To learn to live without....

Day in and day out we use things that has become part of our lives... Hardly we stop to think "What would I have done without this??" If we continue to skip such thoughts, then one day we may lose our imagination. At a moment, when we may have to re-invent the wheel - we may not be able to do it. Hiking, backpacking or trekking has been my ways to stimulate such thinking.

(Un)fortunately this time, just before my Yedakumeri trip I dropped my watch and it stopped working. I took this opportunity(??) to experience 3 days without a wrist watch. Of course I was always in touch with people who had wrist watches... But if I had asked them time every time I looked at my empty wrist, I would not be alive to write this blog today. I realized that I had become totally dependant on some machine to tell me the time... even though I could look up to the sky and see where the sun was... I was not able to figure out the time... My mind was just simply not tuned to such a deduction. My closest approximation of time happened at lunch time. It was around 2:00 PM when I was really very hungry and it was almost 2:00PM. Does that meant that the biological clock can substitute the quartz clock ?? I have another reason to believe so.. earlier in that morning, I just got up at 4:00AM to alight from the bus. No alarms... No conductor stopping at the bus-stop. You can call it sheer luck... but it is worth training our subconscious mind to work so well for us. Trying to learn more about knowing time without watches lead me to this site... http://hea-www.harvard.edu/ECT/Daymarks/ good one to read.

Another thing I learnt to live without is my warm soft bed. As a usual practice of carrying less baggage, I carried only one thin blanket to protect me through out the night. I was woken up many times during the night when-ever a strong gust of cold wind passed by the railway-station. Normally, this is bad.. but that night it was really good. By the time we slept there was enough cloud cover and it could have rained any moment. But waking up to pitch dark sky decorated with millions of stars was satisfying for two reasons - simplistic beauty was the first reason; and assurance that it would not rain was the second. I am thankful that decided not to take much of warm clothes for the night and thus was able to see the sky.

Food and water were in plenty during this trek. Some day... one of these treks will also teach me to live without the city food.