The last few days have found me reflecting on the chaos that is happening outside and inside, a sort of chaos that can be particularly tough on fragile and vulnerable people.
Do you ever get the feeling that your mind is suddenly disorganized, trying to follow a thought you’ve started but ending up with a non-sequitur, an unintelligible stream of consciousness that’s all over the place?
This has been my reality over the past two weeks. I feel as if I somehow ended up in a limbo state, as if I became Alice, going down the rabbit hole but instead of feeling intoxicated and high, I feel, well, lost.
Is my mother taking care of herself? Does my father express his true feelings?
I made tea. I lighted candles. I work out. I talk with people online. I take walks. The dogs in the neighbourhood look genuinely happy and their hair seems cleaner than mine. Ignorance is sometimes a bliss.
I wonder which pill I would take, the red or the blue? I want to know the truth, whatever ‘truth’ means. But I can also understand the people who’d rather live in ignorance.
The last few days have found me feeling as if I experience life from a distance; my spirit exited my body and it’s watching from a distance. “Keep on doing the same things you’re doing. Time, my dear; it has the ability to turn black into gray, gradually causing a blizzard of clarity”.
If I could just pinpoint my emotions, then I would know how to deal with them. That’s the idea, the solution. There is a problem I need to solve, but the problem I do not understand.
Where are those who don’t have a home?
The thing with experiencing your days, weeks inside is that it gives you perspective. During this time, you get to find out if you are resilient, or more prone to succumb to the chaos and panic that’s happening all around you and doesn’t seem to go away anytime soon. You get a chance to try all the new things that the internet suggests; you try to learn a new language, read books, watch that series you’ve always wanted to watch. And you end up doing those things as if to fill up a black hole, but the hole keeps devouring them, remaining unchangeable; a feeling of incompleteness keeps growing inside you. You start feeling impatient and wonder what is the point of all this, at the end people will hurt and you will stand powerless and unable to help them.
Perspective can come in all sorts of ways. The human nature is fragile, beautiful, caring, unpredictable.
It’s in this fragility that we can reinvent ourselves and, consequently, the world around us. I despise staying at home, but it seems that nature started reinventing and reviving herself, feeding from our own discomfort. Oh, how the tables have turned.
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.
Agent Smith, The Matrix
The glimpse of hope I am trying to hold onto is in a constant fight with the reality of life. When all of this ends, I am scared of the next day.
In the meantime, I am trying to figure out the purpose of life sitting on my couch. I lighted candles. I worked out. I cleaned the flat. I am writing a non-sequitur. I am incomplete.
The only ray of light right now, except the literal burning flame: Leonard Cohen, singing Anthem.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
a.