A Short Meditative Story: Finding Meaning of Life In Raindrops
As long as I can remember, it has always rained on my birthday. Heavy downpour kind — the one which drenches your clothes or your soul, if you are out for even a minute.
It has this uncanny ability to match my inner emotional state — sometimes the dark clouds mirror the ones on the inside, sometimes the rain drops mimic the tear drops at the edge of my eyes, about to roll off any time with full force.And in others, I’m like Andy Dufresne of Shawshank Redemption raising my arms outstretched, looking up at the sky, and feeling a sense of relief wash over me.
I don’t know why birthdays bring about the dark clouds of melancholy inside me?
A bolt of lightning full of worthlessness manages to always give me a warm embrace on my birthday. And the interesting thing — I get its embrace only on birthdays like getting WhatsApp birthday wishes from drifted high school friends, who once were inseparable.
I’m now standing underneath a thin canopy on my terrace watching tiny rain drops, full of excitement, race towards the concrete floor, only to be morphed into beautiful tiny ripples of concentric circles, or those spherical bubbles that last only for a few seconds.
I can’t help but see the same cosmic dance in my life — minutes, days, months, and years morphing into ephemeral memories that I can’t hold on to.
My life seems like that accidental bubble — conceived out of rain drops smashing onto the hard concrete floor — which begins its journey into oblivion the moment it’s born.
I wish my life, or life in general, wasn’t like that — devoid of meaning, or agenda.
Or perhaps, I’m all wrong.
Maybe the tiny rain drop’s purpose was to blossom into a beautiful half-sphere. And discover other half-spheres. And then do their happy dance, even if it’s just for a little while.
Isn’t it so beautiful to see these bubbles surf on shallow rain water? They seem intoxicated on life, the way they zig zag happily around other bubbles, and how their surface shakes while they dance away to oblivion.
Maybe I’m an imperfect half-sphere. Maybe all of us are.
And we just need to do this happy dance because that’s what there is to life.
