The Rainbow Run - By Nayana Gadkari

Connected to everything, attached to nothing. A friend shared this phrase on a lovely WhatsApp group he and I are a part of. At first glance, it seemed like one of those doctrines from WhatsApp University. Everyone is a life guru now, I chuckled. Ah! But this was a wily one; it stuck with me. It wouldn’t go away as I went through my day, week, month, even.

What does it even mean? I thought as I went on a run. I thought about connections and attachments. It led me to discover what had been nagging me for a while now. Validation. Startled, I thought, why would I need validation? And yet…

As I ran, I went through my mental Rolodex of people I am either related to or know or love or know and love anyway. Surely I didn’t need validation from everyone? Miles later, I came to a startling realization to the contrary. I realized that I may have created a fragile ecosystem where each person had to periodically play a part in my self-worth. Not hearing from a loved one was a trigger; not getting a mental boost from someone was like not getting a meth dose to a hopelessly addicted!

But what about love, I thought? Wasn’t love supposed to be selfless and regardless? Turns out I love, and I love deeply, but perhaps not always selflessly.     

Even further into the run, now in utter panic, I wondered who I was and what I stood for, if anything? Did I always do everything attached to the outcome? Had I spun so many threads of attachment, creating a net around me? Was I imprisoned by my own device?

I thought about the droopy “Peace Lily” plant I had watered earlier. My beautiful Peace Lily needed watering to retain her magnificence. Are we all plants that need sunlight and water to thrive? I thought about the trees of the Solomon Islands, where if a tree needs to be felled, the Islanders are said to curse at the tree until it withers away and dies. Words can inspire, words can uplift, and words or perhaps the lack of them can also cause you to wither and die...

It was a rainy, misty dawn and I made the turn at the half way mark to head home. The rain started to clear, and the sun began its unrelenting rise from the horizon. The outlines of a magnificent rainbow magically appeared. Completely enthralled, I conjectured, weren’t we all rainbows ourselves? We needed both the sun and rain to forge us. It takes an observer to stand at the right place and the right angle to see all the seven colors of the rainbow, and it would take an observer to make an even more extraordinary effort to see the full rainbow. A rainbow you see is a full circle, not just the partial arc that you see!

The rainbow itself though, is quite oblivious of its own beauty and the awe it creates in its observer. I remembered a quote I had read “Butterflies can’t see their own wings.” Perhaps the rainbow needed to be told in the words of Wordworth that “My heart leaps up when I see a rainbow in the sky”. Maybe the butterfly needs to be reminded of the poem by Higginson that “They are the spark of life that wave wings of gold.”

How incredible would it be to share life’s journey with travelers who recognize us for the full circles that we are in all our glorious multi-hued splendor! How amazing it would be to be cherished for it all!

As I finished my run, my conscious mind and body utterly exhausted, I had a moment of epiphany. I am here for the human experience. With it comes the inevitable web of attachments, connections, love, anguish, regret, and tempest. I will be entangled, I might nearly drown, I will love, I will be heartbroken. I might seek validation through my sojourns until someday I don’t. I am on a heuristic journey, just like everyone else, to find meaning, and it will come to me eventually, or like the proverbial caterpillar that metamorphosed into a butterfly, I will find that it was inside me all along!