On this cloudy Saturday morning, I was doing a speed reading of a book I had picked up earlier to give as a gift. It’s called “A Spiritual Life – Selected Writings of Albert Schweitzer”. The section which set me off musing was titled, the search for beauty. I have been on that in various ways for a while I guess. The medium for me has been the written word. And at the same time as Schweitzer says every composer is also a poet as is a poet a composer, so has been music a critical input to this process of exploration.

People whom I describe as personal heroes have often been many things at the same time, driven relentless by a curiosity for life. I remember the sign painted by someone who has passed that way before me, on a dorm room wall which said “Life is wasted on the living”. And I think these heroes have avoided that by falling into a regiment, a specialist frame of mind. Actually I think that most specialists couldn’t have reached the acme of their field without having a rich life which is again propelled by this curiosity to deeply taste the marrow of life.

Richard Feynman comes to my mind right away, especially because I was talking about him last night. While he was a great physicist, he got a Nobel for that, he was first a fanatic about living. This is evidenced by his bongo playing at the Brazilian carnivals, his quite sketches and paintings, his wacky quest to go to Tuva in the middle of Central Asia etc. While his physics may not have required him to do all this, my thinking is that his physics is the best manifestation of this life force (sounding a little like Yoda) within him, while these other quests were the interesting side shows of the carnival. So is the case with say Einstein or other polymaths like Octavio Paz or Tagore.

While I don’t think I have joined/belong this pantheon yet, I have consciously resisted efforts to be limited to just one kind of a groove. So as much as I enjoy Bach this morning, whose fugues Glenn Gould is pounding on the piano, I have enjoyed, yesterday, the poly rhythmic jazz of McLaughlin’s electric guitar jamming with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, in that excellent album, “The Inner Mounting Flame”. The key I think is to soar or fall into that level/state of transcendence where things become luminous. And perhaps then, living with all its attendant suffering and despair, becomes a festival.

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What often bothers me is how opaquely most of us live from the natural world. In his book “A Walk in the Woods”, ------, writes that an average American walks less than 200 yards everyday. I think most of this would be around one’s place of work, usually hermitically sealed buildings, or in and around the local commercial shopping belts. And then the health (or should it be weight?) conscious members of the society attend to their bodies by going to the gym or similar activity. However the soul is rarely attended to, resulting in strong bodies, stronger specialist intellect but a soul of questionable thickness. In my own experience, one big fuel pump for the soul is the natural world, because it’s an open invitation to learn how to closely observe. And it’s in this learning to see that is one useful way to temper the soul. How often do we screw up just because we weren’t observant of ourselves and for others! Consequently, this still to me is a one such easily accessible idea to turn this “Prozac Nation” into a place of saner and less howling souls.

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Yesterday I was very restless and perhaps a little weary with myself. I don’t like myself in that situation and the problem is instead of mitigating the situation I usually tend to worsen it for myself. One of the reasons behind such restlessness is this yearning for a human contact (feeling almost ETish “I want to go home”) at a level that is still not very clear to me. My best guess is that what I yearn to do is to reconcile myself with me. To use that old line, “you are sitting in your driveway and hoping to get to a home”. Anyways writing and having an interesting conversation helped.