If you go from Lahaul to Ladakh, there are three main mountain passes on the way. Each higher than the previous one, and each even more desolate, so much so that before the last one, one finds oneself cycling on a 50 km long plateau.

There is nothing here. Just a neverending road on a flat expanse higher than the highest part of the Alps, with even higher mountains jutting around the bowl.

But since there is a road, there is traffic, so a small group of shanties, around a dozen makeshift structures, has sprung up at the end of this plateau, the last stop, before the road starts winding up even higher towards the ultimate mountain pass.

As we leave this place, to continue on this road, someone has put up a sign board by the road. Just a simple white plank with black letters.

These things are ephemeral, but when I saw it, it was literally the last thing on this road, and nothing after this.

There is still 20 kms to the mountain pass, and then a further 10-ish kms on the other side before one will find any nontrivial human artifact (if we ignore the road and traffic signs). So I had a lot of time to think about it as I slowly pedalled my way through.

And I kept thinking about it even after that trip too. Is it true?

The first thing to talk about, before we get to its substance, is the message itself. The words got to me when I was there the slow way, under the pain of my own muscles, doing nothing else night and day for weeks except traverse a road.

Later on I went again on the same road, but in a car, and this time this sign felt like a trite coffee cup sticker. I felt no connection to it. Interestingly enough, it didn't devalue my earlier interaction with it – it is as if there are two different signs I saw, one that I am still thinking and writing about, and one that felt like a meaningless motivational yap; the words and the settings were the same in both cases, what differed was me and how I reached it.

So the message itself reached me when I went to it in a way, rather than it being served to me. And something similar might be happening to you as you read this.

In Man's search for meaning, there is a page where author is describing the moments when he makes it out of a concentration camp as WWII ends. After the initial confusion and the rush has died down, he finds himself walking on a road, alone, towards the nearest town, with nothing on him save what tatters he's wearing.

And he realises that he's free. Just him, walking down this road, absolutely free to do anything that he wants in this world.

The author doesn't extempore on the moment, and writes of it in a simple, matter of fact, manner, but after 200 or so pages of living with the author having their freedom taken away from them, I was hit very hard by this sudden realization that he's now free.

Is it a freedom he didn't possess before he entered the concentration camp? It was certainly a freedom he didn't possess when he was in it. And he certainly possessed it in that moment – If I was so sure of it just by having been in the author's company for 200 pages, imagine how sure he felt of the absolucy of his freedom having lived those pages over 3 years of hell leading up to this moment.

The Garuda Purana describes of the mental state that arises in our brains when we're in the cremation grounds, performing the last rites of someone. There is grief, and some are overwhelmed by it, but for others there arises a clarity of thought. They see how irrelevant the threads they've wound themselves up into are.

This clarity of thought doesn't last long. It is not even clear to me if it is intended to last long, or if that'd be counterproductive to one's role in the cosmic dance.

It is not clear to me either if we don't recognize our freedom, or if we choose to forget it voluntarily. Chains can be anchors too.