Love. Nothing Else Matters.

Henry Miller had many wives. There was one wife named Hoki. She was Japanese. Hoki and Miller met in a Japanese bar where she used to sing. After meeting a few times, Miller asked her hand in marriage, and she said yes. She was not yet twenty, and he was over fifty!

After Miller's death, the other wives inherited all his wealth. Hoki was the forgotten Japanese divorced wife. She spent the remaining years of her life in her dark little room on top of a second rate bar on a noisy street. But she kept Miller's memories- a few of their photos, a few signed watercolours of Miller (Miller used to paint), and an autographed book. And of course, plenty of invisible memories of a good time.

When Paulo Coelho visited her once, she told him that she did not inherit the rights to his books or his property, and none of those' mattered, because the experience of being together with him outweighed any monetary compensation'. 'There was no point in squabbling over inheritance: love was enough,' Hoki said.

Yes. When there is love, nothing else matters!

[Quotes taken from Like the Flowing River by Paulo Coelho, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 2018]

The Pounding in the Head

Work these days is monotonous. The technical name is 'transcription'. It is to listen to recordings and carefully write down what people spoke in a test, paying acute attention to minute details like duration of pauses, number of 'hmms' and 'uhhs', syntactic accuracy and linguistic complexity of language, and so on. Transcribing 5 minutes of recorded speech takes approximately 90 minutes. Extremely monotonous. The larger picture is clear- a PhD thesis in the area of language assessment. But remaining focused doing the monotonous daily transcription is a tough job. Yet, I drag through this drudgery to reach the golden goal hiding somewhere in the future.

Then comes the villain- the pounding in the head. Some people call it a migraine. I call it a devil. Or a demon. Or whatever I want to call it! While the headphones reproduce different test-participants' speech about themselves, their lives, interests, studies, and other people, my eyes, ears and brain try to focus on how they express what they express. As I do so, the pounding in my head becomes louder. "My name is..." The pounding becomes harder. "I come from..." "I love playing the guitar." "I have a very small family." "My mother is a teacher." The voices from the headphone slowly become rhythmically aligned with the pounding in my head. I can neither hear anything nor understand a word of what's being spoken. Everything around me is blurred out into a hazy hum. The laboratory in which I work, and the people around me dissolve into the air, and I become the pounding in my head. At this level, I walk to the rhythm of the pounding in my head. Or maybe I dance to the rhythm of the pounding. Faster and Faster. Harder and Harder.

The 'Pounding'

Source

Then at one point, I give up living. I am pushed to a point where I no longer exist. At that point, I end. I stop existing. Blank. At the base of that whirlwind of a spiral, I ain't. For me, that is the zenith of existence and non-existence. That's the top and the bottom, fullness and emptiness. end and the beginning. That's when the 'I' cease to exist as an embodied reality. I become weightless; the body disappears. The mind disappears. I disappear. There is no 'I'. It is just the pounding. And I am the pounding.

And that is what I call self, and you call god!