The International Writers Magazine - Our Tenth Year: Philosophy

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Now and Then • Neha Mehta How life changes. You think you've got it all figured out but you haven't. You convince yourself that all of life's beauty is gone but then you read something so colorful, something so fresh happens that you wish you could share it with the whole world and make it easier for everyone else as well because you think they have the same problems that you do.

Tell them life's not so bad after all. There's something in it for all of us. There is still hope for novelty. Lets not give up. But they seem oblivious. They don't care about your epiphanies, unmindful of themselves and others around them they carry on with whatever they were carrying on with and then the world looks dismal again. It comes and goes in waves. One minute you care too much, you are so aware of your surroundings, noticing the tiniest details of words being thrown around and the next minute its gone. You become a part of someone else's surroundings, giving someone else something to observe while you are lost in the background. Fused with the white noise.

You start to believe that something's wrong with you because YOU are the one unable to fit in when it seems so easy. It used to be so easy too but you grew out of your ignorance. It never worked for you and never will. You start to understand the kind of life you are living and wonder. How does this happen? One minute your mind is enjoying WHAT it's doing not because of the effect it might have but because it is what it is and then you are in this space where the end is the only drive. NOW means nothing to your brain. It creates the illusion of something that resembles happiness but you are never able to really feel it. You want to make most of the NOW, make the most of every contact because its so ephemeral and won't last forever but the NOW is so unappealing. You just let it fly by.

Numbed by everything else, I want to enjoy YOU, not continue delving in me. I know all my stories and looking for novelty, I listen carefully a few times but eventually disappointment precedes hope. I have been surprised sometimes but for me statistics don't lie. And even if you do somehow take me by surprise, transcend my expectations, I am reminded that its evanescent. I've tried to hold onto things in the past and I know it so hard and so out of my control. How then am I expected to be be bright in the morning when I live with the perpetual insecurity that what I have now may end any minute and what will be left, I cannot and will not appreciate.

People don't know me but I hear them saying that I've changed. Doesn't that need a reference point to begin with? How we throw judgments around without taking a moment before to think about it. And when I do, when I think about things, when I listen to people, I come back to square one. How am I able to justify something which is so essential to me and doesn't have the same value whatsoever to my surroundings. It doesn't fit. Since I can't change anything but myself, I start to wish life were simpler. I were simpler. Which is not an impossibility. But then I know; change one thing, change everything and then I wouldn't be what I am. If that happens, does anything else matter at all? So eventually I wonder what to wish for.

© neha mehta Jan 15th 2009
<nehamehta.07@gmail.com>

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