The Need for Quiet Hours

I knew a young boy who kept wandering looking for something precious. What this was, ‘always’ eluded me. I could barely meet him; I could barely keep pace with him till I realized it was just an idea in my head. I realized this when I stopped playing the music of Paul Collier. Immersed in the soothing swing of a man in flight I could sense there was a difference. Instead of analyzing it, it would be better to describe it. Collier has a mixture of subtlety and directness that cannot afford to be lost to a paralytic analysis which is why I refrain from doing so. This mixture is what I found in the boy that I spoke about but I never knew what he really was searching for. 

I tried in vain to ask him. It was not as though he refused to disclose it to me but what he described I could not comprehend. I thought at that point it was better not to confuse him but in hindsight I understand that he was not confused. It was just that, my state of mind was one of agitation. 

I met the young lad with agitation and saw how it distorted every word that he said. Then without my desiring it I came to know how messages and friends get lost due to the distortion effects of one’s own state of mind at a particular point in time. This does not account for factual disagreement, which is quite another matter. 

My thoughts continued and I saw the boy again roughly after some time. This passage of ‘some time’ can feel like light years when you look behind. This happened to me because I was still to the point of hearing a pin drop. I came to know that quiet hour, which I was looking for all along. I found it not from dry analysis but from the effect I could experience after listening to ‘the Man Who Could Fly’ by Paul Collier.  The boy smiled and I knew at once that he had found his treasure too. It was a smile of seven thousand years marking a human being’s desperate need for quiet hours which he finally finds after a voyage of struggle with noise. Imagine that!