BY: FAIZAAN BASHIR
The warmth of love, belonging, and security you get from your mother’s womb and years of care you receive from her once you come into being stand in sharp contrast to what you face from human perspectives and constructs when you grow up. You are no longer someone worth loving for the sake of love; you matter only if you are useful, practical, and rational. Soundness reigns and takes a front seat, but your histories, psyche-induced imbalances, emotional turmoil, and persistent psychological upheavals are not taken into account—just like a stray dog, not cared for, not looked at, and always ignored.
More often than not, we come across people happy and sad at the same time. Excited one moment and numb the other. Laughing one second and crying the other. Feeling lonely one minute and cheerful the other. This psychic pain knows no limits, and our desire to end it, too, knows no bounds. We desire to put an end to the now-conditioned numbness, but we seem to be too helpless to do anything about it. We feel the strong urge to uproot the demon eating away at our ‘Sukoon’, but we quit mid-way. We revive the malady. And we continue with it. And then we are trapped in the perpetual loop. How the perpetual struggle to cut the strings of the devil and be freed of it and live happily exhausts half of our life is something we fail to notice. And we become conscious that we have been in the trap for long, and we curse ourselves for the inability to snap out of it. A huge personal tragedy wreaking havoc on many of us!
Folks, the world will likely never provide the motherly warmth you once knew when you were a child. It’s a pretty dark place to live in. There’s a malevolent edge to it. It’s built to be indifferent—it doesn’t care for your inner being. It has become even more ruthless in its approach with its to-the-point, capitalistic construct. We are living in a world where ears are given to those who possess “something” and deaf ears to those who are “nil.” The former doesn’t need to do something extraordinarily humane to warrant appreciation. That’s how it is.
That said, I know you are helpless, folks. However, compare your pain-conditioned attitude with the emotionless, empirical approach of the world to reinforce the realization of how practical this world is and how even little improvements are necessary for your well-being. Do something to escape the clutches of perpetual pain. I don’t know the exact way out. But there may be some avenues. It could be difficult initially; it may feel frustrating, but do something. That’s the only way to end the maladies.