New Year Blues: 'In-Betweenie' Species!
"Yesterday is gone, tomorrow will come, if we can only survive TODAY"
- Anonymous
New Year's are times of HOPE, an excellent word that never rings a negative bell, never fails to inspire and try as we may, never seems to pass any of us by. Festivals, (and we have so many of them around this time of the year) are the species 'feel good flocking' adrenaline high, that provides just the right stimuli to move ahead, when everything else veers on the verge of falling apart in the monumental quest called LIVING.
Year-end motivational's in gifts, parties, new clothes and company of friends and foes alike seeks only to remind us, 'Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die lads'. Unpredictable in the species existence is the notion of LIFE; its celebration therefore is justified.
Cull all of this down to years, months, days, hours, seconds or nano-seconds, New Year's are caustic reminders, of 'number' mathematics getting worn out as well. The relish and abandon we greet the arrival of New Year, is all fused to suspend memories of the recent past. The species is known to survive, but somehow can not thrive in painful reminiscences of any kind.
The 'numbers' by which our species ends time in life is measured by the highest score: of septuagenarian, octogenarian, centenarian et al: never once do we say, in dying we are back to zero (or is it square one?). Perhaps we are so madly in love with life, that we never reflect on that blissful state of hallucination, as where we have came from, and more certainly where will we be going? The importance is NOW, and now unfortunately is divorced from either of these two extreme inquiries.
God's cruel joke, but it just doesn't stop there.
Year-end reviews of events in journals and magazines are silly therapeutic exercises meant only to remind us how foolish we have been year-round and how everything else may change but not the species. In new calendars, diaries and other database of trivia's, the species mark everything but it's innate frailties. The MAN of the year splashed across covers - is usually a DEMON in disguise!
No one has to tell us our 'days are numbered' - for LIFE has splendid dosage of overburdening ingredients meant only to inspire, while DESPAIR is unfair wisdom, of misplaced pretensions, the carcinogen of wasted moments. For the NOW, the underlying message becomes ruefully moribund, as few are around, if ever, when it is a shattered life one has to pick-up and reassemble.
A thankless job, but one everybody is repeatedly condemned to more often, then less often. This we call 'making a fresh start' - no different then what we had set out to do on the very first day of the year, with resolution and promises we will shortly start to lie, cheat on and forget, while we prepare for yet another New Year's Eve!
LIFE therefore is neither a beginning nor an end - but an in-betweenie of sort, of events that seem to either overpower us into helplessness, or those blessed with a 'who the hell cares' mindset, to maneuver between millstones and milestone, between pitfalls and shortfalls, between bad, bad and UGLY to what is pure garbage.
Goodness is human traits we 'display' aplenty. Whether we have them in good measures is another matter. All these goody goody talks about Peace, Love and what else have we abound. The only problem being, the human species has not been able to make any money peddling this oldest of intangible ware. There is actually more money to be made in misery, and by that we mean, the species causing 'human misery', let us not forget that many acts of cruelty these days come 'hard sell' packaged with proposed goodness - remember that war in Iraq?
GOOD seems to have evaporated from our nihilistic conscience, and less one alphabet the "O" gone - GOD seemingly playing second fiddle in an air-conditioned condominium in Heaven may well have his sights fixed on that Robot flashing pictures from Mars!
What the species do not have, is a capacity to shelve aside 'worries', perpetually backstabbing its imagination, its wellbeing and its talent to compartmentalize its derailed thinking train? Forcing us to make unscheduled stoppages and landing us into unfamiliar, uncharted locales when we want it the least, one has to however leave it to the species in lampooning: 'Do not worry worry, till it worries you, than you will have more to worry and worry others too'. Some call it FEAR, others an opportunity, but WORRY is the disease of all diseases.
It is also a disease the species worry the least about!
Helping us in a wobbly pole vault of sort - is dear friend COURAGE, and that is only because we have come to realize its step twin brother (or is it sister?) FEAR, managed to whisper into our unkind ear, 'hey stupid, that's all in your mind'? Couldn't have been truer.
In-between the in-betweenie's we have more or less done away with yet another insurmountable mechanism in the thinking process - the CONSCIENCE.
Loose talks about among people in power or powerful people 'having it', leaves us to the spectacle of pondering if we are asleep or half awake, for 'their' sheer power of conscience or lack of it, ultimately determines whether we should be 'calling it a night' when it is possibly mid afternoon?
