My own 20 minutes...
There is a dialogue that appears somewhere in the Season 6 of Scrubs when La Verne dies and the staff is sitting at the chapel – the rabbi remarks that if you reach a point in your life when you don’t have 20 undivided waking moments where you selfishly and unashamedly do something only (and purely) for yourself then maybe your life is not worth living. It stirred my innards somewhere because I felt for a moment that I really, truly connected with that line. In our entire godforsaken life where every waking minute of every waking day of all the years they call life we are conditioned into doing things that we seldom question if we really like. And that’s why when I ask myself if I have done something I liked without thinking of what it would cost me, how it would benefit me and whether it can be postponed, I draw a blank. I haven’t. Sometimes I find me telling myself I have me to catch up with. That I haven’t done any real thinking in ages now and all that I do is touch the surface of the feelings I have pent up and all the talking there is to do with me. People have the strangest things that bring vitality back to a life that’s losing the sap out of it. There is no reasoning to why it does that to you. It just makes everything else worth enduring. Worth living for.. A, I know, can do anything to spend those 2 hours in the football field. He tells me it’s one of the few things he is really passionate about. That for how he feels about it,all the manic things he does(in my opinion) are validated. AK always says that when she reaches Padua for every vacation, she is so happy she doesn’t mind dying there and would have no regrets. Baba feels that way for those cryptic medico and physics books he still keeps stacked in his study and loves to read. Things he gave up because he had no money to pursue them. Things he gave up so that he could start working for us. Small for big. Now for later. Aai for that stuff she writes which we never bothered to understand. You see she wanted to be a novelist once. SM says she writes with a heart rending beauty that surpasses all. I wish I could understand her. Or those letters that her favorite authors have written her. Her souvenirs. Her best awards. Proof of the mettle we know she had but gave up because she was too busy sending us to school and doing our homework. She still sits up nights to write for a rare competition. She doesn’t know why. It’s their 20 minutes they are living. Things that validate our most innocent and self righteous rights – hedonism. Since I spent my 20 minutes gathering thought for theirs, heres mine. Knowing that everyone has kept theirs. It’s what keeps them going.