The times were trying. The days were dire. My situation, senseless. It felt like something in my life had been misplaced, and never found again. Like losing a map and not knowing how to navigate further. You keep on moving but never reach anywhere. Happiness, joy, fulfilment felt like ancient history. Some trendy tactics I tried– from mindfulness meditation to practicing gratitude, but to no avail. This is when I decided to take a deep dive into the deserts of my own mind and fish out things which once brought me joy.
I made a new note called Joy– a digital space where I started collecting fleeting moments that once made me happy. And one of the first entries to make the list – after I gracefully skipped ‘jumping on a hotel bed just after checking in’ – was ‘walking on grass barefoot’. It was simple, effortless, and I couldn’t recall the last time I did it.
At first, I thought it’s something easily doable. Get my shoes on and walk down the road to the nearest park. The earth is everywhere, right? But finding parks in urban spaces wasn’t as easy as one would think. And even when I found one, it was always packed with rules and people. Two things I didn’t connect with joy in those days (maybe I still don’t or maybe I do).
Slowly, days turned into months, into years, and I forgot about the note and carried on with my life, escaping the territories of nothingness with new narratives about myself. I did get somewhat better (how? that’s a story for Heal blog), and thought of travelling again. That’s how I entered the peripheries of Farm Aavjo, or rather it entered into mine.
If Earth was calling me back, I think this is where the voice was coming from. Amongst the many things I had stopped noticing in every-day city life, they all suddenly started to exist again. From the birds waking you up in the morning to the smell of the soil; the quiet existence of nature that we so often overlook.
And of course, I found what I had forgotten about, the grass. I realised this as I noticed my feet squeezing the dewy dew of an early October morning, the grass beneath my feet, and a surge of sensation started to race around my insides. This sensation was ancient, it was new. I felt like a 10-year-old and a 30-year-old at the same time. And like a Polaroid, it brought me back to times of my life that for so long my memory had elapsed. I, after a long time, met the kid in me, the adult in me, the human in me. I finally slipped into the present moment, the only moment that’s ever really there.
Nature is always calling, when was the last time you listened to its call?
What childhood joy have you forgotten?
Written by Prakhar Sharma
You can get in touch with Prakhar here - work.prakhar06@gmail.com
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