My mother’s father was an eclectic man. A man driven by a strong sense of purpose. A man who kept his interests alive within himself and expressed his interests, in the world around him. His home, his dispensary, the cars he drove… Everything.

I remember he visited us one time and went into the little brush forest land around us. It was the nineties and the land around my house wasn’t developed, so there was a lot of forest brush around. He walked in, found some dried tree branches, and took them home. He then had them varnished and put on a plinth pedestal, to use as a decorative piece in his house. Back then I didn’t really understand it.

Over the years, his flat in Mumbai has been redeveloped and renovated, and to be honest, it’s lost its soul to the clean death knell of Scandinavian minimalist modernity. In a sea of Grey white black color schemes, I fail to see the mid-century, wood-crenelated, patterned wallpaper soul that my grandfather’s house had. It’s the same building, but it’s just not the same.

Fast forward a couple of decades, I live halfway across the world, in another, very nice yet soulless, modular, indistinguishable from a million other homes abode. A nice, modern, convenient space in middle Tennessee, a product of modular modernity in the midst of a world constantly evolving into the same monotonous grey-brown nothingness due to the guiding hand of thinking, thinking men.

Nature, though, works on its own time, and on its own terms. A particularly windy day in winter-spring saw a couple of trees fall to insurmountable near hurricane-force winds. I heard the conspicuous loud cellulose crack, I heard the sickening thud of wood against the moist, semi-frozen soil.

A few weeks after nature’s show of strength, I sat on the steps at my front door, looking at the horizontal, formerly vertical trees. I see the bark falling off the trunks. I see the dry, rotting core of these once proudly standing cellulose colossus-es.

In this moment of winter-spring finally turning a new leaf into spring proper, I stared at the complex geometry of the horizontal once vertical trunks, I saw the web of branches and branch tips, and I remembered my maternal grandfather, venturing into the forest brush and picking out a branch, just like the ones a few feet in front of me.

That’s when got it. I understood the reasoning behind plucking a branch, encasing it in veneer and enamel, and making it the centerpiece of your home decor. It’s not just an eclectic conversation piece. It’s the constant reminder of man’s connection to nature, and the power that it holds over him. Despite all the modern technological marvels that build moats and isolate him from whence he came, he cannot change certain things embedded within his bones, things within his blood.

A dead tree branch is a preserved, forever reminder of the fragility of life. A reminder of the immutable characteristics of men of flesh, of men who arose from the trees and bushes from the cradle of life and civilization.

Wood is several orders of magnitude more rare than any precious metal in this universe. Life seems to be that way too, based on what we know. It’s been a few weeks since that soul-tethering moment when the tree branches bridged the gap between my and my grandfather’s memories.

Spring has given way to summer. The leaves grow lush green, and the birds and the animals go about their summery business. Vines and creepers envelop the wind-felled tree and a few dry branch tips extend over the forest brush, like extended skeleton fingers.

As I sit here again, remembering my grandfather, my mind keeps coming back to his sense of purpose. He knew what he wanted to do. He knew what he liked. Everything he did had a sense of surety to it. When he took that tree branch and made it a piece of decor, He knew what he wanted, the vision in his mind was clear.

That’s what I keep trying to find in my own life. I ask myself what I want, and if I even know what I want. I spent my whole life doing what I ought to do: get degrees, focus on my career, and set myself up for the future. Now that this future moment is here, what is it that I want? I keep pondering over this question, and I keep drawing a blank every time. My mind is an empty pedestal, waiting for its own centerpiece.

A crisis of meaning in a post-modern world is a cliche, sure, but that doesn’t make it any less real. The thing about “ought to have” vs “want to have”, is that the latter is a lot more abstract for me. Sure, I ought to settle down, have a career path, and maybe even find myself behind the wheel of a large automobile, but what I want is to be loved, appreciated, and accepted. What I want is to be among friends, to be enveloped in the warm blanket of affection. What I want cannot be described within the confines of minimalist, technologically defined, and algorithmically curated sameness that pervades the physical and digital realm around me.

To slam together and paraphrase a few philosophers, authors, and a meme or two:

Life is absurdly meaningless.
Life is painfully meaningful. 
I walk the path between
These questions
And one day hope 
To find myself 
Living the answer.