Envy
Envy is a terrible emotion.
Envy reminds you of the freedom that you could only wish for. It whispers to you deceitful thoughts of hope. It talks to you in a foreign tongue, in a spiteful tone, mocking you. Envy envelopes you like crawling flames on scraggy old blankets.
The realm of 'envy' does not constitute materialistic endeavours. At the very least, it should not be of primary concern. I'm envious of people who are free. This sacred, precious space to be free is further and further eroded by today's zeitgeist of my-cock-is-bigger-than-yours. How unfortunate it is that the sweet smell of money and power overcomes the need to be who we really are and the preservation of the sanctity and sanity of Man, among other matters of concern. I'm envious of the very few that dare to seek such a freedom. Tell me, how many of you have the courage to do what you truly want? To paint. To write. To travel the far seas. To contently lumber down the road less travelled.
Street performers. Sadhus. Standing Babas. Street painters. Shaolin monks. Sufis. Singer/songwriters.
I admire people like those. And many more, surely. There is, in each and every one of us, the urge to rebel. There is that yearning to be free from all the shackles of mortal life, of all conventions and expectations of society. What separates the black sheep from the flock is that bold step taken towards rebellion. To be free. Spinoza said that "order is against the grain of our minds, we prefer to follow straggling lines of fantasy". Such honest statement cannot possibly contain more truth. We are all, I believe, endowed with a streak of madness. It is imperative, no, it is crucially essentially irrevocably important that we retain it. We must retain it.
"The world will be our immortality", Wilde said. Those unconfined souls live that 'immortality'. The ones who goes against the grain of order. The sadhus and sufis, the street painter and performers. To them, THIS IS IT. To many others, maybe tomorrow will be my THIS IS IT moment. And in that latter flock lies a trapped soul that is condemned for all mortality to merely bounce within the confines of what is right and what is normal, within which societal peer pressure sways them like hypnotised eyes under the command of the absolutism of a pendulum.
Normality becomes the norm. Life, as we know it, passes you by like a runaway freight train. Nobody wants to fall into the ever so repeated trap of "living a life of quiet desperation". We all want to be special. We want stories to be told of us. We want to be remembered. We want to be our own person and dictate our destiny to our heart's content.
Envy is, no doubt, a terrible emotion. But nothing is worse than cowardice.
(12.19pm, 8th April 2006)
