When I look at what may lie ahead for me in life, it feels like my struggles have just begun. The uncertainty and hopefulness, if left unchecked leaves me feeling ambivalent about important goals and objectives and often results in me slipping into a morbid state wondering if the future holds more promise than my past, which gets me reflecting on my past. In doing so, I realise how my life has been nothing but a blink of an eye. It feels like I was in high school just yesterday, yet when I consider the events of the many exhausting lifetimes I’ve lived since then, I realise exactly how much time has passed.
Just yesterday I was looking up to my uncles and other elders in the family and contemplating if I would be able to achieve as much as many of them have achieved in life. Quite literally in a blur I suddenly realised that I am now the uncle and my nephews and nieces will probably start viewing me in a similar light. The secrets of the future have always been such a distraction despite being proven time and again that I have no control over the outcomes of so many incidents in my life that I exhaustingly applied myself to.
There were times when I believed that no matter what came to pass, I would persevere and I would be successful in overcoming the obstacles I was faced with, only to realise that despite my greatest efforts, my efforts would only ever cause my own will to yield to the objective at hand, but never the will of others. That has probably been the seed of my cynicism in life, because each time I reflect on my foolhardiness to lift myself up and try again, I’ve realised that I’m not cynical about life, just people because people are most unpredictable when they’re fearful. Even the most seemingly dishonest person only acts that way out of fear for the repercussions of honesty.
Living sincerely takes away our excuses to bow out gracefully at times, because we’re forced to deal with the raw emotions of others that have been allowed to touch us where it hurts most. Each time we’re hurt we recoil and establish a barrier to protect ourselves from such hurt again in future because we’re survivalists by nature. If we live consciously, we remind ourselves of the context of that experience, optimistically believe that not everyone is the same, and persevere sincerely into yet another skirmish with fate.
But most times we lose consciousness to reality and instead dwell in our space of fear, resulting in those barriers being cemented rather than contextualised, which causes serenity to evade us, and beauty to be stifled. It’s this idealism that has given me much to cry about, but even more to reflect on with smiles when I sit in that swing on my porch marvelling at the obliviousness of the next generation as they go about their lives believing that they’re invincible until their first great disruption. The circle of life. Everyone quotes clever thoughts and memes about it, but so few grasp it.