Shoelace Drift

Anant Muses...

For a second there, I felt a creative block, staring at an empty page with a header on it. It’s funny, considering my brain would ever allow itself to think so highly of me.

But then, I came to think of what this really is about. I realize that all I need to do is let loose the leash on my bulls here, and my brain will unhinge its jaws and begin to devour the many shades of pessimism that form my background as seamless ribbons.

I am certain on the equation here, for I am a servant and I have a captain on the ship. That’s almost all certainty holds for me. The whole blog writing episode came as an unexpected wave in my flat-lined life.

Considering I read this phrase on the ‘Urban Dictionary’, it is surprisingly incidental, meaningful and philosophical.

I have dwelled intently in my past on shoelaces, knots and what-not. It always fascinated me to see how shoelaces formed one of the first few standards for the worth of an infant in this shit-sludge journey we’re all forcibly pulled out for. How inability of tying a decent knot in one’s shows almost immediately proved autism. I couldn't understand the strange sense of delight people (including me) felt on having furnished neat, symmetrical and rightly sized loops of string. Why, a bull-dog shaped fold decided how well a person carried himself. But then, that’s more about knots, and that is a whole other story.

We’ve set out to indulge in the shoelace fiasco here. It is an unavoidable infinity I see on my shoes, an infinity wrapped into a bow, with two possible beginnings to it, for we all know there are absolutely no ends.

Infinity, thus, calls for a sense of unfathomable depth. Let me thus ask you, have you ever thought how we breathe through life?

Wait, you might be throwing your head back to say you have, or rather, there’s nothing to think about in the petty fact. But is breath really that simple an exercise? People who've made millions out of teaching funny ways to breath will surely beg to differ.

You might wish to consider a healthy person, one who lives by the books of the Gods, he still gets to die, doesn’t he? The end is invariant and inevitable. Death is, undisputedly, more absolute than life, at least from this end of the tunnel. So he dies a ‘natural’ death, of old age. Dozes off to an unending sleep. What can one say causes a natural death? The food, the soul, the Gods, the time? Or is it the breath, the unchanging, the unaltered part of our lives? Isn’t the life giving also the most insidious?

I am tempted to say that death, as strongly as life, is caused by breath. Our breath is our time keeper in this world, for when all senses may be lost, one can still count breath.

I could seem to have swayed off-topic here, but I haven’t. What I have attempted to establish is that repetitions, all of them I can perceive, are self-decaying. That seems to me to be the biggest bug of all in this matrix.

So every next breath of yours is inevitably weaker than the last. It takes you closer to your climax. All of this has come out of an imperfect knot on my shoe. I have stopped wearing shoes much at all. Apart from them being too much work, I hate how knots are almost impossible to get right.

It seems that every time I get a smaller loop on one side, or worse, a single looped knot, my shoelaces throw back at me a sadistic grin, relishing the blood off of an incomplete, imperfect life.

Shoelace drift is like fatigue. How things are almost always insidious and we gladly choose one over another to kill us slowly.

One fine day you start off with new shoes. Life seems perfect and variables seem few enough to be ignored in your little universe of control. You walk around with your own air of dope and world around you seems to jiggle in sync with a Bruno Mars’ song.

But the next thing you know, your shoes, they’re far from new!

The gloss of the leather, that took an unduly long hour to shine, looks scraped off by the feet stomping aunts in the Metro; and the cheap, greasy mint sauce stains from the snacks Deli.

The laces which earlier seemed firm and monochromatic, now sag like a witch’s sleeve, mustard from the wet mud.

You begin to wonder why things never stay new. What follows, is the question whether ‘new’ would ever mean anything if they really did.

This, this right here is what shoelace drift stands for. An impending doom on the symmetry, the neatness in life you set to create.Spitting out the guinea pig reality of the free world and its free people.

How we keep switching among the many possibilities in life, trying to achieve a balance that runs just as far from us as we try to near it, till the sweet moment when we’re rotten enough to finally be accepted by oblivion.

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I Chronicle... 

They all look the same at first. Nicely lined in the showcase - each sole clean and each lace falling in a nice perfect bow. And then reality happens. There are days when the shoes tread on rough terrain and others when they simply lie dejected in a corner underneath other dirty footwear. Bit by bit their wear leads to tear. The shoelaces which once lived in an egalitarian harmony slowly begin to slip out of balance. While one end rushes to get out of that maze, the other gets dragged into a dark hole – the shoelace drift.

So that is what you Goldilocks, the owner, wake up to find on one of those rare occasions when for the umpteenth time you had decided to bring a change in your life by starting your day with a morning jog. Another mess. You stare at your old shoes for a good 30 seconds, close your eyes, throw your head back and burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. It is almost manic!  

You draw in a long breath and slump back into your bed.

Those laces have lost their balance. They always do. No matter how expensive they are or what substance they are made of, the shoelaces always lose their balance. And it is incredible how little you do to contribute to arrive at this inevitable situation; time and routine take care of it for most parts.

You throw a pillow on your face to drown out those nagging voices in your head, one chastising you for yet again giving up on your plan and the other urging you to let it go because those laces are too much work and you deserve a better morning anyway.

If only Velcro was fashionable, you would have never faced this problem in the first place. But then you remember that it isn't too easy to get a good grip with them. A solid footing maybe inconvenient at first but it guarantees a quality jog.

You exhale and sit up straight to face the shoe on the ground.

As you pull out the uneven laces from their holes you begin to think. Up and down, up and down your hand moves, and you recall all the porridge you have eaten which was either too hot or too cold…In and out, in and out…..and all the times you had to sit in a chair that was either too hard or too soft…left to right, right to left…..or sleep in a bed which was too high or too low for your liking….until it completely falls apart.

And then you start again. Start afresh. Balance.

You put the 10 minutes worth of work down knowing perfectly well that in a few weeks time you will be repeating this whole exercise again. The futility of this effort weighs heavy on you.  Yet you smile at yourself for having over-thought everything in the last 20 minutes and walk away to the kitchen to make some breakfast of a porridge heated to the right temperature.

The shoelace drift might be inevitable, but it is also essential. It helps to find that balance, the perfect bow. Why are we obsessed with that bow you ask? Because nobody likes to run with the fear of tripping over. 


[Dear Charvi, a spontaneous turn of events gave form to a kind of collaboration which manifested itself into this post consisting of 2 monologues delivered by me and my guest contributor (who also came up with the ingenious topic.). Have a good read.]

Photo by Anant Pathak