Rocking in the Free World

A somewhat impromptu trip to western Norway brought me to this cute little town called Bergen where I spent the weekend at, checking the fjords out on my way and on the way back as well, taking two different routes to and from Oslo.

Since the trip was sort of unplanned, and it was intended that way to make it a more worthwhile reminiscence, I wasn’t really sure about whether I would end up getting accommodation, and being in a rush to just be able to make it to the train station after waking from a drunken stupor very suddenly,  I was callous with packing stuff and did not really prepare myself for an underneath the sky crashing experience.

I was mentally prepared to just sleep on a park bench or something, just to boast to myself and to close friends willing to listen about my ‘homeless for a day’ venture and romanticize it in my own mind, in an exaggerated fashion, beyond the levels that it deserved.

Now, I did manage to get reasonable accommodation at the YMCA dorm in Bergen and did not really have to sleep out, thankfully so because it was raining intermittently all the time.

I forgot all about this until last friday evening when I was travelling on the Chamundi express train back home to Mysore from Bangalore. Armed with my ever-faithful companion through thick and thin, my black ipod, I was standing by the door of the compartment, regaling in the scenery passing me by and thinking of how I much I had grown used to this journey as being an integral part of my life, a journey I looked forward to because it meant going back home to family.

At this train station named ‘Maddur’ where the train stops for a short while, I was standing out by the door and looking outside and I saw something that made me feel very weird.

The train station was being renovated and it was pretty much in shambles, being in this intermediate stage of work in progress. I saw workers who had just finished their job for the day, preparing themselves for the night by crashing on those huge plastic sheets that are generally used, among other things, to cover up cars left out in the open.

The very sight of those people sleeping on the hard ground, with only the plastic sheet to lie on was something I found profoundly disturbing. I had thought of sleeping out in the open to be ‘cool’ and to have ‘an experiene’ while these people had no choice. It was then that I felt like this total jerk, and experienced one more of those ‘counting my blessings’ moments, that seem to come by me with a greater frequency than I can previously remember.

There are a lot of things and a lot of people that we end up taking for granted. If only we realize the true worth of what we have, contentment follows automatically.