27/11/2010

It's so cold outside... I decided to retreat under a mountain of blankets with a warm cup of coffee.

As I ventured into the living room earlier, I saw that the family was watching a movie I watched in the cinema a couple of years ago or so. It was a very loose biopic they made of Jane Austen (Becoming Jane) and I remember that when I heard they had made a movie of her life I was rather surprised because nothing much happened in her life - because she spent it writing stories. I always liked to think that her novel Pride and Prejudice was like a mirror version of her life, where she had the power to change fates and give her characters the happy endings she knew she would never get for herself in her reality. The movie actually hints at that at some point. After all, Elizabeth rejects the only suitor she had 'any hopes' of getting due to her poor circumstances and lower standing in society because she could never marry without love. Jane Austen had gone through the same exact thing, choosing to remain alone rather than marry out of convenance. Whereas Elizabeth does get her prince in the end, it isn't so for the writer.

See, she too had a love, but her poorer status and circumstances meant that he had to marry someone else and they could never be together. She carried on writing, and one day, many years later, they meet again by chance as she has become a renowned writer. The man’s young daughter comes up to her full of admiration, and her name is Jane, too. She looks at that young girl and her lost love, and though there is a flash of old pain (the one of what could have been, but never was) they smile at each other and simply part again. He walks away with the family Fate dictated he should spend his life with, and she walks the opposite way, alone but never lonely, for she had that richness within made up of worlds that always defied reality.

It's true that none of us can have it all. That always kind of frustrated me. I always hated the fact that we had to make choices in life, mainly because making choices involves turning your back on other possibilities with often no idea as to how things could be like if we made a different choice. The more passionate and dramatic side of me always liked to think that no matter what choices I would be forced to make, I would know for sure what I could never compromise on, and the very things I could never compromise on include Love and pursuing true meaning of absolutely everything in this world, even if it means spending my life in retreat from the distractions of actually 'living' it. What I mean here is that you can't observe things in enough depth when you're completely caught up in the daily living of life. You need to take that step back and stand at a distance of all that is happening so you can observe and reflect on what it is you see. It means that sometimes being an observer of this world involves sacrificing your own proper living within reality. When would you find the time to ponder in depth if you were constantly distracted by matters of reality?

In a way, me slowly getting to accept these facts fits with the way my path seems to have shaped itself over time. The element of isolation and the impression of standing on the verge of the world rather than being immersed in it were always there, or they have been for a very long time. In fact, I see the moments when I'm not isolated (or just feeling isolated) as exceptions, and life's way of telling me: "Alright Aliska, though you need to stand on the verge of the world because your path is to understand many things in depth, here are a few things you do need to go through in reality as they are necessary lessons or glimpses for the growth of your understanding."

I just wish sometimes some of these lessons didn't have to be so painful... but then again, if they weren't they would defeat their own purpose, which would be to allow the person to expend from such lessons. Reaching Truth, even just from within, and past all illusions.