Here’s another October heralding the onset of perhaps my favourite season i.e. autumn. While taking a leisurely stroll in the front lawn of our apartment building, as I walked over the withering, auburn leaves accompanied by the music of their melodious rustle, I took this photograph to save the beauty and timelessness of the fleeting moment and reflect on the nature’s eternal cycle of life and rejuvenation in the busy coming days as I was soon leaving home yet again for another job assignment that would finish by December.

I shared the photograph with a friend who commented on it with an Urdu verse which I thought was very apt and when he told me it was his own and he had just come up with it tout de suite, I was almost surprised and fell in love with it.

یہ تیرا بکھرے پتوں کا ذوق
میری بکھری زندگی کی داستان

Your taste for scattered leaves,
(Explains) the story of my scattered life

That man has been my friend since early school years and that he had a poetic side to him was never known to me even after our countless conversational night walks through the narrow, partially paved streets of the desert town where we both lived and contemplated the meaning of life and it’s various themes for quite a number of years.

This just gives me another reason to suspend my judgements in a world full of surprises. Being ephemeral beings, the comfort of the certainty of knowing someone or something completely is simply not for us. Let’s bask in this fundamental limitation of all our knowledge and help create a better, more tolerant world.

Happy October!