On Wondrous Life & Glorious Death

"Sometimes to live is an act of courage." - Seneca

I've been living for a while now. I mean, I've been alive for more than 23 years, sure. But I think I started living not until recently, maybe till a couple of years back. And this is partly because, I let my fear of counting days towards oblivion be knocked down.

But it's not that simple too, now is it?

There are days I begrudgingly exist solely to get through, and there are days when I feel so zestful for the days to come. It's my perspective on those "not-so-good" days that have gone through a tumultuous change.

I'm an artist. Always have been and always will be. And that means, I suffer. And I don't mean "suffer" in a negative connotation. Well, there IS no positive way to suffer. But, I've realized I could pick my moments, like a great good well-wisher of mine would say. Had you seen me few years back, you would've seen a guy letting himself be guided by the dread of the atomic clock slowly ticking itself out of existence.

I still think I have tiny ounce of that fear, of life simply unexisting. However, it is my viewpoint that has gone through a magnitude of shift- death is a part of life. You may wonder what in the baloney is this guy talking about. Hear me out.

You are born. You grow from an innocent kid to an angsty emo teenager, hating everything and almost everyone. Then, you go through what I'd like to call the "TWENTIES OF NOTHINGNESS", which typically starts when around the age of 19 and might be as short as 2 years or might even extend through your twenties. You go on a deep search for finding your passion in your life, along with it, love. If you're lucky, you find both and make room for both love and passion. And if you're REALLY lucky (and by that, I mean, if you're absolutely crazy enough to rise against what's considered as normal and 99 buckets of hardwork, pain & embarrassment of the first-hand nature later), then you might get the chance to realize the passion of your dreams to reality. And so goes life for a few decades. By any good chance, you'll die of old age, after achieving half the things you sought out to achieve, at most, with your family and loved ones at your side. This may sound like I'm making life not so wondrous, as the title would suggest.

But for me, it's the inevitability of life ceasing to exist that pushes me forward to do the things I want. I believe doing this lessens our fear of losing control of life and embrace that loss of control because, what is life if not a collection of events happening to you? This gave me a revelation as well- It is okay to let people go. It is okay if people, albeit our own family and close friends, decide to walk away from us and cut us off from their lives. My dad always says that I cannot and must not try to satisfy other people, at the cost of my own. So, I realized that it's better to have a handful of trustworthy people by your side, rather than to have dozens of people around you with no real essence of honesty, respect and loyalty.

And dare I say, death is glorious because of the meaning we put to life. Because of the value we seek to create. Because of the immortality that would be created, if you strive to achieve something so great in art that it would be forever etched in the walls of time and history. And when we shuffle off this mortal coil, we shall be content, not for the life we lived, but for the person we were, the value we sought to bring to ourselves and to those close to us, and again, the art we leave behind.

As this year closes and as we wait for the next chapter in our lives, it's important for us to remind ourselves that all of the pain, anger, sadness and expectations are short-lived. Because, our life in itself, is a small speck up in the millions of years of existence. So instead, we could choose to love, unjudge and fill our lives with people we love, music, books, cinema and art.

I say this knowing that there's no way for us to live for a 100 years. It's physically not feasible for our generation and the generations to come to hit a century. I mean, it's scientifically impossible for that, thanks to the genetically modified food, pollution, global warming and climate change (yes, by the way, climate change is real). It's crazy how we buy fruits and vegetables, something that is inherently organic in nature, after checking whether or not they are organic. My point is, why waste time on frivolous matters?

Lord Tennyson once wrote "..Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever", in his poem The Brook. He spoke of how nature is eternal, and mortals feed off it only to give back ourselves to the nature. I'd like to think of the Brook as the memories, values and art we leave behind, for, we may come and we may go, but life goes on forever.

- Pranav