“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering,” Once upon a time when the Nothingness, Nihilism, Absurdity, Existential crisis were theoretical concepts for me. It was the era when Nietzsche’s quote, “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier and simpler,” was nothing but a tragic expression which was aesthetically cathartic to my intrinsic self-proclaimed agonised self. I was all set for an imaginary patterned life. Nietzsche’s abyss was all but a horrible fiction to me. But then came a giant named ‘COVID’ and all the fictions, all the concepts, all the theories substantiated into a reality that happened to be more real than my existence ever was. My ‘self’ became the ‘abyss’, my futuristic narratives dismantled into an unknown ocean of ‘nothingness’. Once the ‘fountain of youth’, my life was now the lava of existence. I woke up with a revamped consciousness of the self in a strange outer space where the disparities, injustices, crimes, poverty and all that I despised had multiplied. I read somewhere that the giant’s Post traumatic stress would be worse than its holocaustic disposition. But one would ask, ‘What’s worse than death?’ I know, “the survival [suffering] in the post COVID third-world.”
Life today has become an entangled juxtaposition of lies and truths. Narratives are what we seek to justify our existence, both to ourselves and others. We know the truth that our story is a lie, no matter how perfectly knit together. Deep down into our abysses we see a plotless chaos which demands new ideals, new dreams, and new stories more than ever now to calm the all-knowing torrent within. Today, we know what it actually means to be gazing into the abyss and how tormenting is the experience when the abyss gazes back into us. Our narrative of ‘I’ has scrambled at a stampede, fearing the last nudge. At this point you may ask, ‘what’s the point, making such an afflicted description of the individual?’ I say, this act of ascertaining the truth at the right time that each one of us is ‘a forest, a night of dark trees’, and the ‘abyss’, is all we need to know in order to provoke an insidious revolution from within to revamp the abyss [self] into an authentic unleashed giant that can face any outwards trauma with a welcoming butt. Acceptance of the darkness remains the only true light today. No collective revolution is possible without authentic individuals— products of an inner turmoil. Until that point, all the unwanted disparities, injustices, and tyrannies will remain. We need to cool our heels until we become the authentic ‘we’.
