Hello, God,
It has been eighteen years since I have been on earth. My surroundings have started considering me an adult, including the law here. I had forgotten about you for a long time, but now that you have reminded me of yourself, I thought I should send you this letter, writing a review of the story I have enjoyed so far. This won’t be autobiographical; just reflective. I believe you will read this open letter of affection, with only affection.
Earth is very homely. The rains, the trees, the winds, the sceneries, the life – everything is very homely. If you had sent me on some other planet, I believe I could have said the same thing – but it can be no other way. Earth is very homely!
Earth is changing. In these eighteen years, I have witnessed changes. Most things here change. People, environment, thoughts, education system, laws, governments, situations, books, interests, technology, and all random things – things are changing. When I read history and related books, I find that changes have not started only since my birth on earth – something that I believed for a long time – but changes have been always there. Even if I had not been there, changes still would have been.
One of the first things humans taught me here on earth was language. That I am communicating with you through this letter is because language exists. Words are wondrous – you gave the double blessing by firstly giving us capability to understand words and then to exploit that capability. My early years on earth were very confused, I have either no or vague memories. My parents show me my photos as a hairless young kid, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying – and I am surprised at how I do not remember crying like that. When I was not even aware that I existed, I was supplied a name, making that string of letters a part of my identity. That would be my tag on earth, a sound by which people would call me, a bundle of strange lines and loops that I should be happy to read on trophies, a group of words by which I am supposed to be remembered after I have departed from Earth.
It did take time, but I started understanding things. I learnt whom to call papa and whom to not call papa. I was taught how to respectfully ask for food and water without crying like a heartbroken birdbrain, and when they were sure that I was a normal child with no defects anywhere, I was enrolled into a school that was just three streets away.
Now that eighteen years have gone by, I am near to getting graduated from my High School, ready to go to something called a College. Earth is changing. They tell me and I see it, after I have completed my education, I will have to work like my and others’ papas do, something at least half of the earth’s population has to do to keep the earth running.
You have designed the earth with insane preciseness. I have learnt that you have also injected on earth – and everywhere around – a virtue of variations. Almost everything I see has a myriad of variations. The tree outside my window is a mango tree, but just a wall away is another tree that produces no fruits. The soil on our street is different than the one that I saw two years ago in the valley of Baru Sahib. The sky which umbrellas the earth is never the same. Yesternight it rained but presently it is pretty peaceful up there. There are stray dogs around here, and there were stray dogs around our previous house, but those stray dogs were different than these stray dogs.
Some of these differences are not just differences – they are divisions. Humans and dogs – that is just a variation of life, but humans have houses of their own while dogs do not. I wonder what if there were no variations, no differences? Seems things would have been boring and monotonous. I have learnt that wherever there is the concept of “manyness”, there are “variations”.
A big insight which incidentally occurred to me only some time ago – is that so many humans have been, and have left behind a long, long legacy, so many learnings and findings and morals, that you are not the first, most unique and the most special one. This insight is almost sibling to the neighboring insight that you are not so unique after all, and are just another human, striving for greatness. This is the recognition that consciously or unconsciously, you are a part of the race. You learn that in most cases, you must be as normal to other people as the other people are to you.
And I am glad that in these eighteen years, I’ve had these insights, which some take lives to realize.
Anyway, an amazing thing about earth is that here you can have “experiences”. I cannot imagine how it would have been without them. I remember being on a rooftop once, waiting for rainy clouds to come after a season of scorching heat. That was an experience that has travelled with me. As one gathers flowers as one walks through a garden, I have gathered a lot of experiences. Of fear, of pleasure, of excitement, of nervousness. Of achievement, of loss, of novelty, of books.
It is surprising that I have not even lived one fifth of my human life (if I aim to live a hundred years) and have been shown so many things that I can talk about them for the rest of my life and still not be finished. There are so many to be managed.
Because you had not given us naturally, humans before me made computers to easily store such things. But it seems they will need a hundred years’ worth of research before we can store those beautiful feelings.
The people of earth have made enormous efforts to raise orderly systems. There are countries, there are governments, but there is also poverty. There is law, there is justice, but there is also pollution. Due to the people sometimes being so many and sometimes being less hard working, some bad experiences called sufferings exist. Not that these things are very new or accidental – they have been part of the picture ever since, perhaps, the first conception of the human or animal race, or even life. Not also that humans have not tried to reduce or minimize these bad experiences, but they have travelled along for all this time.
