I woke up very late today, past midday actually... I've been feeling ill for the past few days, but the arm seems to be doing slighly better now.
Actually... I opened my eyes earlier than that, looked at the time on my phone: 10 am. I threw the phone away from me to the other side of the bed and closed my eyes to sleep some more. I hadn't finished a dream and I wanted to see how it ended. I fell deeply asleep again and my eyes opened at some point, so I clumsily reached for my phone to look at the time: 12pm. Since I'd overslept already, where was the rush anyway? I wondered how long I could carry on sleeping like some hibernating animal. I laid in bed with my eyes closed and finally decided to drag myself out of it...
It was lunch time at the primary school next door to where I live. Kids were running and shouting in the playground. Some were playing with a ball, others were clearly playing tag, or whatever the game is called in English where one kid runs after all the others till he can catch one and the latter becomes the one who has to catch the others. Some kids were gathered around a wooden construction you often find in parks for kids to climb and play in. Shouting, laughing, running about and panting... Most of them wearing thick coats to shield them from the cold weather, except for one little girl who was playing a ball game and who seemed completely oblivious to the fact that all she was wearing was a blouse and skirt, her long ponytail of red hair dancing in the wind.
I stood motionless by the window just watching the little kids for a while. Right now, I can see parents gathered in the playground to collect their children, and the crowd of people is slowly trickling out of the school to go home. The muffled sound of high-pitched voices is drowning in the music playing in my room. In about 20 minutes or so, all will be silent again.
While on the tube yesterday afternoon, I watched the diversity of people sitting or standing around me. There was a family with a very strong cockney accent talking about some football game; next to them was a pair of people in black suits and briefcase, their faces still and expressionless as statues; next to them was a lone old man reading a book, and next to me a woman who had fallen asleep, while the woman sitting on my other side was also reading some thick book. Three teenage girls who couldn't be older than 15 got in at some point and went to sit opposite me. They sat in the same careful fashion as adults do, talking in all seriousness about what they were going to do next. I looked around at all the faces around me one more time and then closed my eyes to listen only to the music in my ears.
As I came out from the tube station, I walked past a busy pub around the corner from where I live, and saw groups of young, trendy people standing at the bar with glasses in hand as they chatted and laughed away as if nothing was the matter ever. Suddenly, I felt exactly like the guy depicted in the movie Into the Wild... there is that one scene in the film where he watches young, trendy people in suits enjoying their time inside some bar and the thought of him ever being one of them throws him in a deep state of panic that leads him to flee the city at once.
The wise know that the point was never to change the world or its settings. It could never be done because the basis of life is random in itself. You could take any child from the start and bring him or her up in the most perfect way, with the best of ideologies or thoughts, and be trumped by life, or nature itself. No matter how the world happens to work, whether it worked in the most perfect or logical ways, or the opposite direction, it could never include everyone because you'd always get rogue elements working their own way. And why is that, I wondered for so long? Because the mere fact of being human, our faculty to think and reason to an extent, entails that we possess a certain degree of free will as to the direction we want take our existence. It was never about the 'world' as such, but about the journey, regardless of the settings we are randomly thrown in.
That journey, whether we like it or not, is what shapes us from the core of our being. It is what will ultimately lead us to think and act in certain ways and not others.
The point is to become aware in such a way that we no longer take random steps forward for ourselves just because others walked that path before us, or because it seems easier. Instead, we become aware of what makes more sense than not, and what works in a way that fulfills us...
People often like to say it's a good thing to be true to yourself. But what is 'being true to oneself' exactly? Such words remain meaningless until or unless a person goes through the process of defining for themselves what their own self is about... and once that's done, that's when it makes sense to say: be true to yourself.
And once one can be true to themselves, that is when the world's ways and settings no longer matter - because one can at least try their best to follow the direction that is in sync with their true self, and the only thing that can impede on that fulfillment are circumstances. Intrinsically, though, they remain faithful to their vision and understanding regardless of what they are able to achieve in reality, and that alone becomes a footprint in the sand for others to choose to follow or not. That's the point, you see. That we all get to choose. The only trick is to find the desire to use that ability to choose wisely rather than blindly.
Contrasts + Colours = Life
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