Empathy, Solitude and Love

 

Feeling lonely? Solitude is somewhere in the same garden. With a lonely feeling you are depressed, which perilously borders on being destructive. Solitude, on the other hand, is creative. There is an art of changing your loneliness into solitude. You can even start with a peacock like I tell you.

Finding it difficult to empathize with fellow human beings due to many setbacks and disappointments? Well, don’t feel too low. Start with nature and its constituents who have been pushed to the corner due to our onslaught. Empathy is the mother of compassionate self. Nurture her well, and she will deliver a healthy, kind and considerate baby. As a gift you hardly get brooding moments to feel lonely.

Instead of just killing time, and as a result kill my own prospects to being better, I willingly sympathize with the evening guest, even though he won't have tea. I accept my share of the collective sins against Mother Nature. This very acknowledgment lays the first brick of the building of redemption. The biggest of trees sprout from the smallest of seeds. Similarly, mightiest salvations, and resultant boons, rewards and achievements, begin from tiny sensitivities. Sounds miraculous? Well, not to me, because I understand that they make up the persona over all. With the warmth of empathy, my solitude turns full of love.

I see groups of peacocks and peahens on rooftops and terraces foraging for survival in the concrete jungle. Farmlands cover almost all the countryside now. And there are hardly any reptiles and insects to feed upon. Landholding is decreasing. Population is increasing. Agriculture is becoming unviable. More and more chemicals are used to increase production. Commerce sees only the outstanding stats of production and profit-loss equation in financial terms. It overlooks the shadows under the shiny lamp where ecological destruction is writing newer and newer tragic tales. Chemicals give diseases to humans in the medium turn, but they kill reptiles and insects straightway. So where will the peacocks go? They take refuge in the concrete jungle. Ironically, almost every species now stands at the mercy of we human beings.

Well, the winter is slowly building up and the sunrays are losing their pinch. And the moment they lose their hot potency, your skin pines for a warm kiss. Welcome early winters! I have been writing for my blog almost through the day. Then feeling tired I decide to move around to take a tea break in the evening. And here comes the guy, the bald Romeo who has shed his plumage hence bothered more about food than peahens. No spare chapati, his favorite, this evening. So I offer biscuits. He takes a few unwelcoming bites. I try wheat grains. Lo, here he is savoring his evening snack. But I feel sad that he cannot have tea and be my tea party partner.

He has learnt the lesson: to survive you are at the mercy of humans. With his natural feeding ground, the countryside, turning into a chemical bowl of monoculture where poison kills insects, rodents and reptiles immediately in the fields—and humans also, slowly over a period of time as the toxicants enter the food chain and punish we humans for our collective sins—this beautiful multicolored wonder of mother nature enters houses, beating its natural fear of the two-footed most dangerous animal on the planet, and stands there like a well decorated beggar. What else to do? No option left.

The struggling farmers pour chemicals, pesticides and weedicides in the fields. Nothing is thus left for this free forager in the open countryside. So it lands on terraces and yards to get survival morsels. Sometimes when its hunger is unbeatable, it follows people well into their rooms, like a cute kid hankering after elders for chocolate. The last time it came, it had a huge bunch of shining and shimmering plumage, just on the verge of shedding it away. I could hear my mother requesting, "Arre pagal pankh hamare ghar gira ke Jaana!"

However, in this he is the master of his own will. So here comes the colorful Romeo without his burden. He has shed his plumage and looks like a nimble, flirtatious teenager. Moves freely, flies with lesser effort. But it comes at the cost of love. Peahens won't give him a damn look without his decoration. And of course my mother is angry that he didn't shed even a single feather in our yard. "Go to them whom you gave your feathers!" The poor thing gets reprimanded. She starts with her household chores, but not before handing over a chapatti (so it was there after all; or mothers have better eyes than sons in these regards) to me to honor the colorful guest.

With a sad smile on my face, I look at the guest eating the chapatti pieces. Possibly we have already done irreversible damage to the ecosystem. But then there is always hope as long as one sees such colorful wonder of Mother Nature. I decide to be happy and hopeful as it completes it belated lunch. Stretches and shakes its shortened plumage as a mark of contentment and majestically moves to the far end of the yard where it can spot a bucket of water. It always takes water after the meals, by the way. Cornered in a tiny eco-space, it may well be the last in its lineage, but then the sight is so beautiful that all the doomsday scenarios get dispelled. I smile with a contended feeling as it hops onto the wall and goes away.   

So brother and sisters, life is lying around in countless forms for us to provide a bit of meaning to our own self. It has unlimited potential to give love; has limits for our greed though. Go, pick up the small wares and build the palace of your happiness.