What a strange word – deserve. That we deserve to live at a certain level of comfort and security might be the single emotion driving all the pain and suffering around us. That the world owes those who it births some form of equity, and that the universe should be egalitarian to us because we are aware of its existence, because we are sentient enough to collide atoms together and change kinetic energy into light that our minds can form into meaning.
What a strange idea.
Ideas, the manifestations of the mind as it finds ways to protect a feeble body before its logical end. Without which we would have nothing to hold on to, no way to make sense of the banality that is sunrise and sunset, the passing of seasons and the natural repetitive chaos within which we have erected cities with bright lights and called society.
It’s all so fickle.
And when it breaks, we break with it. When we have run out of gold to fill the cracks in our dreams we begin to see that we could never heal all the hurt in the world with words like love and freedom. That suffering is a part of the code and trying to stop it is like mopping back the waves on the beach with an old towel and a bucket. Frustrated, we blame the towel, the bucket, the weather, our hands, our effort, the time of day, our ability, the position of the sun, anything we can to avoid the sheer impossibility of the challenge. Because we need it to be possible.
Because without possibility to hold our faith then we will have to find a way to make peace with the fact that none of it is within our control. That we’re just specks floating through space at the whim of chance. That we have and lack through the incidence of birth and circumstance. That despite all our efforts it’s still largely up to fate what to do with us.
So instead we insist that we deserve things. That everyone deserves things. That the same violence that has created something for a few should be expanded to create more for everyone. No one, not even those who have, deserve anything. Which is why they fight so hard to protect it. They know it isn’t theirs to hold.
Which is what makes it complicated.
It is impossible to unravel without getting lost in the unraveling, to untangle without getting tangled up oneself. The etymology of violence eventually leads to a self that spontaneously actualised in early childhood and, by then, there was no way back. Knowing that and death are the only things we truly share, we navigate this pre apocalyptic space hoping that someone will recognize that it was not by our doing that we got here, nor by the same that we continued to be. And maybe that, in itself, would accord us a morsel of the peace that they take for granted. After all, are we not human too? And, in being human, don’t we – deserve it all?
This takes me back to something I heard from someone who heard it from a TV show, a question – what do we owe each other? If at all? Because it can’t be everything, and it can’t be nothing. The fallacy of individualism has us believing that there is such a thing as my life, your life, when in reality, it’s our life. We are born into this interconnected causality cascade as butterflies flapping as hard as we can to stay alive amidst storms that started long before we arrived.
Maybe then the answer is simple – it’s complicated. And any attempt to uncomplicate it might be the problem itself. Any solution that makes it simple is, inevitably, reductive. And the reduced are bound to rise against those who reduce them. This is how centers create margins that rise into centers that create margins. This is also how desire is the unquenchable root of all human suffering.
the devil’s appetite open wider
The belly of the beast is getting larger
Don’t be careless now, he’ll devour you
and chances are, you won’t recover
- Riley, Devil’s appetite
To try and understand what we all want is to look the beast in the mouth and wonder why you have been swallowed alive. Don’t be careless now, understanding is a desire too.