Saturday 10 September 2016

Blind Man's Circus


I have been a bit busy. There were things I needed to do. But I’m back now and that’s the most important thing.
How is life?
Interesting question, I think.  When someone asks how life is, I can’t help but wonder what the correct response is.  Is it supposed to be a personal question?  Is one allowed to just set off and REALLY tell the person how life is? Like, life is a blind man’s circus. It is a place, a place we hate but can't leave, even though leaving is not that hard. A place where we all pretend to know what we are doing but secretly we don’t, we are just waiting for someone to hold us by the wrist and lead us. Life is a thing, like a piece of paper, you can make marks on it and stuff, you can draw on it whatever you wish to draw on it, you don’t have to draw anything on it even, you can fold it by the edges and make it into an airplane or a boat or a gun or a flower: a rose and then you can paint it red with watercolour and you can pretend it is a real, sweet scenting rose and not just life folded at its edges. Nobody wants to hear any of these things, I don’t think. So why do they ask how life is? Why do we ask questions if we are unprepared to hear their answers?
I have been thinking about heaven and how relative a term it is and how maybe we have a wrong idea of the place. Yes, place. The first question is this: Is heaven really a place or is it an idea. I think that my imagination of heaven has changed a little in the last few years. Yes, I do think that heaven is a place, but not a place the way that the library is a place or the market is a place or the school is a place. It is a different kind of place, like, it exists on a separate dimension, a dimension different from the dimensions that every other place exists in. However, the composition of the place called heaven is what I think we may have the wrong ideas of. When I was younger, I pictured heaven as this golden republic where all the kinds of food you can ever imagine can be found and all you have to do to eat anything is as simple: think about it and it appears right in front of your mouth. What makes heaven heaven, is it the presence of everything we want or is it the presence of God? If it is the latter then we can as well say we are in heaven already, since, even at this moment, as you read this, God is with you. A lot of us have the idea of heaven as a golden republic, roads paved with gold just the way the bible describes it, but what happens inside? Other than the paved ways and golden streets, what happens inside the hugely ginormous mansions? More gold? Food? Books? God?
I have been thinking about the marketplace. The marketplace is a swirling vortex of entropy. It is chaos, it never stops: everybody is going somewhere; you cannot stand still in the middle of the market because you may be hit by a moving human body. There is something called Brownian motion in physics, it describes a phenomenon where particles suspended in fluid are in a constant state of random motion because they were unfortunate to bump into a fast moving molecule of the fluid. It is like the disorientation that occurs in your head after you accidentally hit it on a hard surface. This is what I am reminded of every time I go to the market. It feels as though everybody in the market is going somewhere even though nobody is actually going anywhere or knows where they are going. Most often, we are all looking for things and so we do not know where we are going because we do not know where we would find the things we are looking for. I think the only people who know what they are doing in a marketplace are the sellers, the ones who beckon on you to come and buy onions and tomatoes and red meat. They are strategic people, and they deserve some respect. They understand life. They understand the way in which the market works. They know that you cannot stand still, yet you cannot be sure where you are headed. They understand how life is a blind man’s circus, how he knows nothing except that there is space and so he just goes: walks and walks, aimlessly and confused, until someone holds him by the wrist and whisper’s in his ear: ‘this way.’ That is how they attract you: by telling you that they have what you are looking for, you can afford to stop moving now and go to them.
You can afford to stop moving now.
Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!

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