POSTCARD#292: New Delhi: Saying goodbye seems to be happening more and more these days… ‘See-you later’, becoming less and less. No immediate future here, it’s the countdown to the last goodbye; leaving Delhi after seven years. Then ‘hello-again’ Bangkok looming on the horizon but somehow I can’t see it yet; stepping out of one life and into another. Less than three weeks to go, each new day dawns and takes the place of the day before; each hour replaces the one before it and the memory of what happened in the interim is gone as we tumble into the descent of ‘no-time’.

Looking forward to getting back, but resting in this place where it’s always today, even though it has different names; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., tomorrow becomes today as future time slides into present time, and consecutively each day occupies the place where the one before it was. As we get further along on the journey to get there, a whole new landscape deletes the one before and is itself layered over by successive landscapes in the grand scheme of things.

Hovering on the edge of the smallest pause where the ‘now’ is on the brink of falling into the past (the future form not arrived yet) and pondering the conundrum of how we can revisit the past and change it around so it’s less burdensome in the here-and-now, and long after the event, in the blinding white light of ten thousand leagues into the future, the karma of how that event blossoms.

Everything said and done in a spontaneous leap of words, arranging themselves as they fall: to whom is this happening… is there a self? Something wrong with the question, it’s suggesting ‘self’ is an object… out ‘there’ somewhere. ‘Self’ must be the subject, but when I search for it in a subjective sense, there are only the mind/body characteristics, otherwise nothing is there or here or anywhere.

What is nothingness? Same thing again, the tendency is to think of ‘nothing’ as something, as an object – and that’s not it. Nothingness must be both subject and object… what’s happening? I am not here, incognito, perhaps concealed in a makeshift identity. I don’t really know, it all seems to vanish as each new day dawns and deletes the memory of the previous day, an hour replaces the hour before it and I can’t remember anything that recently happened.

Or maybe I totally ‘am’ here and from this point of view, the world is spinning around me, new landscapes take the place of what was there before… endless flickering cycle of daylight into darkness in the countdown of remaining days in Delhi. When the departure finally arrives, I picture it as the familiarity of airports, the journey itself, Hindi signage changed to Thai, same Sanskrit roots of words, similar culture, but a sense of being in a smaller place. Thai voices, unobtrusive, so quiet it’s hard to hear what they are saying… the inter-relationship of all and everything, same days different names. Adjustments to Default Voicemail after 22 December: “Sorry we are not here to receive your call…” The empty space of not-knowing exactly what it is, until it gets here.

“Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, ‘Thy will be done.’ We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.” [Swami Vivekananda]