather.
A few days ago, it rained heavily here, and the hills witnessed a terrible calamity. More than twenty people lost their lives due to floods and landslides.
 Reposted from someone’s instagram story |
The Teesta River, as people say, has “eaten away” homes and lives, but it’s not entirely the river’s or nature’s fault.
The real question also lies in what we call development.
We keep building and expanding, chasing profits, but rarely pause to think if what we are doing is also aligned with nature.
What good is development if it displaces people, erodes soil, and leads to such tragedies?
Whenever I pass the route of the Teesta River, it makes my heart feel unsettled, seeing how it once was and how it is now.
I remember when I was a child, the Teesta River felt mighty and awe-inspiring. It was the greenest green in colour, unlike other rivers I had seen, and it flowed freely and wildly with grace.
Now, the flow, the colour, the river- none of it is the same.
Because of the Teesta River project, dams and barrages have been constructed, disrupting the natural flow of the river, affecting the river ecosystem, fish migration, and aquatic biodiversity.
There’s also another project- the construction of a railway line connecting West Bengal and Sikkim underway in this fragile hill region.
In a landscape already prone to landslides, this means more deforestation, more soil disturbance, and more risk.
I cannot help but feel sad about how hills are being mined and carved in the name of progress.
And this is a story not only here in the hills.
It is happening across India, like in Ladakh, where people are demanding the 6th Schedule to protect their environment and ecological rights for the same reason that profit may not corrupt the land, and it is the same story everywhere across the world.
We don’t need development that only values money. True development is one that respects all of life- humans, animals, and our ecology.
But who is to make the change makers understand?
Now, after all the destruction, the hills are quiet again. The rains have stopped, and nature seems to be resting after its rage.
The roads are gone,
houses are washed away,
and lives have been lost, right at the time of festivities which we call Dasshai
I pray for the departed souls.
Being here in my maternal place also brings waves of nostalgia.
I remember how this house once was- the old rooms, the wooden floors which had chicken shelter underneath, the long chairs, my grandfather’s little room, the old television, my brother’s room and how it used to be.
I remember the old kitchen, where the gas stove and metal containers were kept, and my grandfather making breakfast for me and asking me to eat. I particularly remember him giving me a bun sliced in long halves with egg.
That old home is gone now, replaced by something new. It feels strange how a place that you knew for so long can just disappear.
You can’t visit it again, just like you can’t visit someone who has passed away.
That house, that moment has died too.
Sometimes I wish I could just go back for a moment- sit there, sip tea in that old room with my grandparents (who always had a cat or two), and come back. But it’s no more.
Even my own home has changed.
We renovated it recently after demolishing the old one, and now that version of the home is gone too.
I found a video of it on my phone the other day, and it hit me how that setup, those corners, those memories have slipped away, never to be found again.
Everything, eventually, fades.
“That’s why there should be no greed in us.” My mother says.
The house we live in was never truly ours. It belonged to my great-grandfather, then my grandparents. Then my father married my mother, and my father is also no more.
My mother often says, “I was a person from nowhere, and now I’m living here- so whose is it really?”
It’s strange, but it’s true. Nobody is going to take anything. None of us is going to live forever.
Our houses won’t be our houses forever.
Our lands won’t be our land forever.
Someday, someone else will live in our homes, walk the paths we walked and make new memories here.
This made me nostalgic and made me think about impermanence ~ how eventually, everything is impermanent.
- Our homes are impermanent.
- Our parents are impermanent.
- Our relationships are impermanent — even the ones that don’t end in separation, end in death.
- Our pets are impermanent.
- Our children are impermanent- they won’t be kids forever.
- Our youth is impermanent- we will all age.
- The seasons are impermanent.
- The leaves are impermanent.
- The mountains are impermanent.
And most of all — we are impermanent.
Our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions- all are impermanent.
Everything passes. Everything exists only for a brief moment in time.
It does make me sad.
There are many things I wish never to change or never to have changed.
I don’t want my pets to ever die.
I wish we always remained this young.
I wish our parents could stay with us as long as we lived.
But impermanence is the law of life. And the reason we suffer is because we don’t want things to change.
We want them to remain the same, to be under our control when nothing truly is.
Life always shows who is more powerful. Nothing can surpass the law of nature, and one of its truest laws is the law of impermanence.
The only way to live peacefully is to be at peace with the ever-changing nature of things.
In Buddhism, this is called relaxing with impermanence– a calm acceptance of the ever-changing nature of life.
To accept that life is of the nature to change- I can’t say I’m good with coming to terms with it, but I can offer a prayer for you and me:
Prayer on Impermanence
Dear God,
May I flow like a river with the changes of life.
May I see change as natural, not as loss.
May I not cling to things beyond their time, and may I let go gracefully when it’s time.
May I never be empty-hearted, no matter what I lose or bear.
May I have the wisdom to understand that all things are temporary, and live better with this awareness of impermanence.
Since I am impermanent too, may I learn to live well and love well while I am here.
Since everything is impermanent too, may I not take this life too seriously.
May I find peace in letting go and not resist what is.
Let there be no fear in endings, but joy in beginnings.
May I move with life’s eternal flow through joys and sorrows, and dance through life seeing everything that comes as an experience and experiment.
xx
Journal Prompt of the Week
Table of Contents
- What is something (or someone) I’m still holding on to that life has already asked me to release?
- What part of me is trying to flow forward while another part clings to the shore?
- What am I taking too seriously in life right now? What would “flowing with life” look like for me this week?
Blog Post of the Week
Quote of the Week
One from Others
Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
— Hermann Hesse
One from me
If you cannot have hope, just be curious about what will happen if you don’t give up.
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