Lately I have been dedicating time to clean up my room, to the delight of my mother. Considering I have a lot of crap unused stuff stored away, I thought its the right time to minimize and put away things I dont use regularly to a proper storage.
A couple of days back I decided to take out all my old college books and move them. The main idea being that I could not find a couple of my old books and thought they are mixed up with those books. Fortunately I found the books I was looking for, but more importantly I found pieces of the past along the way.
Its odd that we spend so much time thinking about what is happening at the present and how to turn the future into something we want that we easily forget the times when we were far more happier. Picking up my old college notes and finding scribbles on the last few pages brought back such fond memories. Old assignments that were written as thought it was a punishment, old question papers that were important for just three hours…
I also found most of my old diaries… thoughts years old and more importantly clear. Thoughts that made me who I am today. Thoughts I dont think about anymore… not coz I moved on but coz I changed.
I found my old German notes too, the only other language I had tried to learn. I wasn’t the best of the students, I actually just managed to scrape thru while my friends simply excelled. Those were some fun days.
I found photocopied notes that were of the uppermost importance for those couple of days before the exam. They even had the logo of the shop where were we frequented just to get books photocopied…
I found copies of my first stories, neatly printed out so that my friends could read it and give me feed back. Notes from my first acting classes… ahh they feel like a generation ago :) My first plays and adaptations… Notes on characters and scenes… It felt like I had lived another lifetime.
All the way the mind was being bombarded by old incidents, old conversations and faces. Everything seemed like it just happened a day or two ago, but it has been years… things have changed… somethings havent :)
The only thing that makes absolute justice to this moment was the quote from American Beauty:
I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life… You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.