The Missing Piece

I have had the good fortune of visiting the most beautiful beaches in India. From the most commercialized in Goa, to far from commercialization in Pondicherry.  From the most crowded in Mumbai and Chennai to the most unexplored kind in Andaman Islands.

I was strolling down one such beach. Sun was setting. Needless to say it was beautiful.

And as is inevitable under the circumstances, the thought process slowly took a turn from single malt whiskey towards philosophical genre.

I have absolutely no idea why people turn pop philosophers/psychologists at the mere sight of a sunset.

You look at the waves sweeping away your footprints on the sand and it all seems to have a "deep" meaning other than the usual that its high-tide time dude, go home.

I am sure that it's just a trait of the people like me living in the land locked cities who seldom get the opportunity to be that near to sunset.

It was a happy ending of a good day. It rarely happens when everything goes right. Well everything was right till the philosophy butted in.

It's a human condition that we tend to improve everything around us but ourselves.

So the day was perfect, the beach was perfect, the sunset was perfect and then I tilted my head to one side like a Zen master and murmured "Something is missing."

What is it?

Well, something must be missing.

Why must it be?

Because, I am not used to the perfect. And if something resembles the perfect, it creates doubt.

But the truth is that something is always missing. The wants of our lives just come to the fore when we are nearer to the things that are perfect.

Perfect things confuse us, scare us and make us wonder, what's wrong.

Life is like a jigsaw puzzle and it's never complete. The journey of finding the missing pieces of that puzzle is an endless one. We have been provided with a lot of similar looking pieces and we need to arrange them in one particular order so that together they make a perfect picture.

This picture has our desires, our dreams, ambitions and a lot of pieces belonging to these are always missing. And if we find them we start looking for the other ones to make the picture even more perfect.

While we are busy putting these pieces together, there are some pieces lying unattended as these pieces do not fit into the current part of the picture we are trying to complete, surprisingly to fit these unattended pieces "Later."

These are actually the most important pieces which we have carefully separated from the other pieces and kept them aside.

So that when the whole picture is perfect, then we can place these pieces at appropriate places. We have already figured it out where they go in that perfect picture of ours once it is completed. But by the time we reach out for these pieces, some of them are already missing.

And as this ever unfinished puzzle keeps creating blank spaces of imperfection in our lives, at some distant canvas of life somebody is desperately looking for the most important piece missing in another unfinished and imperfect puzzle.

And suddenly it occurred to me, "I am the missing piece of somebody's puzzle".

I petted side pockets of my cargo shorts looking for the only thing that separates the two worlds of sanity, my mobile phone.

I felt a sharp need to call someone. And I did.

So sunsets have a purpose after all. They bring out the pop philosophers in us and help us find ourselves, "The missing pieces of somebody's puzzle."

I highly recommend them.