The Sky Was Always There :On Ceilings, Crossbeams and the Art of Looking Up

The Sky Was Always There :

On Ceilings, Crossbeams and the Art of Looking Up

It was early morning at New Maharashtra Sadan. The lobby was really quiet, the kind of quiet that is normally there before the beginning of a busy day. I was at peace and seated, my thoughts still unhurried. And then, without quite meaning to, I looked up.

Above me, the ceiling was a lattice of crossed wooden beams , beautiful, geometric, deliberate. And beyond them, framed by every crossing, lay the sky. Blue. Open. Infinite. The crossbeams did not hold the sky back. They simply gave it a frame.

And in that moment, something shifted in me. How often, I thought, do we sit beneath open skies and see only the beams?

We mistake the frame for the cage. We mistake the obstacle for the destination.

The Closed Window That Was Never Locked -

There is a particular kind of pain that comes not from failure, but from the feeling of being pressed against a surface you cannot pass through. A promotion that does not come. A relationship that runs cold. A dream that keeps receding. An ungratefulness we suddenly encounter. You knock and the echo returns hollow. You push and nothing opens.

We have all stood at that closed window,  forehead against the glass, watching life happen on the other side often with regret or envy. What we forget, in those moments, is to step back. To look sideways or to look up or to ignore.

The window was never the only way. It was simply the only thing we had been staring at.

" Open your mind and fly…

Sometimes you feel left out and lonely,

Drifting listless on silent shores,

Stuck or hitting your head at a closed window,

Yearning for something more.

But open your mind, lift your heart,

Free your thoughts, let yourself fly,

Take that leap into the unknown,

Spread your wings and touch the sky.

In the free fall, you'll find your path,

In the silence, you'll hear the call,

All the answers lie within you,

Just trust yourself and break the wall…

Rise and fly high…"

The Free Fall as the Path -

I have spent much of my life in structured spaces , offices, files, protocols, hierarchies. The IAS is not, by nature, a place that celebrates leaps into the unknown. And yet, my own life has been shaped by precisely those moments: the years of waiting, the MPSC after the UPSC, the long decades as Deputy Collector before the elevation into IAS, the PhD begun not in youth but in the fullness of professional life.

Each of those was a free fall. Each felt, at the time, like losing altitude.  I now understand, that each fall was on the path finding and leading me.

The poem says it plainly : "In the free fall, you'll find your path." This is not romanticism. It is the  structural truth. When we relinquish our tight  grip on how things were supposed to go, something else becomes possible. We become available to what is actually happening. Just like  "In the silence, you'll hear the call." The call was always there. We were just too loud with our anxiety to hear it.

The Answers Are Not Out There - They Are In Here , In yourself. 

In my work with deserted women across Ahilyanagar district, I have sat with women whose lives have been stripped to almost nothing. No husband. No home. Often no income. No legal recourse that reaches them easily. And yet, again and again, I have seen something remarkable happen when you simply sit with them, listen to them, trust them with a question: the answer emerges from within.

They knew what they needed. They knew who they were. What they had lacked was not knowledge but a mirror , someone to say: your instinct is right, your strength is real, your sky is there.

This is also what the Self-Help Group model, at its best, does. It does not supply answers from the outside. It creates conditions in which women discover what they already knew. The shakti was always present. The group simply removed the crossbeams from their line of sight.

Yes,  all the answers lie within you - Just trust yourself and break the wall.

Looking Up as a Practice -

That morning in the lobby, I did not look up because I was smart or wise. I looked up because I was still, for once not rushing, not yet engulfed by the day's demands. The stillness is what made it possible.

We rarely look up when we are running. We only  look ahead, scanning for obstacles, calculating distances. Looking up requires a pause , a willingness to not be productive for a moment, to not be solving anything, to simply be.

Sant Tukaram called this vairagya , the gentle loosening of our grip on outcomes. Not indifference. Not passivity. But a kind of interior spaciousness that allows the larger view to enter. He says, 

वैराग्याचें भाग्य । संतसंग हाचि लाग ॥ १॥

संतकृपेचे हे दीप । करी साधका निष्पाप ॥ ध्रु.॥

तोचि देवभक्त । भेदाभेद नाहीं ज्यांत ॥ २॥

तुका प्रेमें नाचे गाई । गाणियांत विरोन जाई ॥ ३॥

It means that the true fortune of detachment is finding the company of saints (Sant Sang). The grace of saints is like a lamp that makes the seeker pure (Nishpap). A devotee who has no differentiation (bhedabhed) in his heart is the true devotee of God. Tukaram says he sings and dances in love, ultimately dissolving (surrendering) himself entirely into that devotion is he who does not differentiate.  

 When we cultivate that spaciousness,  in a busy lobby,  in the middle of a deadline,  in the depths of a grief that does not lift , we find that the sky has not gone anywhere. It was only our gaze that had dropped.

Rise and Fly High -

The wooden beams at Maharashtra Sadan are not obstacles. They are architecture. They hold the roof that shelters us, they provide light even as they frame the sky we must not forget to see.

Our constraints, our hierarchies, our disappointments, our setbacks, the structures of our lives are also, in this sense, architecture. They hold us even as they frame our view. The question is not how to demolish them but how to use them: to climb higher, to look beyond, to remember that the sky extends infinitely past the frame.

Open your mind. Lift your heart. Free your thoughts. The sky is not something you must reach , it is something you must remember you already belong to.

Rise and fly high.

The sky was always there.

R.Vimala,  IAS,  

Resident Commissioner,  Maharashtra  & Secretary,  Government of Maharashtra,  & 

PhD Scholar at IIT Bombay.