There are some days when you wake up at the wrong time, find yourself a little tired perhaps (despite the long sleep) and feeling none too enthusiastic about the day that would unfold soon. You sit on the bed slumped, hair in an unsightly state, notes lying untidily on the desk; the alarm clock shows that you are running late for school, and you realise your bag is not packed with the things that are needed for the day. But try as you might to be upbeat about things and to summon a sense of urgency - which the situation always demands of you - you just feel unmotivated to get going. It's like you've woken up from a deep slumber on a stationary jeep stuck in the middle of a long empty road: you dreamily recall that there's an appointment to hurry to, and that you need to do something fast with the failing engine - but something appears to be out of sync and holding you back, and you can only remain where you are, almost involuntarily, unable to do much else except maybe stare at the long, lazy road ahead. All this while the details of the surroundings - the relative quiet and calm, the unstirred dust and sand, the usual sounds of nature - conspire to root you to your immobility - which you only all too readily acquiesce.
Today was such a day for me, except that I was not in a jeep on some desolate road. I woke up and sat dead still on my bed, but was strangely conscious of the small room which i've been an inhabitant of since nearly 6 years ago. Immobilised to my bed for a couple of minutes, i was staring not at an empty road but a messy table (and its contents). The noisy standing fan a few metres away from my bed was determined to fill the place of natural sounds. And outside, the sky was occupied by low menacing clouds while the sun was nowhere to be seen. I vaguely remembered waking up momentarily to a raining sky earlier, but it seemed now the rain had retreated.
I surveyed my surroundings and looked for my alarm clock first. If i hastened to do what needs to be done, i reckoned i could still catch the bus and not be too late for the 8a.m. lecture. The mood to act fast was, however, decidedly absent. That's when it struck me that today is not going to be a good day, that things are not going to go quite the way they should like on, say, a normal day. After all, it's always been like this: your mood at the start of the day often has a strange influence on how the rest of your day would be like, while the unfolding events in the day would be all too glad to perform a complementary role, as if proving that your mind had picked up the right signals at the start of the day's journey.
In my case, it didn't take long for the day events to sing to the tune of my tepid, languorous mood. Although i knew it wasn't very early by the time i set off from home, it soon turned out that i would be made to pay for my morning procrastination. Walking to the bus-stop, the rain came on again, first drizzling but soon got heavier, though it never reached the levels of torrential rainfall. An unusually long wait for the bus ensued. When the first one arrived, it stopped to allow passengers to alight, but the front doors remained passively shut. Obviously the diver didn't think that more people could squeeze up the sardine-packed bus. The second one came - yet another single-deck - but still i couldn't board it; the massive, shoving crowd proved just too difficult to get past. Only when the third bus arrived was i able to get on the bus, by which time the lecture was just a few minutes away from starting. Surely this wasn't a very good way to start the day with.
During all that waiting, however, i found myself distracted by the rain instead of being preoccupied with the prospect of being very late for class. There's always a somewhat subdued sense of elation welling in me whenever i gaze at and admire falling raindrops from the sky. Perhaps it has to do with the power of Nature to evoke in me a certain sense of awe and fascination each time it displays its forces (which of course can be benign or destructive). The traffic may be roaring and the movement of humans on the streets continuous and unceasing, but the rain stands isolated from all that, even nonchalant to the little chaos it seemed responsible for below here in diminutive human towns. Against the bad vehicular traffic and in the midst of an atmosphere of incessant rushing and impatience at the bus-stop, the raindrops merely fall innocently from above, creating a constant rhythm that drowns all human din combined. Sometimes the simple joy of admiring nature can't be explained fully in words, if only because man's tool for expression sometimes prove inadequate (and unecessary perhaps) in matters regarding Nature and its myriad processes.
I was almost 45-minutes late for lecture but was told by my friend i had missed little. When i got out of the lecture theatre later the cloudy sky had already cleared and the sun was peeking from behind somewhere. I did feel a little disappointed that the rain had come and gone so quickly, but it wasn't a lingering feeling. For the rest of the day, the lethargy was persistent and, i supposed, quite visible since i had friends asking why i seemed out of sorts today. Also, I would have incurred a great deal of unnecessary trouble had i not realised i had dropped my wallet at a bench. It was almost 15 minutes later that i realised it and flew back to the location to find it still lying there untouched, fortunately.
Ironically, perhaps that recovery - born out of a bad incident - was destined to mitigate the bad day. At least for today, it seems mind, body and fortuity were all playing conspiratorial roles. The only good is that it produced these thoughts, and hence this post.
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