On Pushing it...

“If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”

- Bruce Lee (died young doing something stupid)

Some of his saner contemporaries live on. With little left to die though.

The last real post in this space had me panicking on growing old and ranting about strangers empathizing. I've grown a year and half older since then and all the while I've been relentlessly pursuing happiness and a way to escape the whirling thread of instant karma. And I've been a little late in putting my plan into words, though the plan to stay young dawned on me a few months back. I was in California, and well aware of the fact that some people have plans, some don't, and even those people with plans don't outlast more than a hundred years. May be it was not California, now that I seem to recall, it was in Lake Atitlan, in one of those multiple volcanoes rising into the sky and drawing a circle in those Guatemalan highlands. And there I was climbing this vertical outcrop with a ex-US marine and a professional backpacker who both had seven lungs between them, and lo quarter way up and I fell down and died. Not really but I literally showed them the universal sign of total defeat. 

Now that I remember, it was two days before that, and fifteen of us were climbing a live volcano, and three of us injured ourselves pretty bad, I burned my finger making bread toast using flowing lava, and two days later the rest twelve had opted out of another climb. Them pussies. But that wasn't it. It was perhaps ten years before that, and one rainy day in summer, must be eleven o'clock in the equatorial afternoon, and I was lazily lying around in bed reading Nehru. Now Nehru talked about this out of the world experience he had walking through a ledge in the upper Himalayas at cold dead temperatures in a treacherous terrain, and then he said - that's when he figured it out. 

Now that I am a sucker for figuring it out, that my idea of figuring it out is closely linked with walking treacherous slopes in the upper Himalayas some time in my life, and before I set out out to hike the Indian Nose in Guatemala that fine morning I stood a better chance at figuring out things compared to the twelve little pussies who quit, but there I was quarter way up the steep slope, almost dead, showing the universal sign of total defeat, and it passed my mind, and I suddenly felt the paralyzing white fear that I would never make it to the treacherous slopes of upper Himalayas if I quit, and that I would go six feet under like most of the boys I played cricket with who will never figure it out.

We compete with different people at different times. I used to compare myself with the boys I used to play cricket with, and it is very amusing to realize that I do not care about where they are any more. Not in a competitive sense. I was very sad for a couple of days when one of those boys died in an accident. And we do not compete with dead people. Mostly.

But these comparisons were mostly, till a few years back, linear. Academics, chicks, jobs, salary, chicks, city, mobile phone, expendable income, chicks, car, bike, chicks - mostly. Those comparisons made sense, but most of us have stopped competing in the linear. Because some of us have things to settle in life and have no clue how things are gonna work out, or how things are gonna be a year or two from now. Uncertainty nibbles on our little toes when we go to bed, and the dinosaur is still there when we wake up. Because some of us have given up the possibilities that uncertainty throws up, and settled for some spectacular cuddly certainties. And now gaping at those certainties think 'is this it' when we go to bed, and that thing is snoring next to us when we awake.

Back to my plan to remain young forever, now that it is clear that we are not competing anymore,  and that the terms in which many of us think of reality are different. I figured that the only way to do that is to keep pushing the limits. Now there is no place to push your limits like sunny California, and I decided to run long distance. The fact that I was able to make it to the top of the steep climb at Lake Atitlan, though like a dead man walking, which helped me understand the freedom total death brings, but that's another story, gave me the little confidence I needed to push from half to a six mile improvement in pushing the frontier. 

After that I tried it on a couple of other hikes and I realized that I was growing young after each of these experiments. And in Tahoe, near the Nevada border, one of my fellow hikers pointed to a steep slope of decaying wood and claimed it was infested with rattle snakes. I don't remember if it was my disliking for the guy, or my frontier strategy which made me run down that hundred feet slope with a long piece of wood in my hand shouting like a mad man. Another fellow hiker followed suit, but then he was a mad man, and our collective battle cry much annoyed the squirrels who were intensely collecting whatever they collect for winter. But then, my strategy wasn't so much different from the squirrels.

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Now the day, you stop pushing yourself, you start growing old. You are out of Shangrila.  The day you say you can't make new friends, you have to get eight hours of sleep, you cannot miss breakfast, you cannot run ten kilometers, you cannot stone a cat, you cannot help a beggar, you cannot lie to someone, you cannot be politically incorrect, you will not try a cigarette, you will not pray, you do not find all women hot - you grow old. Because young people do all this. And my pal back in Cali was my first convert. So we went up the highest waterfall in north America, and spat on the rest of the world from top of it minutes before lying in the upstream river and secretly urinating while pretending I wasn't, using the part of my body visible above water. All I want to tell the hundreds of pussies who were bathing couple of thousand feet below us is that the water that day was not so clean as they thought.

We pushed it a little further when this dude and I set out on a five thousand kilometer road trip coast to coast on a twelve year old car, driving through the night at enormous speeds, and in the middle of the Nevada desert, the red light on the dash went off saying 'break failure'. The next day I was musing, driving through the desolate salt lakes of Utah, with the break light going off again - 'I wonder why we are doing this'. And he replied casually without a tinge of sarcasm 'We have to keep pushing it, because, the day we stop pushing it, we grow old'.

And I listened and nodded as if I was hearing it for the first time, though I had invented it. As always, like most of the things I know. I invented it.