An Only One Person

It was late night and she was weeping as she tried to recollect the weakest and intense moments of her life. She felt that we spend so much of our life not saying things we want to say, the things we should say. We need a person, someone who can fill our black-and-white dreams with color. We need a window in our lives to breathe fresh air. We need someone who can be a companion in-place of loneliness, a companion in our silences. Someone who’s talk passes our heart’s lens. “Is it asking too much?” She asked herself.

That person is hidden in a deep corner inside our hearts in the form of a wish. We always look for this wish of our lives, and wander our whole lives in search of it. We need that other half of our soul we had parted with. Someone who can see the pains in our hearts. Someone with whom we want to get old together. These are the things that matter the most, not hobbies, likes, dislikes, and temperaments — a mere socially shaped and tangible preface to life.

This all seems so selfish. But love is selfish. What is not selfish is just respect for the other person, not love.

Her search did end when she first saw him. Lost emotions she cannot recollect but she knows she has never felt such a strong attraction. She was completely living in a fairy-tale world. Whenever she would see him, she would get overwhelmed with a wave of emotion she never saw coming. It would fill her brain with endorphins every time she saw him smiling.

After waiting for more than two years, in her third year of the undergraduate degree, she finally revealed her feelings to him.

Do you have any idea how painful it is to tell someone that you love them and not have them say it back?

Love means exposing yourself to a place where it is safe to feel vulnerable without feeling the need to put some performance to pretend that all is good. We all are vulnerable somewhere and we decide to whom we open up about our pain.

In other words, opening up to someone is a gamble. Sometimes, you open up and it brings you to the point of mental ruin, and sometimes it helps you further enhance your emotional stability; but you never know unless you experience either of the situations that you’re gonna make it or break it.

Nature doesn’t make a person incomplete, still, nobody is emotionally stable. When you are feeling unloved and you don’t know how to respond to such a situation, you get stuck in a mess. You cry. Suffer. Shout. Despair. You just want an escape. Because you don’t know how to respond, you even want to end your life, even though you just want to end your pain, not the life.

This is not in our control, but it’s up to us whether to be patient even if it’s not easy to open ourselves in front of someone to humiliate our weaknesses further.

So she told him, “I like you.”

Destiny came in and crushed everything: her heart, mind, and all in between. Allah says we shouldn’t blame destiny — so she sat back on her chair and watched her destiny ruin her whole life. She didn’t say a word. That time she realized that dreams come at a price, and she had long been in debt to her destiny which did what it felt better — crushed her dreams with its feet, and put a knife in that one dream which was near completion and was starting to get colored. She did not stand up and fight her destiny. Destiny then returned back to the skies towards its home, leaving her looking at the empty sky with empty thoughts and no feelings and eyes blind to reason and ears deaf to advises. Before leaving, it left some literature and philosophy books for her. She was puzzled. What does she have to do with literature and philosophy? She wanted her beloved.

We are ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that this suffering has a meaning. She doesn’t have the luxury of choice right now. Never in life she had experienced such a phase of indecision. Never in life she had been hopeless. This was the lowest point in her life. Crying isn’t forbidden. She did cry. She did not look for ways to avoid pain, but looked for meaning in those emotions. 

In her society, heartbreaks are considered a foreign emotion, an emotion that makes up the content of humor. Sometimes, many times, heartbreak is laughed at, and is a topic for jokes, for gossips. It is repressed to the extent that, deep down within an individual, it haunts us all our lives.

She thinks heartbreak is a graduation for the immature heart. Reason tells it that you are pouring a gasoline of regret over unchangeable situations. Yet, what does reason know about feelings?

She maintains that every emotion ought to be expressed, not repressed. It would be injustice to our psyche, to our soul, if we repress pain and express happiness — just because reasons tells us to conform to such standards of the society. By expressing pain, she means, to express in real life the pain you felt, in real conversations — not necessarily on chats and posts and short videos. Her experience tells her that most people do otherwise, like attachment to social media.

She and her beloved are strangers now. They always had been. On lone nights and sad evenings, her heart doesn’t tremble as it used to before. Maybe it has burnt into ashes. That heart now only has some ethics left in it, something the earlier heart didn’t know it had, because it was surfaced with the wishes in the form of colorful lights. The wish at the deepest corner of her heart, the image of the beloved, is now erased. No such wishes remain anymore. No lights. Not even a fire-fly’s spark left. Do you know what kind of a heart has no desires and no trembling, other than a dead person’s?

Such an emotional death has been so kind to her, like a mother’s lap. She cleaned her heart of all the wishes. When he is around, she bows down, not physically but emotionally, and with a slight change in heartbeat she walks away. Her clean conscience and lofty gaze avoids him.

