The rock that refuses to move!
Get strong ropes with a capacity to hold tons; tie ten camels to them; then try to get them to carry a stone lying in the midst of the desert, and witness a failure – the stone doesn’t move, not an inch. Ropes and the heavy burden-carrying animals aren’t at fault: they are perfectly anchored and appropriately positioned. It is the stone that refuses to amble along.
The stone, soft and weightless, sticks to its ground and doesn’t even budge. One, two, three (and often occasional) tries by the ropes and camels end in vain. The situation is gloomy, grim, and perplexing. Earthquakes and sandstorms curse their formidable destructive nature, seeing this tiny rock isolated, in peaceful tension, suffering under sloth and sluggishness.
The rock, inanimate though it is, has carried this immobile legacy for decades. Animals have surrounded it more than a thousand times, looking at it and pushing it forward (or backward). Dead, it stands there; amazing those coming closer. It has had the privilege of receiving both humanly and divine intervention; yet, something is missing: not external assistance, not action or inaction of animate, inanimate, or esoteric forces. It lacks an analysis of its own. Both objective and subjective. Countable and uncountable. Measurable and immeasurable.
The battle is not to budge, walk, or sprint across the torrid stretches of the desert. It is to understand, dissect, and resolve why it is positioned there to begin with and what cumulative events has concretized its stolidity. Half the answer is hidden there. But, it is not easy to get the hang of them, given it has now grown unhinged.
Analysis breeds action; that’s one thing. But when you fail to string together the series of events in your mind, much less meditate on them (let alone do something in real life), it pinches. In the same way, the rock only wishes for a one-time solution – as intensely as it could – but fails at everything. The suffering is fantastical, in part, as well.
The rock begins to philosophize things. Amazed? It adds meaning to one thing and assigns meaninglessness to another. It obsesses over the rhythmic (and smooth) flow of rivers and curses raging (and unpredictable) seas. Mountains dance in whatever cranial capacity it has, and sand dunes vanish from it all of a sudden.
So far, it has been that way – cooking its mind with something far, far from reality. Amid these imaginary crises, it has forgotten to look within and around, declined to realize the external help, and failed to get at the deep-seated base upon which its illusionary superstructure rests.
The camel, ropes, and the God – have turned out to be useless – no wonder. It is its battle. It vs. It. No amount of tilting towards abstraction is going to push it forward. However, the real concern (something as nasty as grilling a chicken alive) is the reality hitting it as it agrees to come out of its unique mindscape. Building castles in the air is, thus, a foregone conclusion.
Now - right at the moment - this very second - it is stuck in the predicament even more badly. Wind and animals have now chosen to remain on the sidelines, not helping it, though it’s a futile exercise. It is beginning to earn a bad name in the desert. ‘Don’t become Rockish,’ a camel is telling another camel as a way to kill their indolence. They are ditching it. Isolating it. It’s eroding. It’s a gone case.
A slight sandstorm is now enough to break it into smithereens. It is ill-fated; no wonder. Its degeneration, though in part, comes from its sloth and its derivatives - illusions, mental illness - precisely - if that be called.
The desert, the camel, the ropes, and the unseen forces remain. But ‘it’ is falling apart – finally.
