C'est la Vie

Another chapter has ended. No I am not talking about a book.Though come to think of it I wish I was. While reading a book you always wait eagerly for the next chapter regardless of whether the current one is tragic or happy. The words "what next" play in the mind constantly like a background track.

Life unfortunately is a different story. Atleast for me. I love living for the moment and the what nexts never bother me. If anything does bother me it is the "what was". Oh how I hate those! There is nothing you can do about the "what was"s. They leave you feeling helpless.

Imagine this.You get so comfortable on a particular road in life. You go to and fro a million times and you know all the curves and bumps;all the funny signboards and all the secrets. Then one day Fate rubs sleep out of her eyes and looks at you. You are smiling. She thinks "that can't be right." So then she comes up to you and says " hey there, girl. You are done here. This is a one way road for you now. You can walk by once more but at the end you gotta decide which way and move on." She knows what you are going to say. Why not, she has heard it all. Before you can utter a squeak she's gone.

So you walk slowly down the road, one last time. Trying to keep alive the dying embers of experience. You revisit every memory try to feel what you felt before. You remember every tiny bit of emotion that had been evoked and a sad smile touches your lips but you don't notice.
You reach the end. The other roads beckon you. You don't spare them a glance. You are too busy staring back , wistfully, at what you have to leave behind. The pain in your heart is like a song. A song mourning the loss of a loved one. It's too hard to bear.

You try to shut the doors of your heart. You are surprised to find them open in the first place. You had thought that you had been vigilant, but sometime when you had gotten comfortable enough to forget, the risk had been taken and the doors had opened. Now all that was left was regret.

You realize that the time for decision making had come. You look unseeing at one road then the next. You don't really care. You look back at the one you have to leave. Your every thought goes towards distancing yourself from it. Your mind is strengthened by resolution but your stupid heart is weakened by pain. You stand motionless. You cannot afford to break. As the mind becomes stronger the doors shut with a painful creak
Without a single nod or word of farewell you turn and walk down the new road.

Conflict

A friend of mine asked me to write about confusion and conflict....At first glance she seems to be going through a phase of conflict due to confusion....Is that truly the case? I think not.Conflict did not arise from confusion in this case.but what happened was that there was conflict in the mind, a war between desires and necessities ; a war between what's right and what's easy ; a war between inner voices....a war....a war between choices.

Now what happens when you realize the conflict is too much for you? What happens when you add 2 + 2 and get 4 when you wanted 6. To put it in a nutshell , What happens when the mind refuses to face reality? It takes the easy way out.It cloaks the core issue with this deceptively innocent thing called confusion.Cause as long as you are confused you have a decent excuse to not do anything. To remain stagnant and hope some external force pushes things one way or the other. As long as you are confused , your conscience rests easy.

Harsh but rings true.Now on one hand this is pardonable. All of us want easy, care free lives, free of responsibility.We like to take the path of least resistance.Why ? Simply because it is the most easy and natural thing to do.We try our best to live in a state of inertia. We tread carefully , making sure that we don't upset the delicate balance of our lives. And if this inertia is upset by something outside our control , well there is that convenient scapegoat...yes destiny. So we adjust until we are comfortable again and begin moving along this new trajectory with an easy mind. It was meant to happen wasn't it?

Now why is this pardonable? Cause control is an illusion. you will never be able to plot your life to the last bit and expect it to work accordingly.So since it is an illusion, why bother right? Wrong...can you rest easy knowing that you didn't try? That you had no hand in trying to shape your life the way you want it? That you sat back in the courtroom waiting for the verdict from the faceless jury, and you didn't even hire your lawyer?Are you comfortable with not having a say?

Now as is the way of the human world, both paths have their own merits and demerits. What you have to decide is who makes a better bed partner? comfort or satisfaction.

What came first?

Yes , what came first?The chicken or the egg.This is a debate that i have never given much thought to.I have always looked at it as an amusing quandary that would never get solved, so why bother.After all who cared. And then in one of my deeper moments i realized it was an extremely important debate.You could draw parallels from it to any situation in life, in fact to life itself. If anyone solved this problem then it would be like untangling the most crucial knot of life.

I personally do not want to know the secrets of life.But i could relate this dilema to my life.Most of my life till now has been spent in passing off everything bad that i have done as a reaction to something else. "This happened to me that is why i did this". This has been the all powerful sentence that soothes the most troublesome of consciences. I have always been able to look at it from a point of view in which i was wronged first. But now that i think of it i wonder. What if the action i was reacting to was actually a reaction to some action of mine? How would i ever know? What right did i have to an easy conscience? How can i ever blame anything on anyone , when deeper thought places the blame back in my court?You might tell me this is as pointless as the chicken and the egg problem. Well pointless or not, it has been extremely liberating.

How?Well ask yourself this.How many times have you held a grudge against a person? more importantly, how many times can u remember the reason later on? Usually we carry a grudge without stopping to think why. The reason being we human beings feed on emotion. Emotion the only thing that tells us we are alive, we are more special than the rock there. Emotion , both negative and positive, makes us feel we have a right to our space on earth.

But today after i thought about cause and effect, i asked myself what need had i for this particular emotion.Did i really need an emotion that overshadowed thought and reason and basic compassion for the fellow human being, to make me feel important? I realized the answer was not important. I would never be able to hold a grudge against someone without giving it second thought. And once second thought sets in you can't really hold a 'mindless' grudge now, can you? Hence I am free, not by much maybe but more than before. And as i learn i realize, the most complex solutions lie in the most ridiculous of situations. I mean com'on "the chicken or the egg ?" not very profound is it?. but "what came first?" yup that unlocks quite a few doors for me.Yes its as simple as that, "What came first?".

SELF PITY

I have stood on that particular verge before, a million times, put up a token protest and then jumped down.Jumped into darkness and have been embraced by it.Felt immeasurably comforted.Have spiraled deep into the darkness that deluded me into believing my problem was unique and hence so was my life.I have plunged happily away from Light.
Light,my enemy.Light that laughed at me and condescendingly showed me that I was a speck.But the soothingly whispered words of darkness had soon drowned the mocking laughter.I have lingered long enough to feel the high of low.
And as always I have been yanked back into light.I haven't fought it.I welcomed Reason and laughed along with Light at the momentary gratification delusion had given me.Yes,I have stood there before.
Today I stood at that verge again.I put up a token protest.I arched over to begin the graceful dive.But today was different.Today I stopped.Today I thought "To hell with Mr.Darkness,let me go climb the hill instead."
If this was fiction i would have been laughed at (theres still a high chance of that).But as it is not,I'll remember today as the day I had to make a choice.A choice between easily got comfort and painfully earned satisfaction.

I was made for the hills,
I was made for the sea,
I was made for solitude,
But silence killed me.