Vague

I wrote this long ago, and it made some sense at the time, but now it’s just a vague piece about I don’t quite understand myself either. If it makes sense to you, good for you.

Everyone is scared of the dark. But darkness comes to mean different things to different people. Sometimes darkness takes different forms in the life of the same individual. Be it the fear induced by the absence of light, or the black cat that stares at you while you’re trying to sleep, or the failure that defeats you, perhaps mere experiences that are timed wrongly. Or that the timing was right but you were unaware. Retrospectively, some experiences seem to be blurry images buried in our psyche, perceived and experienced long before they are ready to be understood, rendering a dark shade to them, by the mere fact of them being incomprehensible. Sometimes you are to dig them out from the depths of your memory that you once tried to hard to hide or just lost them all along the way, only to realize that you are now left with interpretations that reek of uncertainty. What happened then seems to be more valuable than it’s worth, perhaps only because you didn’t know what it meant. And when you begin to become aware of its absence, you find a space left unoccupied by a more suitable replacement.

And when you stumble upon a replacement, you expect yourself to take off from where you left off. Unfortunately, the passage of time took along with it memories that seemed so insignificant, perhaps even wrong or meaningless. It is unfortunate because memories made sense in a nonsensical way, thereby fitting perfectly well in the moulds of my innocence. Today I look back and the canvas that once seemed so colourful seems to be painted over by splashes of darkness. As I write this, I begin to uncover the life I once deeply desired before I changed my paths. What I am not sure is whether I am actually on a road less traveled or merely lost my way...

To All the Cynics of the World

This post is dedicated to all the cynics of the world, who I’m increasingly realizing are a pretty lame lot. Excuse the judgemental nature of my thought post but I just had some realizations and I’d like to voice them. It seems to me that cynicism is just a way of being lazy. You keep telling yourself that nothing good comes of anything anyway so put in all that effort? You tell yourself that all things (good and bad) come to an end just so don’t allow yourself to feel too much so when it actually ends, you are not surprised at all. It was expected, so duh?

But what seems to pass in the name of a ‘realistic’ approach to life seems to be just a way of being comfortable in your lethargic skin. That, or perhaps the complete inability to give life the opportunity to let you believe otherwise. If you’re comfortable in believing that life has little to offer in way of happiness, why live at all?

Strangely, I see a lot of old people who look really happy. I suppose they’ve been through the worst and they know it can’t get more fucked up than it already has. And if it does, they have the strength to deal with it. They are not anxious anymore. A good instance perhaps is my father. Even though I shall hold him forever responsible for handing down to me his paranoia gene, he seems to me like a happy man. At an early age he had to take on the responsibility of the household, marry off his younger sister and start a family of his own, a story common for people of his generation. Life doesn’t seem all that stable from his point of view because he often lost jobs, lost children leaving him with little stability and no real reason to be happy. But every time I speak to him about how I’m unhappy, his only advice is, ‘don’t take so much tension, we take too life seriously but life is really to have a good time’. I cannot help but wonder, where does he find the optimism, the courage to let himself be happy when life never offered any evidence to believe otherwise? It seems like as life gets more comfortable, people cease to explore their own limits, the limits of their hearts and minds. You’re so comfortable in your zone that you are too scared to even try, to reach beyond your self and see what life has to offer by means of experiences. To give yourself completely to something is take a risk, a risk that no one is willing to take nowadays. What a bunch of wimps!