Seasons of Change

As time goes on, it carries forward with it people who in the rumble, tumble of the path that they walk on change. Life changes not in dramatic flashes, but rather in slow measured movements barely perceived and much less understood, untl one day you pause to take the look back, you throw caution to the wind and go against all the warningsmthat you have been given to not look back. You stop on that path for a moment and turn fully expecting people behind you to turn into stone, but they do not. What you get instead is a whole group of people who were not around the time you started your walk, atleast don't resemble any of the people who came along with you. It is puzzling. change is supposed to be good. Here you are so far away from where you began, you have crossed the point where all you can see is the long road in front of you and you croos all the accomplishments that you set out to achieve. And yet here you are stopping, for a fraction a moment time has ceased to move and you stand there wishing you could go back to that simple, yet uncomplicated life you lived in, longing for only the love of the people you recogonized. The time when you were dissolving in peals of laughter when your cousin fell from the high bar, and giggling like a bunch of theives when you snuck behind your grandmother's house wih the whole basket of three dozen mangoes and devoured them with your n number of cousins, chewing the skin vigourously, and sipping and goobling that sweet nectar of Gods,before it hit the lily white dress your mother bought. Running like the hounds were behind you when the watchman from the apartment down the block chased you for aiming a rocket under his chair and hanging upside down for most of summer from the parallel bars till there was so much blood in your brain that everything looked red and there were round things dancing around your eyes. You look at the person who first taught you how to drive a two wheeler and at the big strapping brother who protected you from the wandering eyes of a romeo. The games you played with six stones and a scarf and sometiems with nothing at all. the songs you sang as you drenched yourself in a glorious river and relished the warm and sweet taste of pongal made with jaggery in a stone pot hit your throat. The days when you chugged along in a train for three days and four nights and how you roped in the entire compartment for a game of anthakshri. Time it appeared had ceased to be then, an yet there it was all along chipping in the changes that would make us who you are today,sculpting in the curves that would impact your lives delicately yet profoundly and along those curves, a plethora of discoveries would be made as they discover their life waiting for them, waiting to mould them into people they knew not and into people they never imagined they had in them. You walk on unaware, being guided by your own little light. You walk till one day you hear your heart beating amidst all the noise and you realise the music that had been playing around has reduced to a gentle hum and you like the soothing tones of the strained melody and yet you yearn for the cacophony of noises that would erupt when you sang with your friends and family. You feel lost and yet you feel the need to go on. It is perhaps with the hope that somewhere down the other curve that you pass, you will see all those people who created those noises waiting for you to catch up with time, change and life. You perhaps must have missed a moment when you stopped, instead of just walking. That was why they asked you not to look back.