Grace

Every being or non-being that can be airborne has, before its lift-off, one of the most non-graceful, violent and often the bumpiest route to grace. In this lack of grace — of every stumble, every half-fall and every near-failure — is hidden the promise of the most graceful thing that we will ever witness — flying. We aspire for that grace in our living and look to eke it out even in our deaths. If it were not for this amazing grace, every suffering would be unbearable and every moment would be nothing but ordinary.

Life, for me, has been a constant tryst with with this grace, more often seeing it the lives of others, when I have often struggled to see much of it in mine. There have been times when I have stumbled, even crawled and looked to grasp at even the faintest hint of that grace. Times when a kind word, a nod of understanding would make you believe when there is nothing to believe in. Times when nothing is about you, everything looks wrong to you and everything looks wrong at you.

In believing in flight’s grace, there is also born, innate and slow, a belief in the stumble, the pain and the humiliation. Somewhere, the line that divides the attempt and the actual in terms of flying fades away. There is nothing magical about it. There is nothing stunning. There is only the appraisal of the blindingly obvious. The obvious that life, flying, pain, hurt, happiness, joy and everything else is a continuum. It is a bland silence that speaks volumes, only if you can listen carefully and listen without fear or prejudice.

In writing this down it is more a message to myself than to anyone else. That it is not mine to seek, but it is mine to experience, as experienced only by me. That, that singularity is the celebration and the grace of flight, not from the moment you part contact with the earth, but from the moment you see, you think and you feel flight, in your eyes, in your heart and in your mind. Most importantly, it is the conveyance of a simple and easily lost message to myself : it maybe vastly difficult to fly, but it is exceptionally easy to forget that it is everyone’s to aspire to fly.