Not necessarily a lot to say
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If you remember correctly, January 2024 felt like a really long month. Like a guest who refused to leave even after you served him cold idli-sambar for breakfast. Comparatively speaking, February can’t wait to end. I sneezed on the second of this month and by the time I opened my eyes, it was already 15th.
Just kidding.
This month is also dragging to its closure. Adutlhood is supposed to be fast but something changed. Maybe it was the pandemic. I don’t know.
When you are happy busy, you don’t care about the passage of time. When you are unhappy busy, you do care. The difference between these two states of mind is a set of two basic questions:
“Am I wasting my life?”
“Have I wasted my life?”
That’s about it.
As I am getting older (and not necessarily wiser), my conversations with me often ends with ‘na?’, as if I am awaiting affirmations from my own belief systems. With time (and not necessarily maturity), I’ve understood that very few things genuinely matter. All our big ooh-aah tips and tricks about money (and not necessarily wealth), our endless drivels about philosophy (and not necessarily ideology), our sense of law (and not necessarily morality), your relationship with the past (and not necessarily history), our understanding of gods (and not necessarily religion), our arrogance of youth (and not necessarily mortality), and so on and so forth, don’t add any value to our meaning of life.
This specific equation is very, very, very personal.
It’s more personal than the colour of the dump you took today.
Once you design your thesaurus around it, everything else condenses into a bushy cloud of non-matter.
So, yes, when the poets told you that you get to decide your destiny, they weren’t entirely wrong. Of course, they got carried away by the rhyme scenes and meters and such technical hullabullas but in essence, they were on point. Your journey is yours.
When I was younger, I sincerely believed that if you are boring, you’ve failed at living. Not anymore. My appetite for stories hasn't dimmed but I’ve learned that the distance between boring and interesting is not immutable.
However, at the core of our existence, we fully understand (and not necessarily accept) that everyday is a fucking drag. Life is hard, particularly when you are stupid. But we like to gives ourselves an endless tranch of second chances. That’s how much youy adore yourselves even if you keep screaming that you can’t stand yourself.
The logic is simple: we try.
We keep trying to get better at life: to guage its many invisible hooks, to dodge its unkind punches, to revel in its glory, to bargain better, and to stay unsurprised by surprises.
Alas, it’s never enough.
But the sweetest thing is, there is always hope. Sorry for this cliché. As most clichés are, this one is true too.
Yes, things—like the shade of your locks, the burrows on your forehead, the desertification of your wit—will take a swing for the worst. But that doesn’t mean you are sentenced to your failures. Nope. When photography was invented, the painters and the artists didn’t stop painting. In fact, the exact opposite happened: one movement after another took place within the next century.
In other words, resistance (and not necessarily revolution) continues.
Just like life.
In all fairness, your life is a letter time is writing to (not necessarily for) you.
The days of writing spectacular letters might be long gone but the days of reading those spectacular letters shall never be gone.
You, despite all your travesties and idiosyncracies, will continue to contribute to your meaning of life. And that, for lack of poetry, is incurably beautiful.