Souvenirs

It's rather important when focusing on life to put only emphasis on the things that are happening along with you. Right now, it's hard. There are a myriad of things that are upcoming that fill my mind, sprinkled in with a variety of photographic snapshots and memories of a month away in a life less ordinary. These are my souvenirs.

Really, when it all comes down to it, the souvenirs that you collect during life help to capture the memories of the things worth remembering. Souvenirs of sights and smells and colors and music. If you are ever in need of traveling back to a time when things were as before, a souvenir will help take you there. These souvenirs of life are useful to keep in your pocket when you are having trouble at looking at the present.

Presently, I somewhat struggle, as I did only a few short months ago, to find the realism in these two extremely apparent lives that I try desperately to live equally. There is no sensation of coexistence among them, however. Soon enough, I will be back with the life that I know so well, a life that I have successfully created for myself with a little help from the universe. I have a wonderful home and job and friends and family. I am eager to find those all waiting for me. However, there is a life that I have been piecing together here in India, sort of intentionally... sort of willingly... sort of nervously. As far as I know, my life is filled to the brim with meaning and beauty, but the brew here in India is something more exotic than I have ever known. Is there a way for these two realities to live together? I am not sure.

So until I can put that addition together to quantify the mathematics of it, I will sit here to focus on my breath and the sunlight and the never-steady pulse in my vessels. Truly, it's all I have. Worrying about the narrowed combination of a life to navigate to and a life to leave behind is unnecessary, to say the least.

In the meantime, between the pages of this novel, I will spend my moments with the smiles of haggard sales-children, brilliant flowers on the roadside, antiqued jewelry hung out in the alleyway to buy, and a steamed momo or two. I truly realize that there is no sense in worrying about my journey: where it is going, when it may end, what it may make me.

Tomorrow I will endure the last of this round of procedures. I am not sure what it will entail, but I am eager to get one more snowstorm of cells before I enter the true snowstorms awaiting for me in Colorado.

With that said, I am off to Janpath Market for perhaps a scarf, a wooden Ganesha sculpture, or a shiny brass singing bowl. Whatever the case, I am continuing to move forward with only so much as an appreciation of everything before right now and everything else to come. Because, truly, what else matters?