Am I a fatalist, say you, or just awake?
“How much awake am I?”
It might sound like a ridiculous question.
However, it is one of the most important questions for me now. “How much awake am I?”
I wake up in the morning to find that I have been throwing empty blows in the air in the night, fighting someone in a vivid dream, shrieking expletives, half-sleeping half awake trying to chaff out the dream from the reality and reality from the dream.
In the day, I am sedated with psychiatric drugs, and wonder if it really helps me to suppress impulses or strong feelings that these drugs control?
At other times, I snap and throw a tantrum, “knowing” that I have the perfectly right reason to lose my temper.
Some days I sit in front of the computer, reading in bulk on some topic that fascinates me for a few months, related to religion, philosophy, magick, and on other days try to free myself of all dogma, conditioning, ideology…
There are times when I “know” that I want to be a journalist, and there are times when I am sure I want to become a theatre artist.
And as the days turn into nights, nights into days, as sleep returns me to a sedated world of medication, as I lose my temper “finally” and then a job, as my aspirations change, with the seasons, I search for the true I.
Am I what I am when I am sleeping – too scared a child defending himself?
Or am I the man who walks on the streets and goes to work, confident that he is sedated enough to keep steady on his two feet?
Or am I the potential journalist, or a theatre artist in the making?
Or am I the person who quests for the right knowledge, just a person in pursuit of something he doesn’t know about?
Am I the guy who in a bad temper, would not stop perhaps in doing something stupid?
Am I anger, confusion, curiousity, ignorance, confidence, fear?
In all this, whether I realize it or not, I am one thing – Awake.
(“that one thing that stops one from going insane” as my therapist Uma once said)
Like a Lighthouse, in the midst of a sea-storm and even when the sea is calm, there is a light inside me that watches over all the emotional tides that arise and fall within me. At times, that light is so dim, you can hardly see it.
But the light survives.
And after every major disaster in life, after every storm that engulfs the mind, after every fire that sets my heart afire, I catch a glimpse of that light.
The light I mention here is not the Conscience or any other construct or judgements of the human mind.
It is just an awareness of the convulsion of my body as I retaliate in my fear. It is the relief that I experience when I vent out my anger. It is the alertness of my body that I feel when I feel a lot of anger.
It is that shrug of helplessness and the awareness that I know not the way.
‘Simply being’… angry when I am angry, sad when I am disappointed, happy when I rejoice in my heart, or afraid when I fear…
Not ‘wanting’ to be something other than what I am. Living in the moment, accepting it or knowing that I don’t want to accept it s it comes, and not judging that…
That perhaps makes the light shine brighter. That helps me to allow myself the freedom to be as I am in the moment, allowing life to be as it is naturally.
And the extra light that it sheds, lights up some way, a path… that I choose to take or not to take, and thus shape my destiny.
I don’t call that fatalistic, do you?
