Expanding Zarf

Zarf – the boundaries of your thoughts and actions, the extent of your love and camaraderie, the vast tapestry of overall humanness – is to remain trapped inside certain restricted boundaries.

The world today is in the final stage of standing on tiptoe, pushing forward ideologies and narratives emphasizing the further betterment of ourselves. Practical approaches are justified and revered on all fronts and in all situations.

Whatever comes in the way is declared a threat, grave enough to warrant an immediate eradication.

As simple as managing the daily business to setting long-term goals of achieving and consuming swathes of money, we remain concerned with the judicious use of our time and energy. Honestly, it makes perfect sense: as fine as a hailstorm. Of course, what else is there better than taking ourselves seriously and going all out to achieve our perceived ends?

Managing ourselves and our business, we stumble across several extraterritorial entities roaming around, passing by us, halting, moving and disappearing. Our tethering to the be-down-to-earth mentor restricts us from seeing the human conditions around us in the complete picture. Those in dire need have to witness us taking jets and flying, dawn to dust, from ourselves to ourselves, and nothing beyond. Even if a situation pops up where we get to choose between taking a few minutes off from our enthusiastically busy schedule and having a lovely word with lesser mortals, it feels as though we stand stuck in the throes of life-taking existential crises. Our failure to recognize ourselves has us that.

Restrictions we or others put on ourselves don’t stop here. Weakness, a logical byproduct of it, tears us to pieces in times of human loss. And we come to realize the significance of human connections – their cultivation. Repressed emotions and feelings get a radical outburst, and we scream and scream but remain dumb at the same time. Teleporting to our primitive selves, we let our once-lost love leak from our people-ignoring hearts like a volcano. We lose ourselves.

Impartial Disclosure:

Our Zarf is in our hands. We can put restrictions on it – or remove them thereof. There’s no stopping us from expanding our love, broadening the horizons of our mindscape, cultivating human connections, and forget not, flying jets.

Faizaan Bashir aspires to become a civil servant.