Undo

How many times do you wish you could just take a chunk of your life and undo it?

Imagine this, you have been out in the sun too long and are desperate for a drink. You are sweating profusely and there is no shade in sight for miles. The soles of your shoes are burning your feet inside. A gust of wind blows a puff of dust on your face and it sticks to the sweat on your arms. You look around to see if a ride is coming along but no, you are alone on a long, dusty road in the scorching heat of a hot summer afternoon. What is worse is that you have no idea how you got onto this road in the first place. It is almost as if you are in the opening scene of an old movie and the plot is just beginning to unravel itself and you as part of the audience are still trying to make sense of the images flashing around you.

Now consider feeling like this everyday for the rest of your life. Wouldn’t you wish you could just go back in time and take another road when it mattered? Wouldn’t you curse yourself for opening the wrong door when you did? What if you could walk past that house again, maybe this time you will summon enough courage and ring the doorbell. Don’t you wish you had an extra moment with that one person when it mattered, what if you could have worked harder, studied better, lived longer, worked out more, made more money, not said a ‘yes’ when you wanted to say a ‘No’… the list is endless.  All of us, at some level crave for an undo button in our lives and envisage leading a different life – someone else’s perhaps.

What is harder to explain is that despite that stinging despair one feels with every heartbeat, we all try to coax ourselves into thinking that this is how it was supposed to pan out and blame it on what we call destiny. At times, we put up a brave face in front of others and boisterously claim that we were in control all along, that maybe if we are given a chance we would want to live this life the same way all over again.  Most often than not, we all know that it is not true and that we are nothing but cowards and liars deep inside.

Life doesn’t treat everyone the same way but the death sure, is indiscriminating. In our final moment of truth we all realize where we failed. I do not have a stringent concept of a virtue or vice but maybe there are certain things which we do to ourselves or the people around us that doesn’t send out a happy vibe out to the universe. Once you are instrumental in causing some grief, inviting a few tears and general unpleasantness with your actions, it all comes back and wrings your heart and chokes out the last flame left in you at the time when you breathe your last.

I guess, I will die with a few regrets of my own – just like everyone else. Maybe I will reach out to you and ask you to forgive me then, for having let you down. Maybe I won’t get as many breaths to voice it out to you. I wish I could have played it differently all along. Maybe I can still muster enough strength to conjure the right words – stark naked and straight and tell you while it is still time and make amends.

But perhaps, we will just continue to consume whatever days we are left with, just the same way we have led thus far – hopeless and aimless, sighing at our own thoughts, feeling a spear through our beings every time one of our dreams crash and waiting for a glitch in the universe, nurturing the plans for an ‘Undo’ moment but never really working for it.