Savour the Berries
Reading Orwell’s Roses put into perspective for me how necessary it is to pursue your central mission in life by doing things that may seem entirely unrelated, and how that is something I’ve been doing unwittingly for a fair few months now.
I write this sitting in the park, looking over not one but two banyan trees, struck by how Solnit has a way of immersing herself in life and drawing her readers along with her. When she wrote of loving the steadfast continuity a tree represents, it felt as though she had finally named a feeling that had long been stirring within me, waiting to find its way back to the meadows.
An old Buddhist parable introduces a person getting chased by a tiger, who in flight for his life, stumbles over a cliff and clings to the branch of a tiny plant with a lone strawberry dangling from it. The parable asks its readers what the right thing to do at the moment is and the answer is to savour the berry.
Life throws incessant struggles at us, yet it always leaves little berries of joy within reach. Orwell found his in a pulverized London post World War 2, when he asked his readers if they were familiar with the name of the ‘weed with a pink flower’ that grew among the rubble of blitzed sites.
I find mine in the smallest of pleasures: snacking on cape gooseberries while studying, sitting at home with my dear friends and flatmates and never feeling the need to step out for amusement. I find them while walking or playing badminton beneath the banyan trees, with the chatter of birds, dogs, cats and children all around. And often in the belief that every spring day is, in its own way, my summer vacation.
In this day and age, where tragedy unfolds worldwide in the blink of an eye and uncertainty feels ever-present, there is often an implication that finding pleasure in ordinary things belies an indifference to the evils that prevail. Yet why should one deny oneself the delight that lies so readily at hand? Sorrow and joy move through life together, and it is only natural that we allow ourselves to be taken by both.
Orwell very rightly believed that there is no such thing as permanent happiness and no politics to realise it, but there do exist fleeting moments of delight, and even rapture. We ought to gather as many of them as we can, for what else is life but recognising it for what it truly is — a tapestry of challenges, each carrying a scintilla of joy.
Like Orwell, I hope to leave a tree to the world, and like Sarla Dhawan who lives on in the park I frequent, I hope to leave a bench by the flower bed. In order to let people know that their love for simpler things is something to be clutched onto as tightly as possible in this world marred and fueled by the next best thing, I shall bask in the pulchritude of the trees I’m surrounded by, for as long as there are trees to look at, there’s a life to be lived fully.
