To live is to think
Alone you’re born. Alone you will die. The occurrences that happen in between are mere distractions built on the premise of saviors. You wish to believe you’re worth saving. You wallow in a fool’s paradise, waiting for someone to arrive and shower some divine sprinkles to reignite your courage. You expect others to come full speed, take you by the hand, and place you at some summit, forgetting about abundant dark histories and corrupt human behaviors.
History testifies to betrayal in the most unimaginable guises. How quickly people forget bonds once shared. How readily they retain a slight remark from yesterday while erasing decades of care. What once was intimate, passionate sharing can spiral into stark bitterness and jealousy.
You learn the stone-written principles this world follows: give-and-take exchanges, harsh abandonment of the weak, elevation of agency, and discarding of the rest. In the face of such fixed earthly criteria, how can you expect goodness all the time? What use are hopes of never being humiliated and isolated? Madness lies in failing to recognize the pattern that underlies these exchanges.
The myth of universal mothering is deception. The reality is something else: pain, disappointment, and hurt – they hover in the air. One slight divine hallmark you hope to see and you’re crushed in incalculable ways. You desire others to be selfless, Godlike figures, without covert impulses. You are lost in this utopia. You stand amazed with abandon as love is vanquished; as the last remnants of care fade into nothing; as we label one another as forever flops; as we disgrace each other; as passive attacks succeed; as words, sentences, or screed segregate and wound; as virtues are touches and hatred is retained; as we race ahead, while discouraging (or initiating no concrete steps to help) others.
Free? Nothing in this world ever truly is.
You dig deep and psychologize why people behave as they do. What instincts kick in and metamorphose into outward features? You detect patterns, generalize, and draw from eminent personalities across disciplines. The end result? Time wasted.
You want to say you murder time: first by witnessing events, then by operating on them. Escapism, maybe. What ails people? What remedy could end this agonizing? Years pass. Decades melt. As if a whiff of air moves from one end to another. Like a few steps forward and a few back.
Realizations often come while you dance to self-cooked melodies: the world cares little to know you, let alone assist you in snapping out of predicaments; philosophers can be a waste, and seeking refuge in them sometimes becomes an emotional crutch; so much time has slipped from your hands that idolizing and drinking from your unique tavern no longer sustains you. These truths strike you into awakening - pleading you to come to terms with reality. But the reality tastes so sour you throw it up, sneak back into your hole, and resume your sorcery.
While building the palace of reality everyone admires, you ignore the pillars of your own sluggishness. Without facing those pillars, the palace will keep terrifying you. The thin air separating reality from simulation can’t be swept away by bursts of resolve. It’s there for a reason. Only reason and patience, applied in the right direction, can lift it – not relentless philosophizing, psychologizing or drowning in the pool of hidden thoughts.
Between birth and death, things happen. Some do us good; many harm us. But they are things, in the end. Build values informed by the trend. Let reality not slip away while you discern public conduct. Enjoy the game. Race ahead. And analyze yourself at intervals. But analysis shouldn’t be an excuse for over-analysis. Excess of everything breeds diseases that multiply like cancer.
Watch your tendency to wander. Wander, yes, but return to the real world. Resist nothing. Retain everything. Process emotions held for decades. Meditate to bring forth the stagnant emotional stocks. Balance emotion and reason. ‘Put one leg in disorder, another in order.’ It shocks us less when calamities and heartbreaks-those that drive most of us into mental immobility-befall us.
