Ritual To Resolution

There’s this strange sense of contentment that accompanies bus rides, particularly when your figure’s lodged to one of its back seats. The 13 meters long metal structure grants me comfort like no other place. Intrigued by the mundanity of the houses we speed past, it almost feels like my duty to adjust my head just right in order to peak into its open gates. These few minutes allow me to absorb truths stretched over this expanse of land, while introducing me to the clusters of reality I am unaware of within the perimeters of my own hometown. I hold the key to a faultless dimension, otherwise known as the bus I board.

The bustle of children’s voices welcomed me every time I entered the vehicle. What seemingly looked like an invincible surge of sound was all muffled as I approached my seat. The chasm of voices remain hung on the trapezes of my mind – nothing dared to divert my pooled mirror of thoughts.

I start painting my surroundings with opaque shades, leaving my window untouched. Time pauses, and I’m left with my persistent thoughts, a throbbing heart, and the melancholic voice of Umm Kulthum playing. It has been quite a while since I last felt the tides of buoyancy bathe me into a jocund state. Everything I’ve inherited from life fill my heart in that very moment.

Scanning the landscape out my window is where I am able to see, more than anywhere else, the significance of simplicity. The pace at which time truly proceeds. I can measure all scalars, fill all pages with stories of people I’ve met, drive through the atrocity of colours, decipher foreign dialects and count all hues on the street. Rides on the bus act as my temporary getaway.

In a similar fashion, this ritual sets me reflecting on the twists and turns of life; it births a self-evaluation process. Seldom do I host these reflective sessions with myself, and I truly find it a blessing to be able to do so now. Who knew that a few minutes on a moving body possesses the power of pausing time? Who knew that it would generate resolutions from an intertwinement of troubles?

The sun offers me a shaft of its light and whispers: “All that is measured, all that is timed has grown ugly, colourless, distasteful. Spontaneity shines a light brighter than that I radiate. Don’t let the illusion of time fool you. Your era will not commence unless you start orbiting a new star. Mould yourself according to all that you aspire to be, but don’t let it mould you.”

What is it that triggers understanding between a sore spirit and its holder? Is it the sounds emerging from lips and tongues that reassemble fragments of minds? Is it in the products of our mouths? Or in the vibration of our throat tendons?

Does it not rely on the state of tranquility? A state in which the soul is carried to its ray of light and heart to its abode? Is it not solitude that separates us from our mundane selves, and leaves us swimming in the infinite space of divinity?

A mere change in number will not mend your self equation unless you allow it to. Not until an inner endeavour is acted upon that change will ever prove noticeable. Resolutions, dreams, and goals aren’t embedded to the start of a new year, but also surface when you’re in desperate need of change. To my dismay, I’ve figured that time hasn’t always been a loyal companion. As this new year unfolds, it appears to me that time is able to carry both the good and the bad. I am not in the good, nor in the bad. I’m somewhere in between.

 This writer of this piece has requested to remain anonymous.