All my life I’ve played by the rules. I’ve poured libation to the ancestors before I drank, in a figurative sense. I’ve brushed my teeth after every meal, said grace before each. I’ve believed in God. Prayed to him. I won’t cheapen this by making it about agnosticism. It isn’t. Atheism has lost its sex appeal for me anyway. It is myself that I’m doubting. My look-right-left-and-right-again-before-you-cross-the-road self. My calculated-risks-leave-no-shoe-string-untied self. I’ve never really…dared.
At a few breathes past 21, give or take a million, it’s that time of day to decide whether to grow into your mother or no. Whether to aim for the safety net and all that the above does appertain or to just dare. Two roads diverge in yellow wood…
Am Mikhail Lermontov’s Circassian Novice, leaving my monastery for the first time, breaking free, seeking the outside…the validity of being. And freedom. Fearing to lose my way or to die in the monastery. Or his Demon, feeling the bubbling of hope for redemption within myself, the instincts for good…again. Wary of the kiss that can poison this hope, feeling the tantalizing draw of new beginnings. I feel like Caesar, awed to silence by the Sphinx, feeling restless within myself for the conquest of a new world after Rome. Ready to be the plaything of fate. Or Galileo ready to chant, ‘eppur si mouve’ to the dissenting flat-earth men. Seeking completeness in the round.
I want to see what’s beyond the horizon. Want also, someday, to toast to a life well lived. That means I must actively go out of my way to seek complications now…a broken heart, financial ruin, bodily discomfort. Risk, risk, risqué!
‘Those who cling to life die, those who defy death live’ says Daisetz Suzuki. I am ready, not to die…God no, but to lose that part of me that is afraid to. Two decades under the sun…I should know more, should be more myself. I want to take a stab at life, to map out a whole existence.
Why don’t I? Why don’t we?
Let’s buy Swiss watches and think we can control time and blame the weatherman when it rains. Let’s take charge of our lives right down to the itch on our backs a breath away from arm’s reach. Let’s play by the rules with Catholic prudence…or let’s not. Let’s live noisily and br azenly. Let’s wake up laughing. Let’s be penitent sinners who love their sins, every sacrilegious one and love even more being sorry for them.
Let’s try to save the world and fail and then try to save ourselves. Let’s pray to God for a good God.
Let’s try to mould our children with our own defective hands…like taking a picture in the rain. Let’s have red wine for breakfast. Let’s let ourselves go…lose ourselves completely. Let’s read the Bible reflectively and the Quran contemplatively. Let’s find a Guru and a Mantra and a Chi. Let’s find an oracle.
Let’s trust everything from the sand beneath our feet to the man with whiskers who smiles always. Let’s get rid of the tiresome wheel and the restrictive box. Let’s go back to the beginning. Build Babel. Let’s stomp on the earth that forms us. Let’s fall in love; you and I. Let’s ache and be pained by it. Let’s make a pact and promise each other forever. Let’s make our own luck. Let’s do it all…from the sublime to the absurd.
I want to go away, just my heart and I, to a place that has no assurances. Because everything will vanish…I must do it all, everything that matters. I want to bask in the sensations of living. To discover the things that I love while I can still desire them. It’s my turn now. It has to be.
There are no assurances in life and that’s half its charm. But life always goes on unheeding and there’s some tragedy in that. The sky will fall and the sun will still rise. I think too much, I think. That’s not half as pompous as it sounds. I overanalyse situations, try to wrestle some inner meaning even from the most mindless of things. Why does an ant run frantically to save its life? It has neither a lover nor a kingdom nor a history. Its pedantry…a fascination with detail. And it takes the fun out of living. If only there was a way of being sure of things. It’s easy I know…you chose the things you are uncertain of and you leave them for philosophers. You cling to the rest.
I’ve played by the rules all my life…so why must I always lose?









