i'll be seeing you

My departure date (a customer service interaction that included my request to “talk to someone who’s not going to yell at me”) is changed but even with a later departure, my time in Mysore grows short. I’m at the same time comfortable with the idea and resistant to it. Being deafened by honking horns on my way into town, oh yes, I'm comfortable with the idea of leaving. Then I think of leaving the smells, the colours, the sounds (horns excepted); I think of leaving this easy, slow life; I think of leaving my friends; I think of leaving this yogi playground where talk of pranayama, meditation, asana and philosophy flows so naturally and mixes so hilariously with nonsense talk of porn-eoke and I want to cling, grasp, hold on because I can’t do this at home. There is nowhere like Mysore. Then again, there is nowhere like home.

It’s not just my time that grows short. Just as quickly as new faces are flooding into town, familiar faces are moving on. It’s time, things change, but still I resist. I tell people I’ll be seeing them instead of saying goodbye; the world is increasingly small so the former is very likely true but that’s not why I put it that way. It’s because I don’t want to say goodbye, I want to ignore the closing of this time and the transition to another.

It is beautiful this opportunity we have, whether here or elsewhere, to meet and appreciate people without attachment, to find kindred spirits in the most unexpected of people, to realize just how bountiful love, support, and understanding are in what we keep being told is an increasingly disconnected, impersonal world. It is also beautiful this opportunity I have to practice accepting people as they move in and out of my life, to practice accepting change. It’s practice I very much need because, currently, I’m less on the “it’s beautiful” side and more on the “fingers in my ear screaming ‘lalala’ while ignoring everything” side.

Still, "lalala" notwithstanding, the universe conspires to help me. Many of the new faces flooding into town are familiar ones, people I haven't seen in years, people I probably said "I'll be seeing you" to at some point in time and here I am - seeing them. There is truth to my words and a different consciousness arising in my motivation for saying them.