The filled cup of hope she was given by her Creator, is empty now. She has killed the poetess inside her. She shall no longer hope for compassion from anyone. Now, only a few stars on the night sky are the only ones she can talk to. No gambles. No opening up to anyone. She no longer wishes that her dreams be weaved with color by anyone. She has learned to breathe and smell in the dusty air, to not complain of suffocation, and have no hope of having a window with a fresh air.

She still respects her destiny because whatever it did, it was ordered by her creator Allah. Maybe her parents’ prayers didn’t reach Allah. Now, she has loyally bowed down to some responsibilities of her family, which need to be fulfilled, otherwise they will suffer because of her. She has become friends with her loneliness, and her dear loneliness doesn’t distract her anymore. It even helps her write well. She calls it ‘solitude’ now — and it sits with her for hours, greets her, hugs her, and talks to her. In the deepest of solitude, the rhythmic melody of her beloved gets caught tracing her mind's theatre.

She has retreated from love, realizing that in this world the meeting of souls is destined only for a few beautiful and chosen ones. Her soul has found solace in the only half she has got, because by cutting its own legs, it has stopped chasing its other half. Her soul, after playing with the grief for a time, has buried that grief with its own hands. It started to feel the need of someone to help out with the grief, but then instantly realized what destiny did to it last time when it felt such a thing, and thus did the burying with its own hands.

She has veiled her heart, so that no one can see the fresh fragrance of pain in it. She has learned the meaning and value of being considerate of other people’s feelings. She still remembers all of it. We still remember those roads even when we have stopped passing through these.

She does take care of herself now — we do learn to take care of ourselves when there is no one to take care of us. She thinks that she ought to share things only with Allah, and she shall not reveal her torment here anymore. But sometimes, she does not act out of her thinking.

She had become very weak. We all come and go in this world as incomplete. We all have weak moments in our lives. If somehow we pass through such a weak moment in our life, if we pass through it easily, we can avoid so much pain. But that requires support of someone. Someone who can talk to us, listen to us, advise us, to tell us that “It will all be fine.”

Such was her university’s third year. Leaving all that behind, except a mental stain, now in senior year, she lives monotonically and meaninglessly. Sometimes, mostly at night, she bursts into tears. Sleeps a lot, misses classes, works on her final year project a few times a week, comes home every weekend for a hug and a sleep with her mother. Anywhere and anytime, if she finds out her heart is starting to beat faster because of someone, she retracts her steps and leaves.

“Am I changed?” She asks herself. She realizes that she is more than her feelings and thoughts. Even if a large part of those feelings centered around the heart, and a large part of thoughts centered around the mind have been replaced with new ones, she still is the same person. Will a wooden ship’s identity remain the same if one-by-one all of its parts are replaced with new ones? However, she deeply feels that the old Seema is dead in some university; and her bones tell her she is a new person.

September 29, 2023

Slightly inspired by 'Hashim Nadeem'

Modern Man in Search of a Soul - Notes

We wish to make our lives simple, certain and smooth, and for that reason problems are tabu. We choose to have certainties and no doubts, results and no experiments, without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt, and results through experiment. The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is called for to give us the certainty and clarity we need. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results: and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness.

We are all thoroughly familiar with the sources of the problems which arise in the period of youth. For most people it is the demands of life which harshly put an end to the dream of childhood. If the individual is sufficiently well prepared, the transition to a professional career may take place smoothly. But if he clings to illusions that contradict reality, then problems will surely arise. No one takes the step into life without making certain presuppositions, and occasionally they are false. That is, they may not fit the conditions into which one is thrown. It is often a question of exaggerated expectations, of underestimation of difficulties, of unjustified optimism or of a negative attitude. One could compile quite a list of the false presuppositions which give rise to the earliest, conscious problems.

But it is not always the contrast of subjective presuppositions with external facts that gives rise to problems; it may as often be inner, psychic disturbances. They may exist even when things run smoothly enough in the outer world. Very often it is the disturbance of the psychic equilibrium by the sexual impulse; and perhaps just as often it is the feeling of inferiority which springs from an unbearable sensitivity. These inner difficulties may exist even when adaptation to the outer world has been achieved without apparent effort. It even seems as if young people who have had to struggle hard for their existence are spared inner problems, while those for whom adaptation for some reason or other is made easy, run into problems of sex or convicts growing from the sense of inferiority.

