Routine

Last Thursday I was done by evening.

Not the way work makes you tired. I’d had energy all day. Nothing went wrong. No fight, no fire. Nothing piling on me. But by 8:30 I didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to hear anyone. Just switched off.

I sat with it later. Why.

The word that came was routine. The day starts at 5, ends around 8:30, same shape every time. Fitness, the walk, the dog, the Hukamnama playing while I get ready. Work after that. And somewhere in there the day had already been filed. Done this. Know how this goes.

Strange thing, when you actually look at it. Nothing repeated. The walk wasn’t yesterday’s walk. The dog wasn’t the same dog, not really. The Hukamnama was new. The work was new. None of it was the same. So where did routine come from? Not from the day. From me. From the mind that stamped it before I’d even lived it.

This is where I got confused.

I thought I was supposed to be the drishta. The one watching. And the watcher, I’d told myself, stands a little apart. Cool. Untouched, no feeling in it. So if I was watching, why was I tired? A witness doesn’t get tired.

Maybe I had the witness wrong.

Maybe Sakshi Bhaav was never about standing back with your arms folded. Maybe it’s the other way. You’re so far inside the thing — the cold, the walk, the dog pulling at the leash, the words on the screen — head to toe in it, that nothing stays behind. You live it fully and it’s gone. Nothing carried into the next hour. No calling the afternoon old because the morning already happened. Which isn’t detachment at all. It’s being all the way here.

And the tiredness — I don’t think it was the day. It was the chitta. The mind talking over the day while I was trying to live it. Telling me I’d been here before. That running commentary. That’s what wears you down. Not the 5am. The voice that keeps saying again.

I haven’t solved this. Thursday happened, it’ll happen again. I just notice it now. The gap between living a day and being told you’ve already lived it.

There’s a song I keep coming back to here. The whole feeling of it is that if you keep believing, if you don’t give up, something — call it love — finds you in the end. And that’s just how it is.

I don’t fully know why it sits with me on this. Maybe the love it means isn’t a person at all. Maybe it’s just staying awake to whatever is in front of you. Maybe consciousness is the love that comes when you stop filing the day and stay in it.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into a song.