Author: Shubham Mittal
You want to live life on your own terms. You don’t want to follow rules. You want to call the shots. The sweet taste of freedom is something you don’t want to abandon, something your mind gets so enmeshed in that it’s hard to let go. It’s the joy of having the last laugh, the final say, the right mind to say “fuck you, I don’t care”. But it’s also the satisfaction of knowing you made your own mistakes, it’s the risk you trade for reward, it’s that first breath
of fresh air after being rescued from a quagmire.
Is it the fear?
The fear of being trapped within the confines of your own mind, the fear of being trampled by not knowing what could have been, the fear of those thousand voices drowning out your own. It’s a battle of the masses from whence your individual flame gets extinguished as soon as the supply is cut off. The emotions that a person holds so dearly, the ones that let them define themselves, they are the ones making the so-called decisions that leads a person down a spiral or up as some people might prefer to call it.
How much is a man ruled by his emotions? And how much of a role does his family have in ruling him by those emotions?
I knew a man once. Greatly ruled by emotions, jovial and kind, generous and smart, lost and heartbroken, withered and desperate, deserted and now dead. An alcoholic who dedicated his life to living it for his family because he didn’t have anything else to live for. Not even himself. And with his death, I realised the platitudes and the multitudes of strings he had left behind, all tied to his life, and all now hanging in empty space, trying to grasp for the reality that the other end couldn’t possibly perceive. Some were thicker than the others, some had more layers, others had different shades, but all wept a common black for the man who had departed untimely.
I was with one of the people recently who was left holding the other end of one of the strings. A relatively thin one, with not many shades, but enough to make her reminisce. Enough to take her back all those years, when she wasn’t capable of imagining anything of this magnitude. As soon as she received the news, she looked to the table for support and the chair found its way to her, while she sat down, her breath a little short and her eyes already welled to the brim with tears, now cascading down her cheeks, while she trembled ever so slightly. It was the fingers that gave it away. The eternal abyss that she was facing as she became truly thoughtless and yet had a wave of whispers crashing down on the shores of her mind. Those short huffs of breath told me that her body wanted to go back to normal but the constant tremors reminded that her mind just wasn’t ready. And yet, it was probably that slight twitch of the lips that said that she had already started down that memory lane. The time he cried in a war movie or the time he shit his pants as a kid. The day he got all nervous before his wedding and wanted at least 5 hard drinks before he could get up on the horse and the time he swore off alcohol as he held his first born daughter in his arms, a slight glow on his face, a smile that stretched ear-to-ear and moist eye. He had left all that behind. And more.
Do our choices factor in these multitude of threads that we attach to us every single day, every single hour? Can we? Or is it just too much to think about and too much to deal with, so you shift the favor to another day?
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — - Questions whose answers we don’t have yet. Have you ever wondered what choices have brought you where you are right now? Do leave your likes and comments for our author!