People whose own temperaments offer problems are often neurotic, but it would be a serious misunderstanding to confuse the existence of problems with neurosis. There is a marked distinction between the two in that the neurotic is ill because he is unconscious of his problems; while the man with a difficult temperament suffers from his conscious problems without being ill.

If we try to extract the common and essential factors from the almost inexhaustible variety of individual problems found in the period of youth, we meet in nearly all cases with a particular feature: a more or less patent clinging to the childhood level of consciousness — a rebellion against the fateful forces in and around us which tend to involve us in the world. Something in us wishes to remain a child; to be unconscious, or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything foreign, or at least subject it to our will; to do nothing, or in any case indulge our own craving for pleasure or power. In this leaning we observe something like the inertia of matter; it is persistence in a hitherto existing state whose level of consciousness is smaller, narrower and more egoistic than that of the dualistic stage. For in the latter the individual finds himself compelled to recognize and to accept what is different and strange as a part of his own life — as a kind of “also-I.”

Psychology teaches us that, in a certain sense, there is nothing in the psyche that is old; nothing that can really, definitively die away. Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and thereby regresses to the past, falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past, and the other from the future. In principle both are doing the same thing; they are salvaging a narrow state of consciousness. The alternative is to shatter it with the tension inherent in the play of opposites — in the dualistic stage — and thereby to build up a state of wider and higher consciousness.

This outcome would be ideal if it could be brought about in the second stage of life — but here is the rub. For one thing, nature cares nothing whatsoever about a higher level of consciousness; quite the contrary. And then society does not value these feats of the psyche very highly; its prizes are always given for achievement and not for personality — the latter being rewarded, for the most part, posthumously. This being so, a particular solution of the difficulty becomes compulsive: we are forced to limit ourselves to the attainable and to differentiate particular aptitudes, for in this way the capable individual discovers his social being.

Achievement, usefulness and so forth are the ideals which appear to guide us out of the confusion of crowding problems. They may be our lode-stars in the adventure of extending and solidifying our psychic existences. They may help us in striking our roots in the world; but they cannot guide us in the development of that wider consciousness. In the period of youth, at any rate, this course is the normal one and in all circumstances preferable to merely tossing about in the welter of problems.

The dilemma is often solved, therefore, in this way: whatever is given to us by the past is adapted to the possibilities and the demands of the future. We limit ourselves to the attainable, and this means the renunciation of all other potentialities. One person loses a valuable piece of his past, another a valuable piece of his future. Everyone can call to mind their friends or schoolmates who were promising and idealistic youngsters, but who, when met with years later, seemed to have grown dry and cramped in a narrow mould.

The serious problems of life, however, are never fully solved. If it should for once appear that they are, this is the sign that something has been lost. The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrifaction. So also with that solution of the problems of the period of youth which consists in restricting ourselves to the attainable: it is only temporarily valid and not lasting in a deeper sense. Of course, to win for oneself a place in society and so to transform one’s nature that it is more or less fitted to this existence, is in every instance an important achievement. It is a fight waged within oneself as well as outside, comparable to the struggle of the child to defend his ego. This struggle, we must grant, is for the most part unobserved because it happens in the dark; but when we see how stubbornly childish illusions, presuppositions and egoistic habits are still clung to in later years we are able to realize the energy it took to form them. And so it is also with the ideals, convictions, guiding ideas and attitudes which in the period of youth lead us out into life for which we struggle, suffer and win victories: they grow together with our own beings, we apparently change into them, and we therefore perpetuate them at pleasure and as a matter of course, just as the child asserts its ego in the face of the world.

The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal standpoints and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many — far too many — aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.

Complexes. They are unresolved problems of the individual, the points where he has suffered a defeat, his weak spots, something he cannot evade or overcome. They are emotionally toned contents of the unconscious having some autonomous behavior, meaning that they resist conscious intentions, are outside the control of the conscious mind, and come and go as they please, are split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the unconscious, ready at all times to interfere with conscious intentions. They are the cause or effect of some conflict — shock, inner strife, etc. They are the 'vulnerable points' we neither want to remember, nor want it to be reminded by others, but they frequently come back to mind in the most unwelcome fashion — as memories, wishes, duties, views — with which we have never really come to terms. They are a conflicting obstacle, but can also be stimulus for opening new possibilities of achievement. They are the focus or nodal points of our psyche. Lacking complexes would mean that our psychic activity has come to a fatal standstill.

The events of our psychic life are immediately close to us, we ourselves are the psyche, hence we are almost forced to assume that we know all of our psyche better than anyone else, and are encouraged into believing that we are the best authority in psychological matters. But what is closest to us is the very thing we know least about, although it seems to be what we know best of all.

September 28, 2023