Let's forget the old adage 'making night into day' for the time being - and what we have is powerful sets of lies made by those we expected to have a conscience? All too often we are goaded into a trance and we end up confronting lies that are hammered in as the truth, and inevitably become the absolute TRUTH, and hangs in their as stoutly as the hard Rock of Gibraltar.
The irony of it all, power comes hand in hand with wealth and vice versa, but in all fairness wealth alone is no 'absolute' criteria for creating or nurturing conscience, infact in very strange ways, it assists in doing away with whatever conscience one might have had in the first place.
Not to believe the Marxist 'pro-poor' do-gooders telling us that it is only the rich that are greedy and corrupt, by that is meant, whenever a coin is flipped, it falls on its head, never the tail. At best this is utopian narco-fantasia, for tales of on-ground reality serves to remind us, that creation of wealth leading on to power is no longer the select domain of the 'fortunate'. Corruption? Remember the time a taxicab charged you 200% over the meter - simply because it was a chilly New Years Eve and there were only a handful around?
GREED is as old a phenomenon as the species itself, the difference being over the years we have managed to bring the term respectability by calling it AMBITION. A lovely word, what it doesn't curtail is a 'come what may' gung-ho world culture that equates the mighty Dollar or the puny Taka - to GOD.
End of the equation we tend to loose focus and go looking for a middling path, something in between our left and right hemisphere, someone to remind us that the species might have been blessed with two's of most thing in its physiology, there is regrettably one brain situated between the eyes?
As with our one mouth and two ears? We still haven't quite figured out their proportionate usage!
Cerebrally we have everything balanced in uniformity and our focus never dithers between either pole, our vision anchored by a THIRD unseeing eye, that only the mind has the right aperture to expose, and if that is not enough, there is nothing more sacred and secret than what lurks in our deepest: in the In Betweenies!
Like it or not, the middle path is the chosen path, the path of those who try to battle an existence. Slightly above mediocre thinking, the thinking of the 'middlemen', the collaborators, the power brokers, are ones that will call the shots this New Year. Everything else will be status quo.
The mundane will have to move their act elsewhere, and so will the middle classes, as well as countries around the globe lapping the 'moderate' laurel to appease a new GOD.
Time now to make a New Year shift in our thinking - think 'In Betweenie'!
A Happy New Year nonetheless, and do give it a THINK.
First Published 3rd January 2004
- Anonymous
New Year's are times of HOPE, an excellent word that never rings a negative bell, never fails to inspire and try as we may, never seems to pass any of us by. Festivals, (and we have so many of them around this time of the year) are the species 'feel good flocking' adrenaline high, that provides just the right stimuli to move ahead, when everything else veers on the verge of falling apart in the monumental quest called LIVING.
Year-end motivational's in gifts, parties, new clothes and company of friends and foes alike seeks only to remind us, 'Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die lads'. Unpredictable in the species existence is the notion of LIFE; its celebration therefore is justified.
Cull all of this down to years, months, days, hours, seconds or nano-seconds, New Year's are caustic reminders, of 'number' mathematics getting worn out as well. The relish and abandon we greet the arrival of New Year, is all fused to suspend memories of the recent past. The species is known to survive, but somehow can not thrive in painful reminiscences of any kind.
The 'numbers' by which our species ends time in life is measured by the highest score: of septuagenarian, octogenarian, centenarian et al: never once do we say, in dying we are back to zero (or is it square one?). Perhaps we are so madly in love with life, that we never reflect on that blissful state of hallucination, as where we have came from, and more certainly where will we be going? The importance is NOW, and now unfortunately is divorced from either of these two extreme inquiries.
God's cruel joke, but it just doesn't stop there.
Year-end reviews of events in journals and magazines are silly therapeutic exercises meant only to remind us how foolish we have been year-round and how everything else may change but not the species. In new calendars, diaries and other database of trivia's, the species mark everything but it's innate frailties. The MAN of the year splashed across covers - is usually a DEMON in disguise!
No one has to tell us our 'days are numbered' - for LIFE has splendid dosage of overburdening ingredients meant only to inspire, while DESPAIR is unfair wisdom, of misplaced pretensions, the carcinogen of wasted moments. For the NOW, the underlying message becomes ruefully moribund, as few are around, if ever, when it is a shattered life one has to pick-up and reassemble.
A thankless job, but one everybody is repeatedly condemned to more often, then less often. This we call 'making a fresh start' - no different then what we had set out to do on the very first day of the year, with resolution and promises we will shortly start to lie, cheat on and forget, while we prepare for yet another New Year's Eve!
