Book-Box-Shock
Oops. You look out, and all you see is nothing.
The funniest part was that I felt as if I had been thrown behind the bars of etymology.
Who is to blame?
Of course, it was me.
I began to write a story. Suddenly, my creativity became the stereotype, and the dream drowned. I had somehow crippled my way out of the hurdles of my previous project (first book), but this one pushed me off the cliff. Snippets of conversations secretly recorded in many coffee shops were not appropriate. On my computer, the backspace key was used more often than the letters.
I spent days crushing and tearing off bundles of paper. Refills were emptied. A few hundred Word documents were deleted. The view was discouraging: a pyramid of overflowing crumpled papers in the trash can and a graveyard of deleted files in my computer’s recycle bin. Lastly, the “final article,” which I had rewritten countless times, still seemed incompetent.
Moments later: Cmd + Q, followed by Shift + Delete.
Back to square one.
Back to square one
The sad truth became painfully clear. My mind had gone blank. New ideas continued to appear, but only in a passive way. They were beautifully boring. Every line looked like a series of awful clichés. My dream to become a serious writer had begun to lose hope. It simply vanished in the wind. The past existed like an anecdote, and the present had become nightmarish.
Google, the God or the Goddess or the Neuter Being, had gradually weakened my intuitive strength.
It produced thirty-two varieties of book genres and their wordy definitions. No matter how easy the explanation was, it continued to feel unclear. People of my generation were constantly influenced and interrupted by this obsessive search engine. It had become an integral part of our day to day life. It is very convenient to say that this universe is captured inside a small rectangular mobile device.
This was the world I was living in: loud, fast, and distracting. Somewhere in that noise, I lost the quiet place where ideas are born.
Thinkers and Do-ers
The benchmark standards set by all the intelligent do-ers opened the gates of competition and resulted in ongoing masterpieces of art. Their persistent efforts complicated my life. I gazed from the top, trying to find where exactly I was standing. Where do I stand among them?
Yes, I spotted myself one day. I had juxtaposed myself comfortably in between, with an ocean of audience to my left and all the do-ers to my right, smiling with grandeur in their Armani suits.
What the fun? I was neither of them.
The Process of Choosing a Side
There are no sides. There is only do or die.
People often talk about sides: winners and losers, creators and consumers, thinkers and do-ers. But standing in the middle, like I did, revealed something uncomfortable. There are no sides at all. There is only motion or stagnation. Do or decay.
For years I tried to pick a side.
Did I want to be among the thinkers, who imagine worlds, build universes, and talk about ideas endlessly?
Or among those who wake up at four in the morning, bleed on the mountains, and break their bones chasing impossible summits?
I attempted to mix both, but all I created was noise.
I was not a tortured artist.
I was not a disciplined do-er.
I was a confused bystander, standing in the middle lane, blocking traffic.
Here is the truth: choosing a side is not about who one hopes to become, but about who one is willing to stop being.
When I looked at myself honestly, the answer was not poetic.
It was painful.
I was afraid.
Afraid to fail as a writer.
Afraid to succeed as a mountaineer and then realise it still did not fill the void.
Afraid to commit to one path and sacrifice the comfort of the other.
That fear was the real decision-maker.
It chose the side long before I did.
The day I understood this, something cracked open.
Not inspiration. It is Honesty.
And once honesty walks in, every illusion walks out.
So I stopped choosing between thinker and do-er.
I decided to be the person who moves.
Sometimes with words, sometimes with altitude, sometimes with mistakes.
A side is not a destination.
A side is simply the direction of the next step.
How Long It Took?
Probably a thousand years, that is how it felt. In reality, it was more than four years. When it all began, the craving to achieve something was strong. My mind was competitive. I was sincere. For more than nine months, I trained every single day, and for at least four months, I survived on boiled bitter gourd with a little salt and turmeric, along with rice and plain lentils. I was sincere, no doubt.
However, when I look at that person now, I know he was sincere but also full of aggression and desperation. His entire thought process revolved around climbing that enormous mountain. He believed that was the end of the line. In that aspiration, the very first thought of working on my next book was lost in time.
Desperation killed the cat.
Then What Happened
The summit was successful. Stepping into the death zone altitude without an oxygen mask was not bad at all. In general, when someone climbs an 8000er, it is a big deal. Mountaineers usually receive a good amount of name, fame, and recognition. However, that did not happen in my life. There was some recognition for sure, but nothing that matched the effort, the dream, or the expectation.
What actually happened was a realisation, and it took more than two quarters of a year for me to surface those endless depths. I began questioning myself. Was it really the name I wanted or the adventure I needed? What was I truly chasing? Until then, I had simply placed myself comfortably in a comfort zone with the mindset that I could do beyond possible things.
This Is What Happened.
This Is What Happened.
October 22nd, 2022. I read my first book, Unfailing, once again. It was good. Until that moment, I lived with the insecurity that my book was not good at all. As a beginner with hardly any skill in writing English, I believed I would never be able to present a story well like any other contemporary writers. I carried a constant shyness, the fear that people would laugh at me.
That evening, I called my friend, Kishan from Ahmedabad, because I needed non-opposing support, a witness, and someone very dear to me whom I could command if needed, and to help carry a heavy carton box sealed full of 200 fresh copies of Unfailing. We carried the heavy box and walked to the middle of the Sabarmati Bridge, just a kilometre from where I live.
GIFT Bridge on Sabarmati
We reached the middle of the bridge carrying the heavy box. Kishan did not know what exactly he was lifting. It was pitch dark, around eight in the night. The parapet wall is separated by a three-foot pedestrian way, and then comes a three-foot kerb wall that acts as a safety barrier to the road. I needed to jump the kerb to reach the parapet railing so that I could push the box into the river.
We placed the heavy carton on the kerb, and I jumped over it and landed on the pedestrian space. That is where something happened that snapped me back into reality. Until that moment, I was angry and frustrated, for a reason that can never truly be a reason, because I did not even know why I was so agitated. Was it the timing, the embarrassment, the mood breaker, or simply a reminder from the cosmos to come back to my senses?
What the fuck?
What I saw next shocked me. There was a couple, almost half-naked, completely lost in their own unencumbered world, dangerously close to the f-word I had used earlier.
I was disappointed, confused, and irritated.
And what did I do?
I simply said “sorry,” and then finished the job I had come to do.
I pushed the box into the river, jumped back on the road, and never looked back.
That was the moment I came back to my senses. I realised I had been living in a well, imagining the world was ending for me, while the actual world around me was busy having sex.
That hit hard.
Phew!!!!!
Kishan finally realised what was inside the heavy box. He shouted, “Why?” I told him, “See it as an offering to the Sabarmati River Goddess.” And I asked him not to judge me.
End is the Beginning
Even then, days and months of introspection brought hardly any progress. One fine morning, six months later, the quest simply stopped. An idea, not unique but impactful, surfaced. The idea was genuinely exciting.
Instead of creating a protagonist, why should I not live the life of a protagonist? Exactly like the one I created in Unfailing.
And that is when the actual truth was understood: “Finish is the actual Start.” The end happens only when the heart stops pumping.
And a decision was made: To live every moment brutally honest, To live every moment with utmost enthusiasm and compassion.
I took that decision, and I will live with the good and the bad of it as the days come.
Probably that is the title of my next book.
Finish is the Start.
Verdict / Truth
End is a new beginning till the end of a heartbeat.
by
Venky
Awesome! Very inspiring 👍
Nice…End is a new beginning 👍