“Lightness of being” is all

I am a self-confessed hedonist fond of all good things that I can mine out of this ephemeral life for my insatiable platter. Besides gorging on the magnificent delights that mother Nature presents  – golden-hued dawn and bird song, changing moods of the Dhauladhar,  meditative silence of the deodars, crimson-cheeked sun’s shy descent heading west for the rendezvous, and so on – I adore  exalting company of friends (though the truly cherished kind is harder to come by!). Above all, I love the sunshine of books that open new worlds of thought and bestow revealing insights into life and world; dispel the cobwebs of hatred and bigotry from the mind; infuse love, compassion and poetry in our souls and sculpt us into better humans; stimulate, excite, tickle and titillate and make us cry or laugh. And in addition, if yours truly is able to pen-push a few lines off and on, I have no need for any kind of heavenly bliss. That said, it is however the little story of my abiding love for the Bacchus that I intend to wax eloquent on. I have been a votary of a good sundowner and increasingly so with advancing years. But of late I was caught off-guard. Life was good: some reading, some two-bit writing, and even if sans old friends – “who tread softly on one’s dreams…” – a good sip in the evening in the sad-sweet company of utopian fantasies. It was bliss. But on the insistence of a kin when I went for the LFT along with other routine tests, the results were a shock. My liver after having patiently endured my (inadvertent) transgressions had finally decided to revolt – not forsaking its golden silence though – a nice, good guy that it is. Some parameters had crossed the lakhshman rekha beyond belief. That probably had told upon other organs also reflecting a poor picture of my overall health profile. Suddenly, from a Bacchus lover I had turned into its inveterate adversary. I lost all appetite for the ‘drink’. And from a settled, happy routine of one trying to live his twilight years to the hilt, it was dispiriting visits to the labs, doctors, and having to keep date with the prescribed medicines that became the dominant theme of life.

It has been over 4 months now. The liver, like a kind, helpful pal, kept a patient vigil over my reformative journey; and after the doctor(s) gave me the thumbs up, loosened its reins to let the ‘tipple’ woo me and win back my affections!

Being an easy-to-please type, I took the bait, and it is back to good old times again, but tempered by discreetness.

But why am I serving this maudlin personal saga on your plate? Just to say that a truly humbling experience that it has been for me, I am now more acutely aware than before that it all boils down to  human conceit. A vicious fiend that it is, feted by over-confidence – be it about health (or wealth) or any aspect of worldly life – it turns your head; you lose your sanity, your grip on the ground; turn narcissistic and haughty and tend to live in your own misshapen bubble of self-delusion sequestered from all that makes life healthy, beautiful and wholesome. To my mind, humility, the “lightness of being”, a conceit-free mind is the soil where we grow the garden of all-encompassing love, sprinkle its fragrance all around, stay sane and cheerful and finally  bid our ‘adieus’ not with a grumpy frown of vanity but with a  little smile of love on the face!

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