Maladies of the mind

Maladies of Mind

It is hard to walk the avenues of present time without feeling disgust at everything going around, the wars, famines, environmental disasters, diseases, technology induced sufferings and plain stupidity of the ones who are meant to govern us, and we governed as well. And for those who say the world keeps on turning you keep on living, I am sure they have not yet experienced the disaster and distress that is borne when the world lurches itself uninhibited into the mind. I cannot say for sure about others, but it did happen to me, and it’s powerful enough to drive oneself crazy.

I used to try to not give attention to all this. I used to think if I did my part silently, the world will forget me. Not only that, but I thought I could stay out of the macrocosm while I was a microcosm inside that macrocosm. Oh, how naïve I was, to say the least. The denial I had nurtured in my mind for so long was bound to be shattered, and it did. You cannot escape what makes you. 

The external environment did influence and shape my life, and running from its clutches was getting me nowhere. So I opened the floodgates of my cranial cavity, and it all came rushing in with overwhelming pressure.

Once you let the novel forces you have been keeping at bay since so long you cannot deal with it, you do not know how to approach it neither how to be with it. Learning comes in steps.  You observe at first, you want to understand it, how it works, what makes it work, how it affects you and everything in between. You start to poke at it all with the needles of rationality, and it smothers you in its contents. But you cannot and will never make sense out of it. The more you try to understand it, the more it drags your feet into its unpredictable marshland. Some things just do not make sense, and you have to make peace with it. 

When the disgust at the outer world is directed to the inner world (your own self) then that’s where the problem starts. I did exactly that. Whenever I saw some bad news over the television or something bad happened to someone, I used to blame myself and why I did not do anything to prevent that. I know you must be thinking how you could prevent all that (you surely aren’t a superman), you must have been out of your mind, well, I was out of my mind then. I could not even bring myself to help them, even if I could. The utter helplessness and the excessive guilt that I garnered and carried in myself was festering like a bad case of cancer, and it over-shadowed everything in my life. It took its toll on my body, my mind, my spirit, my social relationships, you name it, everything. And I wanted nothing more than cure myself of it. 

Revelations are sudden and that is why they change your life overnight. It plants a thought on your mind, and you are never the same again. One day it just came to me; do what you can first, change what you can. I was stressing myself wanting change as if one swing of wand could make every imperfection go away. You start with yourself and branch out to the world, never whole in a minute. So, do what you can right here, right now. I say let the world turn, you plant your seed and hang on to your tree.

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