Things that have been written many times and sensed
by millions, nevertheless timeless and faulty. Washed with tears of poets and
mere mortals, so explicit and brilliant. An incurable ailment, famous, but with
each in its own way. An ailment that bites into a wanderer, turning into a
shadow of the wanderer, into his only friend. Oh universal loneliness of an
immigrant! All your transformations, habituations, all that implies the
evolution of the personality, can end with a mutant. And still, always, a stranger.
Neither there nor here. Now you won’t go back, beaten by experience with eyes
opened up wider than is possible, and there is no strength for forward neither,
you only dangle like a balloon from a passed holiday somewhere in ‘now’,
regretting and not wishing. Searching and searching for these ghostly ‘yours’,
not according to the passport, but according to the thoughts, you are searching
for what you have made up yourself, and so here you find something completely
not right, but random and whatever there is. And it seemed that everyone was
talking about it all the same, but why did no one say it? An old, worn and
broken hurdy-gurdy.
From the gills to the ears, you’ve been coming to a
human for so long, you have multiplied, stumbled, destroyed selecting the best,
and leaving only a couple of unnecessary nipples, you arrived, you reached the
peak of your best self, a self that doesn’t need you. Through millions of
years, you invented and built a system for people in which people are not
needed. We people, unneeded, victims of our own ambitions, we are born to die,
and preferably faster, we rush to finish everything, childhood, college, love,
sex, marriage, day, dinner, and then retire, and then retire from retirement.
Because the system is so complex and unconquerable to reach the minimum circles
of needs and comforts, we waste our whole life and usually die without
receiving at least an echo of our desires. Life proclaimed beautiful is only a
vicious circle, a rodent's wheel, where in false hopes for response you, a
hamster, with all your four, like a tractor tumble on in order to reach the
criterion of Ozymandias, transform all your essence believing that it's better
for you, that in the finals, becoming what they asked, you will receive a
magical prize consisting of prosperity, recognition, freedom, comfort,
happiness and other flattering words, that in front of every one of those words
will be your name. But the way is too long, in comparison with the length of a
hamster's life. You are used and unneeded, tricked, and too old to protest and
act now differently. Now you no longer hope, but are simply content with the
cell that you have. Then the feeling of contentment, along with all the other
feelings, disappears somewhere, you defecate lying down for the last time, you
writhe a little in the agony of death and PUFF!
Realising all this and still having some life
ahead, not dying yet, my question is how to live with this? Rejoice in the
trifles, follow the leaders, get distracted, let everything go by itself,
abandon all desires, love yourself unconditionally, trust others without
demanding proof of their intentions? No. Each of these points is too
controversial and relative, especially when theory and practice are such
different poles. The overwhelming fear that I have only one life, and that I
always have to choose only one thing, and sometimes not the one I want, and
that the choice can be wrong and lead to consequences, call me paranoid, but
can one live being devoid of such questions? Life is indeed too short to fill
up your head with this existential rubbish, yet life is even shorter to keep on
making mistakes one on top of another, and to find this fragile balance, to reach
this long-desired golden middle seems absolutely unrealisable.
They say having a question is already half of an
answer, so let’s consider this observational essay as that fifty percent of the
answer and I would be very grateful to the readers if you would share your
ideas on how to live your life knowing how horrible and hopeless life is.