I should be working (yes, on the weekend... well), but the flu stopped me. Nature knows and reacts when something is too much. But now, all of the sudden, there's too much time to think for a mind with atrophy. So the balance of the too-much now is hanging to the other side, opposite to where a brain without weight is placed.
On my excess of time to think I went through the memory of the places I wanted to visit since I was a child, and they were only two. Since I was a child: New York City; since a teenager: Varanasi. In the primal and untidy attachment to the images of these two cities, received during those years, there was a base of knowledge that hasn't failed yet; there was an spiritual, yet unclear base for this attachment. The years started to slowly prove it, without any search for proving anything. The base was an idea of change that couldn't happen in any different way than visiting, and making my way through those two cities.
Right now, while going through a dark time, there are positive changes operating inside me, and they are directly linked to my very personal experience with the city of New York. My whole being is slowly revolutionized in a mild way, without blows or spectacular lights.
What was expected of New York, and what is expected of Varanasi? That was something that took decades to foresee, but I could, I could see in advance what would happen. New york was expected to be exactly what it was: an experience provided to set very well fixed milestones; milestones to measure the whole future change needed to humble the cosmic size of my ego to the cosmic size of its real importance for the community; small in the general, big in the particular. In the end, an experience to tame the ego and put it in its place in society.
What's expected of Varanasi is, for the lack of another expression, quite the opposite. It's expected to be an experience to leave milestones for the needed change of integrating the society to the inner forum of the individual that I am. Impossible to explain without a set of examples: Argentina is very well known by its sociologists as a very individualistic society, where acts of social awareness could be brilliant, but isolated and very rare. It's a matter of how this society is constructed. There are no social expressions of will, no festivals, patriotic celebrations are fake, and a uniform way to be is desired for creating a personal and social sense of peace. In India there are social festivals, celebrations of the good prevailing over evil, and a high value of the learning experience of life. Finding your path to personal knowledge about what's good for the person and the society, is desired there to create a sense of peace.
In New York the same person that kindly says hello to you today, can't recognize you tomorrow. You are this that you are, in a city that it's too big to remember one of the crowd. When you can be a stranger for someone that you know well for years, this creates the haze of a dream surrounding what's real and what's not. A friend can put a friend aside for a while, to catch another objective, there are no hard feelings there; simply how the place is constructed. It teaches very well to desist on the ego, and embrace the common ground. It's a very spiritual place. In Varanasi a guy will honk his claxon for 30 minutes, naively and without hard feelings at all, until you manage to get out of a narrow path, crowded by puppy dogs and loud crossing people; you are this that you are, and you are there all the time, every second is too raw, until you are not there anymore. And it teaches you how and where to be, and not to be; teaches also what's good, and how to persist on every breath you take. It's another very spiritual place. Both are; one to desist on the futile, the other to persist on the essential.
These two cities are obviously a personal experience, and only create this atmosphere to me; they help me to evaporate the illusion of personality and they empower the reality of what's common in us all. So they both are important catalyzers for a change that I can't manage to do by myself. A change towards an objective of inner peace, recognized nothing less than twenty five years ago.
Nature knows when something is too much, knows how to stress a fast change with a flu; or how to provoke a drastic and slow change, with a primal need to visit two cities. New York is influencing from the past, Varanasi already from the future. Two images, one from the past, another from the future. Both operating their gentle force to switch the rotation axis of my world, from the outside to the inside; to something needed, to something happy inside.
All this configures only one of several reasons why I've always known that I need no shrink: I know how to place the pieces of my own puzzle; and the time it takes, must also be considered part of the puzzle. Who else could know better.
Inner peace to have freedom without numbness, freedom without numbness to have happiness without recklessness.
Maybe even my nickname shall be part of the sense of it all one day, since ancient indians considered the frog as a symbol of radical transformation, a swimmer through tough life-transitions, needing no assurance while traveling, a being of enhanced intuition, with a strong and calm connection with the spirit world. One day.
