How it came to Daily Riyaaz Gratitude

because Shaorya Vijay

It’s easy to picture yourself nowhere on earth — gone — when someone you know well, dies.

Imagine yourself in a place. Be it walking in a building, walking outside, sitting in an office, lying on bed, laughing in a car.

Next, erase yourself from each of these places. All of them.

That’s truly how you fill space after you’re dead.
The very real effect death brings, is you not being there. anywhere.

As I sat puzzled 4 months ago, after Shaorya’s suicide, I imagined myself this way — dead, not in the immediate grief of the scene, but as hence quietly deleted by people from a possibility of existence somewhere.

Nothing stirred in me from the visualization.
I wasn’t in any place anywhere, everyday, already. Besides, I didn’t seem to mind.

It was sad, me not minding my being dead that way. And it was troubling for the years ahead.

Hmm, what was I missing?
Career? Nope.
Relationships? Clearly, yes.

I felt I had none, sceptical of those I might already have. The feeling seemed appropriate, credit to HouseMD and his powerful, popular, cynical world view.

House had a severe influence on me. I watched him repeatedly, everynight in bed. I took him in, I acted him out. And I arrived where he arrived. A seclusion, by choice. Seclusion in a world that we both knew obviously cared.

Following him, I felt Shaorya had misjudged, quoting to myself:

There’s no dignity in death. You can live with dignity, you can’t die with it.

But I was unsure. House as a real character had fissured a month ago. He struggles unendingly with relationships & evades himself, both qualities far-fetched with his insightfulness.

Ah, writers! What’s all this! House wouldn’t be doing this!

,I’d gone in scenes. With the shown House faulty for a moral compass, I was out for another that day. Suicide had to be understood better. And in time, as the first search result came The School of Life to be a new compass, introducing Albert Camus the afternoon & more with time.
A younger Camus played football too, Siddharth. You’d love his words on it.

Just as handing your game a death yielded an intensity on field, to enjoy every game as much as possible, handing my presence a deletion brought me to intensely be.

It’s for this reason that death is meant to be stayed properly in touch with day-to-day, a lesson we can learn from Heidegger:

When in a lecture in 1961, Heidegger was asked how we should better lead our lives.
He replied tersely that we should simply aim to spend more time in graveyards.

To Shaorya Vijay for scaring me to life!
To The School of Life!
To Death! :)