Salad # 8 : Another Medley

Quite apart from the fact that I've always wanted to showcase my older writings, I find it's actually fun to let 'em loose on an unsuspecting readership which comprises people in their teens and twenties who have been brought up on a diet which was largely bereft of introspective reading material. The thing, you see, is that a great deal of technological advancement may have happened in the past thirty years - but the vagaries and the machinations of the human mind, and the unpredictability of the human thought process has, in the main, remained the same. So I would like to think that what I wrote in the 80's can still be considered relevant. There's time and room enough for the 21st-century writings to come in......

Here, then, are three strands of thought from an 80's collection called "The Metaphysics of Behaviour" -

Treadmill (1985)

Letting yourself be taken for granted is like volunteering to become the soles of someone’s favourite shoes – you’re constantly stepped on until you get worn out.

 

Metamorphosis (1986)

“Oh, you’ve changed !” he said to me, on our meeting after two years. I didn’t think I had, which set me thinking: what is this thing called change ? What does it do ?

Change is dynamic.
Change is absolute, not relative – it never pauses long enough to permit comparisons.
Change is continuous – at any point of time, it is more accurate to say “You are changing”, rather than to say “You have changed”.
Change is undetectable as it happens.
Change is gradual: a whitewashed wall growing yellow as you continue to gaze upon it.
Change is as spontaneous as it is involuntary; as involuntary as it is inexorable.

Change, in fact, is stranger than fiction.

The Other Cheek (1986)

One of the major indices that determines the depth and quality of a friendship is not, as is popularly believed, what one gives, and is given; it is what one forgives - and for what one is forgiven.