Setting up the Table

We live in pandemonium all throughout the day. With our working table full of heaps of books, papers, notebooks and other miscellaneous things which are not set in order. They are there, just like that, one over the other; sometimes falling, sometimes about to fall and then one day, you just start setting up the table. Maybe due to someone who said that "You can't even keep your table in order, what will you do in life" or you were searching for something that you needed promptly but couldn't find it or you were just wanting to follow a disciplined approach that is necessary to crack some competitive exam but in my case a lizard jumped onto the table and that made me overthink my entire life again. It made me ask myself "How I ended up here?" And the answer was the table itself.

Putting things to their right place, removing the completely filled notebooks and similar thick and thin registers, old workbooks, and along with that comes memories attached with them, if you are that sort of person. Scribbling random quotes and shayari behind books and notebooks, making your signature for the first time and in different ways till you get that perfect one, playing criss cross a bazillion times in between classes and then seeing all of it after so many years makes you pass through the memory lane and the stories behind your state of mind at the time of doing all of that even if it is now blurred and not entirely clear. There's a melancholy in realizing that all of this which was once our present or (say) our aspirational present for the future has now become our most cherished past which we remember with entralling eyes and a bit of regret about the times we wasted in self-loathing and self-doubt and questioning ourself on things which were not in our direct control and comparing ourselves to everyone in our class, in our neighbourhood, assuming that all of them were perfect and you can never be like them only to realize later that how all our parameters of judging everyone else, including us were flawed to the extent that they kept us away from discovering who we really were. And now we wish our next generation realized all this much earlier than we did, but that looks difficult at the moment with constant bombardment of insecurities towards us from a wide range of social media paraphernalia, our friends, our relatives, the celebrities who we admire and if anything was left then from ourselves to ourselves.

After all the setting up of the table; keeping only the important items on it which have immediate requirement and everything else in some shelf or cupboard, radiates a feeling of freedom. Freedom from all those useless and used less things and a forward looking approach towards life and it also shows that we have left our vegetative state behind for something better which may not be evident now but it's in progress to some extent.