It appears the pixels of suffering have been cemented by you in the big picture. Maybe there is a reason you do not want to completely eliminate it.
Okay, when I was some years old, I learnt a shocking thing: it was that your life must have an aim. My grandfather whose beard had no black hair left, his aim was to be one with you, God. I played around that idea for a long while – there could be nothing more exciting! I imagined it as there was an author, curiously writing numerous stories, and that by being “one with him”, He would make me sit beside him on his desk, so that I could help him with this work of his. The idea was funny but it was thrilling.
But I was taught that I also needed to have other aims in life. The idea was that I was going to spend so many years on earth, and that spending should not be a free run, random. The idea of “planning” and “design” was introduced to me.
For almost the first quarter of their lives – give or take a few years, depending on the length of life – humans on earth have to spend time discovering themselves. They try new things, strange things – scary things – and tap into different areas of their bodies. Some excite them, some that they want to do more – some interests, passions, tasks – and they slowly see shaping in concrete forms what they want to do with their lives. It is like testing various flavors in food and seeing which excite taste buds the most.
I believe I am still in that process, possibly in last stages. I have had many fantasies and many experiments. At one time I thought I would become a pilot. Some years later, I wanted to be a doctor. At times, I wanted to be a writer, sometimes a poet. I tried starting a YouTube channel, I asked myself if I wanted to be a politician. For a long time, I have wanted to be a civil servant. Sometimes my passions want me to become a teacher – oh, how cool that would be – and sometimes a singer – aha! At times an actor, at times a director. An animator, an astronaut, a scientist, an inventor. A motivational speaker, a cricketer, a psychologist, a businessman, a religious leader! Please, God, do not think I am confused or something about my priorities in life – I have just tried to list down things that I considered to be in my eighteen years.
But to say that I have figured out everything about aims, purposes and directions would be a lie because I have not. I am still a directionless little ingénue, trying to understand things. I am making and marring worldviews every day.
At different times, I have had different ideas of the world. When I was a kid, I had always wondered at how complex some things had been made by the people on earth – and the prime example that I always had was of the working at government offices. I felt largely annoyed by how much fuss there was of paperwork and formalities for even little works. That was my worldview then. I liked simplicity, easy sorting out of things.
Now that I have grown in age by some years, I giggle at my own thoughts and their childishness. I still reserve a tad of such ideas, but perhaps understand that some forms of formalities are really necessary, that’s just how things work, and accountability, management and order need to be maintained. I have also perhaps realized that filling out a few forms, taking a receipt and such things are not fuss anyway. This is my present worldview.
I cannot compare even if I want to, which of the two is better – the one that sees a small part of the picture and is happy in simplicity, or the one which sees that the painting consists of so many colors and hence there is a need for bottles of different shades – but I am surprised by how views change.
I have had one more important insight. It is the idea that life is limited, and you cannot be everything in its true sense. That you have to choose.
The idea that firstly there is a choice, and secondly that the choice is ours.
With age came the sense of how big everything was. Once I watched a documentary about the Universe starring Stephen Hawking. I was 16 or 17 then. That little film of one hour was a big blow – that was maybe the first instance of seeing someone talking of something so enormous – time and space both. Maybe. Maybe not the first, because I remember lying flat on the rooftop of our house while electricity was out from the world around me one day, looking for deeper mysteries and meanings in the space that opened up above me. I do not remember having such unique feelings of grandness at any other time.
I do not know if everyone has such experiences, but still believe that you must be giving tastes of your grandeur to almost everyone one time or other. That night under the stars and that dip into the documentary, those were precious moments, beyond description in words, beyond any form of explanation.
I and many like me have been trying to figure out our purposes on earth. Many have been trying to figure out the earth, and many good ones are trying to figure you out. Seems life is about “figuring out” somethings.
God, I am thankful for these beautiful eighteen years. I do not know how many years I have more to live, but this won’t be a lie: there is a beauty on earth, in life, inside You, which I and billions others wake up to understand every day. My prayer has been and will be that this beauty remains intact and that we earthlings are reminded of You in your little creations. That we become beautiful someday.
In the meantime, I am breathing under the shade of the mango tree, where mangoes will sprout with the season and may fall into my lap, sometimes sour and sometimes sweet, both having their own unique tastes.
Yours, on Earth
Inderpal Singh
Great
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