Parts left behind

I read something a while ago that left me flabbergasted. It went on the lines of....

"You don't visit the same place twice."

That is obviously because the Earth is spinning and revolving around the sun within one planetary system, which by itself is hurling around in a galaxy, which in turn is moving in through space. That takes into account the cosmic vastness, or at least a tiny fraction of the cosmic vastness that we find ourselves in the middle of. What I want to ramble about today is slightly different, and pretty much unrelated to what I just said a few lines earlier.

Firstly, I shall touch upon familiarity. Familiarity of something/someone comes with repeated/prior exposure to the something/someone/a stimulus. I just happened to notice something as a kid. If there is something ubiquitously encountered, and you stare at this hence familiar object, the object starts looking unfamiliar. The first time this happened to me was when I unknowingly stared at the rear lamps of a Maruti 800 for a lot longer than I care to remember. At the time, the 800 was one of the most common of cars to be seen on the Indian roads. And here I was, finding the car's unmistakable backside unrecognizable after staring at it for a while. I don't have an ounce of clue as to why this happened, or rather happens. But just to verify the happening, I tried staring at the back-lights of other cars, all to the same avail. 

Tail-lamps of automobiles is one thing. What about other things? What if the thing you happened to accidentally look at for a while longer than you should, happened to be the most beautiful thing you've seen?

Something strange happened recently. The phenomenon that had occurred with the tail-lamps of automobiles up till now, happened with a face. And yes! It is one of the most beautiful ones I've happened to see so far.

I was day-dreaming as usual, and my gaze came and rested upon this beautiful face that I have come to know for a very long time. I looked  at this face at both, an unconscious and conscious level. I know that because I kept looking at the face rather unapologetically after realizing that the lady knew that she was being looked at. Either I have too much balls, or that I was too dumb to not look away. 

I kept looking at the face for reasons and the duration of time, both unknown to me. But suddenly, the automobile -unfamiliarity hit me like a punch from Rocky Balboa. I could no longer recognize the face I'd known for so long. It was beautiful nevertheless, but it was not the one I knew. And for some most stupid reason in existence, I still kept looking at the face mindlessly, soaking as much as I could of it into the crevices of my mind, but to no avail. I can recall it no more.

This brings to me the second part of what I want to discuss. Do we go to the same place everyday? Be it the place of work, worship or recreation? This is a bit separate from the whole cosmic-movement theory that I mentioned earlier. What I want to say is more on the lines of the Ship Of Theseus paradox, which goes something like this.....

Imagine a ship. It is used for all the things a ship is usually used for, i.e. transport, wars, etcetera. And eventually, its parts wear off, requiring replacement. Here's the deal. The original part, assuming there is no serious damage to the part's shape, is preserved separately. And this is done for each part of the ship that requires replacement, until every last part of the ship has been replaced. Now, the original parts that had been preserved so far, is used to make another ship. And now, we have two ships with us. One ship is the ship that went through a series of repairs to receive new parts. The other ship is that which has been reconstructed using the preserved parts. Which one is the real ship?

Continuing on the same line, the place we go to everyday, if there is such a place in everyone's life, is it the same day after day? Specially given that there are a thousand things that might never become know to anybody, of things that might never even transpire in one's lifetime.

Of all the murmurs, all the wear, all the tear and toil that a place takes onto itself everyday, it becomes a bit more, or maybe a bit less of what the place was on the day before. It witnesses a bit of history, and stores it within itself till the time it gets reduced to the ground like all other things. Only thing being that since time is an irreplaceable commodity, one cannot put together a place all over again with the history that the place contains. The only thing that can be possible for rebuilding a place in time is to have another parallel universe where the event happen in the same sequence as that in our universe. But then which is the real universe?

Each day I leave the place that I think I've known for so long, I wonder if I'm leaving the same place that I left the day before. The other thing that strikes me is how much, rather how little do I know of this place that I think I know? I might stare at the place long enough, and it might just turn into something unfamiliar, so that I can start afresh.