Follow Suit

In considering what is significant and insignificant, in asking questions that aren’t questions, and giving answers that answer nothing, we send days and decades to the graveyard of mediocrity. We ourselves dig their grave, bathe them, and bid them adieu. We are the culprit and the victim, the oppressor and the oppressed, and the subject and the object. The two mingle in such a way there’s no distinguishing between them. No thin or thick line. All gets blurred. No magical way forward, no bringing the dead back. What remains are their residues, remnants, and rumps: lament, disturbances, and a special hellhole crafted along the way in the deep recesses of our being.

There’s no limit to engaging with what kills time. Bring the chaos out, poke the nose in matters least concerning, toss the backside out onto the patio, delight in hedonistic kicks, and glory in immersion. In one way or another, we silently, almost unconsciously, cherish, almost die for, curiosity. Just a flicker of a spark creates enough suspension to break the order, to concretize time, to grab it, to guillotine it. I may be humiliated, yet the humiliation here can’t outweigh the insects rushing up and down in my veins. I am a lover of what’s happening here, in the Now. Fifty years old, you say? Beyond my imagination.

Wallowing in this sacred game of saving ourselves the energy required for timely reflections stands as the ultimate goal of life-until we hit our thirties and forties. Even though faint realizations often appear along the way, they rarely hold sway, and are never transforming in nature. They come and pass. Like seconds. We recognize them. And we let them be admitted into the reams of our personal history. Flops. Failures. Reckless, timid souls.

Keeping a tab on the pros and rectifying the cons of your environs in relation to inner and outer forces: a thing of the past! The world no longer requires deep thinking. Follow contemporary discourse, and race ahead. The same principle applies to how time is defined-compartmentalized into sections: twenties, thirties, and forties. A slew of obligations, neatly classified. Fail that, and you are downgraded, undermined, and almost eliminated from the race. Evidence or subjective accounts of being stuck in a rut (of killing time!); not factored in!

The principles describing how the world now runs: you must concur. Exploring the hidden layers of your being? Absolute hogwash. Histories causing present incidents? To be done away with. A simple, singular path remains: do this, waste no time, and rise in the hierarchy. The world creates chaos before your very eyes, exclaiming and disclosing its secrets. Turn against it, and pitfalls follow.

Folks, you put your dignity in peril the second you transcend (sensibly or insensibly) others. There is no chance for organic wholeness. ‘Wise men help one become wise,’ they say. But that’s not our forte. Only lopsided, one-way traffic leading to salvation: smash your personal abstractions to pieces, and partake. Put on blinkers and follow.

Time: tailor days and weeks to climbing the hierarchical ladder. Ruthless, absolutely ruthless, metamorphose into it. Listen to nothing. And, if by chance, some neurons connect, forcing you to become wiser and not merely accomplished in what the world deems important, take a second, and observe your environs-this mechanical, always-on-the-run world. You will get an answer. Sufficiently satisfying so!

Call it a tragedy, but I have begun to call it a tragicomedy. However disquietingly so!