a sea of identities!

The tides, the waves, the roar of the seas,

They frighten yet allay me…

The lightning, the thunder, 

The dark clouds of storms…

They rage deep within me…

I swam across the ocean once,

Hoping to get lost,

I swam across the seven seas…

To find again what was once lost…

This agony of fear,

Of not knowing myself,

Of doubt and disappointment,

It’s worse than your worst nightmare…

But while swimming across that sea,

This light that I failed to see…

Shone brightly into the darkness,

As it told me,

“You swam across an ocean love,

Is this not who you are meant to be?”

the recipe for serenity!

Inhale… Exhale… Inhale… Repeat…

Somewhere lost between these breaths, between all the noise and chaos, there lies peace… there lies serenity. It’s that balance between being emotional and being mad where serenity lies. That’s the beauty that we never recognize.

Maybe serenity is not found deliberately but much more by accident in our lives… I guess that’s what we call as love! This perfect balance of all the elements of our lives, just coexisting in harmony, resonating with our minds, calming it down yet pumping it with adrenaline!

That perfect moment of serenity is usually found in silence, no matter between whichever two elements. When both of them are calm, at rest, even if they are surrounded by chaos, that’s when serenity exists between them.

But what about when someone either adds too much of an element or too little of one? Serenity is a balance, a balance between the mind and the heart of a recipe, and if something goes wrong, the recipe tells us itself on how to restore it. We just need to look!

So hold on to serenity, hold on as a soldier holds on to a lover, as a parent to a child! Hold on and never let go of your recipe for that may change and evolve with time, but it’s yours, your recipe to serenity!

So inhale… exhale… inhale and repeat! 

the midnight lamp!

Sitting on the beanbag in your home watching the moment pass by, recollecting how you spent the day and deciding how you will spend the night, lucky are you if you say “I shall sleep”, but for insomniacs this moment, this standstill of time where the entire day has passed and the night bears upon you is where the most craziest of all your crazy, stupid and idiotic ideas strike. Eureka!

Excited by a new idea, for whatever your heart longs the most you get off the beanbag on which you so lazily sat, excited and rejuvenated, full of energy to accomplish what might take forever in a single night, you lose your thoughts of sleeping for this idea of yours is more important than anything else in that one, tiny standstill moment!

So excited are you that you might just dance, and dance if you must for that’s what makes these ideas so special. You get up and first find a page, any page where you may write down this idea for you are so frightened of forgetting it!

As you begin writing, you go on and on and at a point it seems as though the idea is writing itself and you are just the medium through which it takes shape. Writing, scribbling, writing and repeating the process over and over again till you are satisfied with yourself, you finally stop, not of exertion but of shortness of breath!

You get up again, this time to only find yourself being dragged to the kitchen to brew a hot cup of coffee with your favourite vanilla essence, so that you can hold the cup deep in your palm to feel the warmth of your drink and the aroma of the coffee bean. Drunk with caffeine and ecstasy you sit down once more with that so called single page of your crazy idea to work on it even more.

Slowly as the caffeine wears out and without realising that you are falling asleep only a few hours away from dawn to be awaken by the alarm you lay your head on that page of ideas!

It’s in the morning when you wake up, still a little drowsy that you re-read that page only to realise it really is stupid and senseless, but then, that’s where the fun begins!

-Mehul Doshi