ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES

I came across a man, whose world had played a trick on him. The torture was evident, its imprint on his face evident and his story a living metaphor. He said...

As my strength drew to a nadir and the single path opened before me, the silent suffering yielded its thoughts like bullets from the brain, spewing with unmeasured alacrity, what some might consider a rave, but it was the expression of a broken heart, and shattered dreams that no one understood. Silence does build walls and suffering hides within the midst until the strength weakens and the restraint is lost.And as I look through the frame of my reference into the outer world; my personal universe, I see the opposite: trees are resilient, upright and blossoming. The flowers are colorful and inviting and the birds chirping in their solemn prayer, blissful in ignorance. Even the lashing punishment meted out by the storm last night seemed to have been an evocative play between might and right, all forgotten in the midst of the sun-soaked brightness that illuminates this universe today. Yet, a lingering starch of stoicism and anger is steeled away by the past and bottled in quantities large that threaten to spill and stain in the grandest of scale. "O' that I am angered!" He sobbed.

The Question:

But as time slipped, the turgid seething anger within slackened its hold on his person. The abating sense of freedom awakened once again. What? Should he fight and counter the weakness that has spread through the sinews of his being with this, once-coursing liberating elixir through his veins, again and follow its dictates? Should he relearn the manifestations of the residue of a long and torrid past; to fight the element of resignation and nature’s powers of emotional entropy? Or should he rest quietly amid the weakness that seems so fertile and warm and soft and all-encompassing and with that allow himself to dissolve into its oblivion? Where was the truth? His mind filtered the demands imposed upon it by the slow trickle of that elixir. There is a surge of impatience quickly to be subdued by the coziness of the infinite reflection; to let go or to be?

The raucous riot grows slowly but steadily in the brain, gaining a foothold at each threshold from whence the light of life escapes and plugs the leaks to confine the dark spirit that weakens the flesh. All the suffering from the whips and scorns of time, as Hamlet calls them, common to all sentient beings are laid out on a tapestry. Some succumb to the darkened vagaries of wretched thoughts and allow their minds to devolve into the cycle of self-hatred. Others take arms against their sea of troubles and by facing, end them.  Ah Hamlet knew it well. He knew the human element as no other. He knew the sinews of action and inaction. He might as well be the master-knowledge-keeper of all human psyche? Is the human life defined in those 32,241 words written by Shakespeare? I think it is. Is one just facing the inevitability of life’s progression conjured so beautifully though the Bard’s mind? Is he feeling life’s ordinary tumult? And through the mist, a subsequent bigger question arose; Does he have the strength to stand up and face the sea of troubles, in order "to be?"

The Answer:

Each one of us is gifted with a sense of self. We each have the strength of purpose if we allow it to embellish our lives. It is not in the self-imposed drama of an entropic vision played out in the mind, when faced with a calamity, that one finds the welcoming arms of success. It is what is learned from the weaknesses of moments where frailty and abject abrogation of self-reliance, that one conceives the human heart is strong, the will courageous and the mind resilient. It is in the fall that the rise holds the light. It is in the despair that laughter reveals a path. “Though this be madness, there is method in’t!”

I look out from the tormented pillow of a sleepless night, where dreams might have been made and the window to the outside brings the relief with the first light of dawn. The human suffering continues and I but one am charged to change the course of a life with all its frailties. Each life is a weathered storm. Each moment a memory. It is hazy at first and as I focus my vision, the trees take shape and I can just hear the birds. Life is, once again. The dreadful nightmare has passed as all such unhappy moments do, and the world is whole. In that moment, I realize that I am he!

In each life a little rain must fall and in each life a new green shoot will blossom with that rain. We must learn to get up the eight time after the seventh fall. We must live to see another day, to make a difference, to see a smile, to hear a laughter, to form a friendship, to enrich our soul, to live fully the life apportioned to us.

In the end that is clear. To that contemplated tantrum from a series of frustrations, a modicum of temper must be applied. To that irresistible frustration to lash out in anger, a lather of reason supplied and to the urge to create disharmony a nuance of understanding from where a better person emerges; knowledgeable and wise. 

In that future, there exist endless possibilities!