Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.Milan Kundera
What I really fear is time. That’s the devil: whipping us on when we’d rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won’t hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales. My past- it doesn’t feel real in the slightest. The person who inhabited it is not me. It’s as if the present me is constantly dissolving. There’s that line from Heraclitus: ‘No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.’ That’s quite right. We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn’t the end of life but the end of memories.Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists
For as long as I could remember, ever since I developed a brain, which was a little after my sixteenth birthday (in case you’re wondering), I have yearned for something. I wish I were purposely trying to be vague in order to brew some suspense but unfortunately I really am as clueless as I appear. There is so much about life that baffles me. So much about what we are and who we are and why we are that turns me over in my sleep and moves me to bite my nails and stare at ceilings or gawk at the moonlit skies. So much about the purpose, the meaning, the reason, the simplification, the secret, the key behind everything that we do here and everything that is done to us that boggles me. These unanswered mysteries of our existence excite and scare me at the same time. What was it that I was born to do? Is it decided or do I bulldozer my own road? If it is decided, then did I have anything to do with it? How does one live the ideal life? What is it? What does my soul want? How do I listen to it? Does it even have wants? Doesn’t the mind manipulate it? Scheme it into wanting things perhaps like a teenage child tricking their parents into believing them. How does one reach its true potential? How do I prevent my life from going to waste? Can life be wasted? What is being alive like? What is peace like? I have always wondered. I haven’t quite experienced it as such. Only fragments of it, some mere distorted versions. After all, it’s all relative isn’t it? Peace to me might be being less tormented than usual but is it the same thing that the yogis in the mountains are talking about? I have never told anyone this though, for I fear that people might look at me with their jaws dropped and eyes wide open and ask me if I am serious and if its really so for how could anyone not experience peace?! Surely one must have, at some point of time, even if it was only for a span of sixty seconds. Who knows? Maybe peace is just silence of the mind, maybe its just unadulterated happiness and joy. What do I know, I still find stars fascinating.