LIFE therefore is neither a beginning nor an end - but an in-betweenie of sort, of events that seem to either overpower us into helplessness, or those blessed with a 'who the hell cares' mindset, to maneuver between millstones and milestone, between pitfalls and shortfalls, between bad, bad and UGLY to what is pure garbage.
Goodness is human traits we 'display' aplenty. Whether we have them in good measures is another matter. All these goody goody talks about Peace, Love and what else have we abound. The only problem being, the human species has not been able to make any money peddling this oldest of intangible ware. There is actually more money to be made in misery, and by that we mean, the species causing 'human misery', let us not forget that many acts of cruelty these days come 'hard sell' packaged with proposed goodness - remember that war in Iraq?
GOOD seems to have evaporated from our nihilistic conscience, and less one alphabet the "O" gone - GOD seemingly playing second fiddle in an air-conditioned condominium in Heaven may well have his sights fixed on that Robot flashing pictures from Mars!
What the species do not have, is a capacity to shelve aside 'worries', perpetually backstabbing its imagination, its wellbeing and its talent to compartmentalize its derailed thinking train? Forcing us to make unscheduled stoppages and landing us into unfamiliar, uncharted locales when we want it the least, one has to however leave it to the species in lampooning: 'Do not worry worry, till it worries you, than you will have more to worry and worry others too'. Some call it FEAR, others an opportunity, but WORRY is the disease of all diseases.
It is also a disease the species worry the least about!
Helping us in a wobbly pole vault of sort - is dear friend COURAGE, and that is only because we have come to realize its step twin brother (or is it sister?) FEAR, managed to whisper into our unkind ear, 'hey stupid, that's all in your mind'? Couldn't have been truer.
In-between the in-betweenie's we have more or less done away with yet another insurmountable mechanism in the thinking process - the CONSCIENCE.
Loose talks about among people in power or powerful people 'having it', leaves us to the spectacle of pondering if we are asleep or half awake, for 'their' sheer power of conscience or lack of it, ultimately determines whether we should be 'calling it a night' when it is possibly mid afternoon?
Let's forget the old adage 'making night into day' for the time being - and what we have is powerful sets of lies made by those we expected to have a conscience? All too often we are goaded into a trance and we end up confronting lies that are hammered in as the truth, and inevitably become the absolute TRUTH, and hangs in their as stoutly as the hard Rock of Gibraltar.
The irony of it all, power comes hand in hand with wealth and vice versa, but in all fairness wealth alone is no 'absolute' criteria for creating or nurturing conscience, infact in very strange ways, it assists in doing away with whatever conscience one might have had in the first place.
Not to believe the Marxist 'pro-poor' do-gooders telling us that it is only the rich that are greedy and corrupt, by that is meant, whenever a coin is flipped, it falls on its head, never the tail. At best this is utopian narco-fantasia, for tales of on-ground reality serves to remind us, that creation of wealth leading on to power is no longer the select domain of the 'fortunate'. Corruption? Remember the time a taxicab charged you 200% over the meter - simply because it was a chilly New Years Eve and there were only a handful around?
GREED is as old a phenomenon as the species itself, the difference being over the years we have managed to bring the term respectability by calling it AMBITION. A lovely word, what it doesn't curtail is a 'come what may' gung-ho world culture that equates the mighty Dollar or the puny Taka - to GOD.
End of the equation we tend to loose focus and go looking for a middling path, something in between our left and right hemisphere, someone to remind us that the species might have been blessed with two's of most thing in its physiology, there is regrettably one brain situated between the eyes?
As with our one mouth and two ears? We still haven't quite figured out their proportionate usage!
Cerebrally we have everything balanced in uniformity and our focus never dithers between either pole, our vision anchored by a THIRD unseeing eye, that only the mind has the right aperture to expose, and if that is not enough, there is nothing more sacred and secret than what lurks in our deepest: in the In Betweenies!
Like it or not, the middle path is the chosen path, the path of those who try to battle an existence. Slightly above mediocre thinking, the thinking of the 'middlemen', the collaborators, the power brokers, are ones that will call the shots this New Year. Everything else will be status quo.
The mundane will have to move their act elsewhere, and so will the middle classes, as well as countries around the globe lapping the 'moderate' laurel to appease a new GOD.
Time now to make a New Year shift in our thinking - think 'In Betweenie'!
A Happy New Year nonetheless, and do give it a THINK.
First Published 3rd January 2004
posted by Mac Haque at 10:43 PM
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