Fidgety

I feel restless. I feel happy. Can those two things mean the same thing? In fact, I am feeling so disinterested in my day-to-day work that I took a day off from it to sit at home and do nothing. Nothing means thumbing through detailed road maps of Indian states, reading names of small unknown places whose very existence I'll forget once I close the map. Nothing means imagining how those little places must be, towns like Bharuch with no special identity except for those people who live and breathe in them. For them, it means the world. For a car speeding through the highway which is their lifeline, they are just markers, check points which indicate that the direction chosen to get it from Gujarat to Calcutta is correct. Nothing means feeling that inexpressible feeling in my stomach as something totally great or something totally ordinary may lie in wait for me as I venture outside the trials and tribulations of my regular schedule and life. 

The promises of new experiences - mostly bland, sometimes exciting but definitely one of a kind, hang around me like a haze of never ending mystery. I feel mildly pleased but not overly so that very soon I'll be at the wheels of our car driving for endless kilometres through the aforementioned nameless, nondescript places with the wind blowing in through the side windows of our non A/C car. It's a bit like meditation, a deep soul searching experience at 80 km/hr; it maybe deep but is hardly exciting... on the face of it. Yet I feel contentment, content despite knowing that I'll be driving away from what has been my base for almost all my life, the fun & the punishments, the friendships & the rivalries, all of it with the sun and the rain. Maybe it's wrong to feel content... wrong to feel lethargic when there is so much left to be achieved in my life. All I know is that I am in love with this restless feeling of contentment (See the inherent paradox?) that overcomes me whenever there is a trip on my mental horizon, especially a trip which I have never made before and it is not really of consequence whether I am making this trip all alone or with fellow travellers (my parents and dog in this case) as both have their own ways of making life on the road memorable. They have a word for it in the English/German language and I have previously confessed of my infatuation with it (http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2007/11/wanderlust.html). Wanderlust... sometimes being fidgety is the same as being truly happy.