Growing up, you heard people making bland statements, equating a person lacking an aim in life with a malfunctioning machine devoid of some vital part. When you think about it now, you find it strange to compare complex, thinking beings such as humans like yourself with unthinking, inanimate machines. When the reasoning part inside you makes you think if the metaphor could actually depict a reasonable comparison, you arrive upon a crazy reflection. Then you process this unsettling question, wondering if humans were being trained to become machines- told to move past life in tracks laid out by societal expectations, to get done with certain things before a certain age, to have acquired a list of experiences before turning twenty-something. As if, you were indeed a machine and that would prove your efficiency! I hope you know better then to succumb to this narrative, although sometimes, you too struggle to hold on to the shore when the melancholy waves find you and sweep you away into the ocean of despair. The idea of the existence of some ideal way of living life sounds idiotic anyways, and who could potentially own the authority to dictate if it is the right way?
Coming back to aims and aspiration, it's weird how you know things without ever noticing that you know them. Or is it just that there are definite time points in your life when you are a bit more sensitive, a little more perceptive to your own conscience? How often does it happen that you find yourself being surprised to think about one thing that you have always known, that as you grow older, you are making yourself pass through a funnel that keeps on becoming narrower, creating a bottleneck on myriad of aspirations you had in life. You become aware of problems in the world and you wish to change things in the best of your capacity. You wish if you had one superpower, you would keep the climate from changing. You grieve almost everyday that the inequality between the rich and the poor is so vast that your brain can't think in numbers even if you wish to quantify, that the place where you are born which you couldn't choose in the first place determines the opportunities you get in your life to realize the full potential of being a human being. You struggle to find your stance on capitalism, a part of you despises it for fueling consumerism, for promoting the deterioration of resources to satisfy whimsical human needs. And yet, it is the necessary evil. What bothers you the most is that the economic pie that they claim should always grow for everyone, is discriminating in its growth rate across different scales of power and privilege. Surrounded by such a chaos, you wish you could be multiple things in parallel. A part of you feels like the main character in the Sylvia Plath's novel- The Bell Jar, standing in front of a Fig tree, the paradox of choice, so beautifully written in the lines of one particular chapter that always resonated with you ring in your head again,
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
But unlike the main character, you have already chosen your fig. And you wonder if you will be able to make a difference with your chosen fig. You ricochet between feeling so full of potential and being utterly powerless to change the course of all the things that bother you so much because you are so human.
You indeed are going through life filtering out the possibility of things you could potentially become. For a relief, there still remain some aspects of life where your 'becoming' will always be work in progress, your perspectives will be the result of the summation of your experiences, and you will be a little mosaic of how people, books, art, movies and music make you feel. It is still, interesting to think that when you are little, you don't know about the impending inevitable bottlenecks awaiting you in not-so-distant future. If you knew about those bottlenecks, would your little eyes still shine with the innocence of your countless radiant dreams?
Comments
Post a Comment