Just like the touch of a needle upon a record of music brings the frozen beauty of music to life, do we not listen to the songs of experiences and memories that we collect over our walk though life..?

Just like the fine groove of a record of music capture the beauty of music and its elegant flow, do we not imprint the passage of time of our existence in the record tracks of our minds..?

We tag the needle that plays the tracks of our being with a special name: the present moment –here and now. Yet how easily do we intoxicate ourselves and wonder away with the songs to the past and to the future; like a bob going up and down incessantly in the rough waters, never knowing what is like to be at rest..?

It may be our natural tendency to leave our destiny at the mercy of the time; for we see our lives and everything around us flowing along with this river of time that goes only in one direction and together takes all that are young, fresh and vital to their old age, decay, disease and antiquity.

But is it…? Why does time opens us such an inevitable one-way path towards decay…? Since the hay days of human civilization, we have learnt to master technology, innovation and ingenuity to reverse the effects of physical processes: We learnt how to mould and re-mould artefacts with clay and metals, to heat or cool our surroundings; we learnt how to navigate accurately from once place to another and back again, and to do so with ever increasing speed and comfort; the socio-economic frameworks we invented helped us to bring forth change and means to revoke such change when necessary.

Despite all the sophistication that we have achieved today, we still helplessly defeat when confronted with time. We only seem find means to mitigate this embarrassment; by leaving the mechanics of time in the hands of the God, by identifying the passage of time as the ultimate force of judgement of one’s fate beyond death –be these judgements be executed by a Godly power, or be it some form of a cause-and-effect process or an annihilistic ideology; still some others over-indulge in materialistic existence simply to forget the disturbing nitty-gritty of such effects of time.

Are we blind to the reality because we are only too eager to seek the solution that is far away, and manage to simply see through the answer that is so close to us..?

Just like the flow of music would only be manifested where the motion of the disc touches the tip of the needle, the perception of life would materialise nowhere other than where the river of time breaks its waves against our observation -the moment “now”.

For what all we remember as the past or speculate as the future is nothing but the tone of music we hear in this moment now.

And the perceptions of the time “out there” is as misguided as one wishing to hear music where no disc touches a needle; for the disc only imprints the vitality of music, which is sprung to life only helped by a needle and the motion of the disc underneath.

Likewise, the only reality of life we experience is at the threshold where the dead past and the unborn future meets in a moment of observation –and the one who keeps observing this sees a continuum of ebb and flow –for he sees the ripples of the river of time.

The beauty is that the river exists only in one’s observation –for it is where the needle meet the disc; for it is the only point with potential to render the music of life…