Musings

You have to be an Island at first to be a part of the big land later. If you start considering yourself as essentially being a part of the mainland then you won’t be able to etch out an identity for yourself. This is an identity crisis of the worst kind as apparently it doesn’t seem to be a crisis at all. What can really be wrong in being a part of the whole? On the outside, nothing; but on the inside, everything.

A direct outcome of this realization is that you have to learn to believe in the ephemeral existence of things around you before trying to monumentalize them. Let me elaborate on this further, suppose you have a personal experience which can make a pretty interesting story, you have to first train yourself to fully flesh it out as it is. At this stage, do not bother about how appealing it might sound to others. It may or it may not. In order to fully realize that personal experience into a story, you have to spit out whatever you have around that; free-associate. Just get is out of your system, you will feel unburdened. You are now convinced that you have it in you to put something out of your sheer experience into a sensible narrative that appeals to at least one person in your knowledge. That is you.

Several story ideas don’t even see the light of the day, despite their high appeal value. They pass out through that initial self-censorship phase. Those that make it to the next level have a slight chance to making it even bigger. Therefore it is essential to spit it out, and see where it takes you. Remember, the best of the stories were merely “an idea” before they became timeless classics.

In the process of writing these ideas, sometimes you need a certain degree of detachment. You don’t want to color the impressions of your ideas by something that has already been present in a much matured form to you. One of the challenges of modern times is that you are living in an age of overwhelming visual experiences where peoples’ (including yours) aesthetic and cinematic senses have heightened manifold over the past few years. Any nascent idea dies out a quick death due to a lack of visual thinness. Good thing here is that your gut feeling still prevails. If your instinct says it can then it will. But sensitizing one’s instinct is like rolling the dice and watch the luck play out. Instincts are moody whores. Any moment could be as wrong as it is right.

By severing all the connections and curbing all the cravings to go back to civilization, you embark on that inner journey which is full of unseen passages and unturned twists. Sometimes to reach that deep inside, you need to dissociate from others and just be unto yourself. Like a remote, lonesome island. Easier said than done.