My Takeaways From The Ruins And Remains Of Rome!

The ruins, remnants and the remains, which are piles of brick structures around the place, which is ought to have began life as a glorious mausoleum, constructed by the great Augustus to hold his remains and the remains of his family for the generations to come, for lifetime. It must have been difficult for the Emperor to have imagined at the time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty Augustus- worshipping empire. 

How could Augustus have possibly forseen the collapse of the realities and the realm of the vastness of the empire? Or known that, with all the aqueducts depleted down and crushed by the barbarians and with the strong infra structures left in ruin, the old city would be long empty of its people and civilisation which it was once proud of which would take millions of years to rebuilt and reconstruct in the same profound manner ?

What we all need to glorify in our lives is that happiness is merely the consequences and effects of our personal views which we ourselves need to be accounted for. What one does is that one can fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking out for it.

And there I looked at the Augusteum, and there were several thoughts gushing through me. It came to me that life ain't that chaotic, after all. It may be the pursuit of our perceptions, about ourselves and about others, which brings forth the ideas and notions about the things that surround us. This particular place warned me to never get attached to any obsolete idea about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. We transport our minds to some other time or place or world, where it can be safe and insulated from the pain of day-to-day life.

This very place made me to hold the opinion that one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation. It is like sometimes that one gets so attached to the past ‘who one was’ and wants to keep it as a living edifice of one's so called glorified existence. Existence is today, now or never. Our past glories must not make us. Times are never equanimous, one is not what one was or what one could have been, what one is today, is what one is.

Then I looked around this place for one last time, at the chaos it has endured - the way it has been adapted, burned, pillaged and found a way to build itself back up again. And I was reassured, maybe life isn't so chaotic, it's just the world that is, and the real trap is getting attached to any of it. Probably, the ruins may be a gift to keep for lifetime, ruins may be the treasure that one can keep within oneself, ruin may be the roads to the journeys that lay ahead of the much awaited transformations.

It kind of feels like a precious wound, one would not let go off because it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same, settle for living in misery because we are afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Our distraction needs to be planned and moderated in bite-sized chunks. We can’t binge on distraction.

- Hardik