We live, for better or worse

One moment, life is all joy and bliss, and the next, adversity and fear. The pleasure, the contentment, the solace. All reduced to dust.

We await and dread our future equally. Perhaps it’s only the next day, the next week. month or year that really frightens us, fills us with a nameless trepidation, because ten years on, twenty years on, it all seems so distant.

Always living in apprehension, living in worries, living in lies, is living while killing yourself inside. And yet, you have to do it. Everyone would like a life free of all care, and yet, the world doesn’t let you have it.

We are safe today. We are happy. We know it. But that happiness is marred by the knowledge of what we have in store for us. Our present is forever stained by our past, and eternally haunted by our future. We are caught, always weaving back and forth, sometimes resorting to tears, sometimes trying to laugh it off, and always carrying that sense of burden with us, within us.

If our world collapses around us tomorrow, and we lose everything…what would we be left with? If we should lose our possessions, our comfort, our freedom, what would we have? Would we have a future at all?

But would it be fair for us to say that we have nothing, no future? We are only dreading it too much, because we are scared of abandoning the refuge of present? The thing that we dread most will surely come, but it will also come to pass. That’s easy for us to say that at this moment, to resort to the only possible defence we have – hope. But what about when it finally arrives? What would we be like at that time?

We are thoroughly confused. We hate it, we dread it with all our being and yet a part of us wants to see it come and go. Why do we feel that? We think it’s vertigo, probably. We are not sure what we want, except that we cannot take any more worry and apprehension. If a thing makes us happy today, but would cause us pain tomorrow, let us have it. If we have to pay with tears for a laugh for today, let us have it.

Sometimes we have the strange feeling that we would like the earth to open up and swallow us whole, and no more be. That we would like to abandon everything, every dream, every joy, every pleasure – and the funny thing is, it’s not suicidal. It’s happy, almost. It’s strange. It’s an urge of relinquishing everything, whether good or bad.

It would be easy for us to continue to hope, continue to delude ourselves, into a sense of security. It would be equally easy for us to despair. Whatever way we choose, it’s going to happen. Whatever happens, tomorrow will come. We live, for better or worse.