Random thoughts

This story is perhaps the hardest to begin. There are horrors and sadnesses that are difficult to articulate sometimes- not because they are extraordinary but because they are ordinary , happening to ordinary people and who then have the extraordinary task of coming to grips with those horrors. Or sometimes not coming to grips with them and instead simply breaking their spirits, their minds and sucking out all hope.
There are always incidents in one's life that make us question the arbitrariness of it all. But if it really is that arbitrary, does that make life the greatest horror of all. If we can never really know what's going to happen next, on what are we running? What faith carries us through from one hour to the next and from one day to the next? How do we love? How do we trust? Is it our desperate need to be not alone , to fend off the silences that come out of our loneliness that binds us sometimes in bonds of such awfulness that we'd rather not look at them or examine them too close lest we see things that in our desperation we have missed out on.

I have often longed for silence myself. A silence of the mind where my thoughts are not buzzing around like so many dragonflies. My mind that so restlessly tries to find an anchor. It doesn't know what it's looking for. At least it isn't looking for anything that it is willing to acknowledge as being part of the search or an end product of the search. I am told I will be happy if there are a certain number of things that I can achieve. According to those older and wiser who have set the rules, if there a certain number of boxes I have ticked on that check-list ,then I am told happiness or something closely resembling it will surely follow and become second nature. But here's the problem – that checklist doesn't contain anything that I want. Not really. So, I took that proposition to the elders. “Nonsense,”they scoffed. Of course , those things don't look like anything you might want. But trust us and try them out, and you will see that you will come to think of them as things you could never have imagined not having in the first place. But isn't that just settling ? I asked them. Child , you think too much , they admonished me. Enough with all these books you read. It's time you took your head out of the clouds and learned what life was really like. But those books are written about life , I said to them. They are about people who searched like me and looked at people like you who settled for what went before and they tell me a very different story from what you just told me.

They stared at me for some time. Yes, I know. I had insulted them. I had made everything they lived for, everything they believed in , seem like nothing. That's never fair is it? But they had me feel like nothing too. Or at least , made me feel like a woolly headed dreamer who was looking for something that wasn't there. But surely, if it wasn't there, would I even be looking for it?

But what is IT? What is this panacea for all that's weighing me down, that's making me turn to something within because what lies without fills me with a kind of self-loathing that needs to be experienced to be fully understood?