The hand from many days past

It en-gladens the mind and everyone else, when one chances on a sight SO perchance, while in the midst of a moribund party, looking for things to colour the blankness.
(No, NO Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, or ANYthing going there! :-)

This'll be a simple elaboration of what the wandering mind thought of the image captured above, so many days back, in a world that seems so distant and yet so distinctly present.

At first glance it seemed to be little more than the inter-dimensional portal wherein the hand meets its shadow, only to find the wall beneath becoming fluid, so as to open the doors to another universe.

Then, one was hit by that which one refers to as the 'Falling feather phenomenon'.


This was first observed on one of my countless walks across the wonderful IIMC campus. Something about the way in which the feather travelled, hit me. Within moments I realized that the root of all the awe was in the mutual journeys that the feather, and its shadow on the street-light lit road took; how both travelled from afar, covering severe obstacles of the unthinking wind and passers-by on one hand, and the many terrestrial objects that litter one's path on the other; how both looked each other in the eye, long before any connections were discovered, not even thinking of what lay ahead; how both felt the need to become one at some point in time, and then spent their every waking moment, scouring the environs so as to attain that the earliest; how both had started out in 2 worlds, and yet how their union was immovably fixed (by definition perhaps!). As in popular parlance today, "it was written".
In fact, the moment their outstretched hands touched on the ground, one could almost hear a distant 'sigh' underneath.

The union between the hand and its rightful partner is rather self-explanatory, in light of the phenomenon described above.

Finally, one last story which hit me this very moment.
The hand is what one is today.
The shadow is that which one becomes tomorrow.
It is as if there are 2 persons standing there, with palms in direct contact; one is the self of today, and the other, that of tomorrow. The interface between them, is the moment of 'now', the only time that we actually live. And our existences are made meaningful, by the stitching together of several such 'now's, each in effect the communion of the self of today, with the self of the morrow. Each such meeting, is the seed for a million possibilities. The present is after all, all that one really has.
Further, one may observe that this instant is where life truly exists, for inspite of all of man's social-ness, are not all his interactions and experiences aimed, finally, at attaining oneness with the self? Borrowing loosely from 'Siddhartha', in this entire cosmos, of several countless alien beings, colours and elements, is it not the self that man is most distant from?

Sigh... Nice it is to find oneself getting still newer insights into things one had considered long understood, long consumed, long dead.
Such is life I'm sure.