In the fullness of moment
| Date :30-Jul-2019 |
By Vijay Phanshikar
The butterfly
counts not months
but moments,
and has time enough.
- Rabindranath Tagore
OF COURSE, for the butterfly, there is always time enough to live fully -- no matter the length of life! Unfortunately, the humans are not butterflies to realise this. They are always in a hurry to live longer, and yet have little time left to live more. A man known for his extreme sensitivity, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore often related to Nature, made intimate connects with leaves and flowers and flowing rivers and rippling lakes and blowing winds and quivering glades and shivering antelopes and hard-working ants and busy honey-bees glistening in the Sun and wilting petals and flying butterflies ...! Gurudev understood Nature as it was -- without his own definitions imposed on it, without his own terms. Nature’s terms were his and its moods he understood as did a child her mother’s.
And so, he understood how the butterfly lives -- not in months but in moments -- and still has time enough to live fully. Each moment has its fullness, its own metaphor, its own sound, its own song, its own purpose ...! And who understands all this but a butterfly?! -- Tagore as if asked. It was Tagore who romanced with the given moment -- in its entirety, leaving nothing to chance, adding nothing that the moment did not call for. For him, like it has been for the butterfly, each moment was something to lived fully, something to be sensed deeply to its core.
The poet in the man understood that moment is not time; it is a happening that cannot be locked in time’s confines. Moment is something that has to be lived as it comes, endured with all its vagaries, endeared with its all softness and the paradoxical harshness. When the moment is such a fullness by itself, it becomes momentous. It then assumes dimensions or facets that are in countless multiples of its own. The moment, thus, assumes a meteoric and metaphoric persona that is both material and metaphysical. The butterfly understands this more than anyone may do. It is all the time winging along and around, not steadying itself anywhere even for a split-second.
It has no such inclination. For, it is living that moment -- fully, unreservedly, holding back nothing, giving itself fully to it. Tagore notices that timelessness of the moment. He realises that life has to be lived in that fashion -- without confines of time, with no bounds of years and months and hours and minutes and seconds. For, if a moment -- the moment -- is to be bound thus, it would no longer have the momentousness that is so divine, that is so complete -- despite its momentariness. For the butterfly, the moment has no limits. It also has no fixed definition.
Each moment has its own signature, its own definition, its own face and surface, its own length and breadth and width and height -- all of labyrinthine proportions, for the little, soft, delicate, beautiful butterfly. It knows only one way of living -- of living it fully in that one moment, without being bothered about other moments that may be coming to him as part of his Destiny. The butterfly also does not know how long it will live. For, the metaphor of its life is not defined by the length in time; it is decided by the depth and height of the sense of purpose it has.
The butterfly knows its purpose -- to live fully each moment, as if there is not going to be another one, as if everything depended on that one moment. In fact, this should also have been human philosophy for certain completeness of life. Alas! Alas! We, the humans, have never given a fuller thought to what life should be and could be. That is why we do not live the present moment -- in the quest of some future point, rushing forward without any sense of destination. Thus passes each moment without being noticed and with no note of its own to romance about. So we live in months and years -- and leave out the moment at hand. We are not butterflies, you know!