Ambition

What is ambition? Is it a vague idea in the head, comforting in its warm fuzzy ambiguity and lack of any definition? Or is it a blazing light in the distance with fluorescent highway makers leading the way? Is it now, or in a year, maybe ten, or even twenty? Is it pragmatic or fantastical? Achievable or well nigh impossible? Is it supposed to make sense to people or move them into paroxysms of disbelief or admiration? Is it a maddening heady rush or a sober batten-down-the-hatches-and-keep-the-rudder-straight kinda job? Can I live without one? Do I need to have one? If I do, can I have ambition, plural? Or it has to be one overarching all-consuming objective?

I find myself wondering a lot about this these days, simply because there is so much to do, so many things to sweat out and grunt for and see them to the end. Not that I am only one with these things in my head. Almost all of us would be in the same position, where we are constantly juggling priorities  and trying to bring everything to a satisfactory conclusion. Maybe one is of greater import than the other. Then is that my ambition, or just a mundane necessity? And if all of them are equally important, then what? Is everything an ambition then! I might find happiness and contentment while striving towards a goal, or only after achieving that purpose, or maybe never. Is ambition supposed to be responsible for any of this?

What I do know is that I never want to be anonymous. I want my name to be known to a large number of people. But again, hazy concept that, not to mention a sentiment shared by the other 99.999999% of humanity. Nothing special in that. Surely that can't be my ambition. Lots of money....hmm. Nothing novel there either. Fancy cars, bungalows, travelling the world, living the jet set life....all inane and mundane. I want to excel at my job. I do. I always try to be good at what I am doing. But I do that for everything. That's just the way I am. Surely that can't be my ambition.

What is it then? What is my purpose in life? Do I even have one, or I am just going with the flow? I have love, family, writing. No fame or fortune as yet. Need to link these two subsets into something meaningful, a credo if you must. I want to wake up every morning and see blazing letters across the wall in front of me telling me pithily and concisely what I am here on God's green earth for. I want to close my eyes every night with that image burned in my head. I want to live every moment with that thought in my head, wherever I am, whatever I am doing. A bed of nails to lie down on, or a soaring aria to lift my spirit on; whatever shape or form that push comes in I want it. Things might look up after that or not; it is immaterial at this point. People live and die by their faith. This would be mine and hopefully I would be much happier for that.

So as it stands, my ambition at the moment is to find an ambition. Ironical that. All those questions and whats and wherefores have led to this anticlimactic and absurd answer. I hope I am not the only one in the same boat. And now that I am here, I need to get out fast. No time to dawdle.

The World As I Know It

It's a funny little thing,
This realm of the living,
Where anything is everything,
Everything nothing
And why's it so, nobody knows!

Great lives are lead,
Great leaders they tread,
But footprints never stay,
Blind still we tackle the way
And we wander, aye without a clue we wander!

Glorious edifices to rival all Creation,
Giant monstrosities defying Imagination,
But the elements still hold sway,
Bit by bit they crumble each day
And we sing paeans to glory, fools that we be!

Grand thoughts and theories that simply amaze,
Grandstanding grandiloquence that puts us in a daze,
But the ether still cloaks many a mystery,
Blurs what is myth and which's history
And we still drift aimless, amidst dazzling infinity!

Grown we have and still we stride on,
Glory awaits us at the break of a new dawn,
But those whom we crushed weigh down our feet,
Bare inches away from where sky and earth meet
And we bemoan fate, doused in blood and misery!

It's a funny little thing, 
This realm of the living,
Where anything is everything,
Everything nothing
And why's it so, nobody knows!

Myths

What is a myth if not the truth for some. Someone somewhere in some remote part of the world probably looked at the sun rising in the east one day and had a sudden great epiphany about some aspect of the cosmos. Or maybe it was a starry night and he was stoned out of his wits. Or she. Or it. Whatever works for you. The person/sentient being came up with a big brainwave that set off the EEG and gave a nice fuzzy feeling afterwards. Then the same entity/existential construct went up to his or her best friend and shouted boisterously, "You gotta hear this Mac!"(or Joe, Cynthia, Reshma, Odombo, or whatever else you prefer). And Mac heard it. And liked it. And passed it on to other people (or maybe he just thought his friend was off his rocker and was cautioning the others to keep all sharp objects out of his reach). Anyway, end result was dissemination of said idea. A few drunken binges later, we have a belief, a way of life if you must insist. And then came the naysayers.

It's almost inevitable really. Your parade will always get rained on, regardless of how gingerly and non-offensively you went about setting up the darned thing in the first place. Maybe they were pissed with you, or they actually genuinely believed in their essential rightness, but soon enough there is a competing truth in the market. And more. And one of them catches on more than yours, hence rendering you well and truly screwed. Supply and demand. Simple enough. And hence lady and gentlemen we arrive at the creation of a myth.

Obviously science is logical, cogent and comes with all the right credentials and references. I am not foolish enough to think that the sun revolves around the earth or that my behaviour is dictated by four humours.  But it is in the end a truth simply because it is believed by most people. The heliocentric theory simply just caught on. Before that was egocentrism. Similarly with the four humours. They were actual realities for people at some point. For them Freud and Jung would be myths, mere constructs of fevered imaginings. Some of our truths will stay, others overturned by posterity. And on the generations of humanity will march onwards, filling in the universe one theory at a time till finally the whole cosmos is spread out across the skies in front of us in all its glory. Or maybe the universe might end five minutes before that final awakening. Fascinating journey it would be nonetheless.

What about the past then? How did we come to be? What happened before the beginning of time? Did time even have a beginning? Did someone create all of us and everything around us? Doesn't there need to be a creator for everything to come into existence? Or maybe we don't need one anyway. Time had no meaning before the Big Bang. Nothing mattered before that infinitesimal infinity. It is only after that cataclysmic explosion is when meaning came into existence. It is futile to search for anything before that. What is is, there was nothing before. Two alternatives but no definite truth to believe in yet. No matter how sceptical I might be about creationism, I don't have anything else that I could believe strong enough in to disparage it as a myth. So here I stand with a foot in each boat waiting patiently for another epiphany. Who knows when that will come.

The celestial orb pirouettes in the sky,

What secrets it keeps, what dreams it hides,

Such vistas and landscapes I weave with my mind,

What is truth, what fiction, how do I divine?

The Vagaries of Everyday Life

Think you have it all figured out? That life is all set and ready to zoom off into the sunset on a Trans Am with a stetson perched carelessly on its cranium? This is where you pay off your debts, reap dividends and roll around in some serious moolah? Heh. If only it ended at that.

That is the beauty of life innit? Nothing is ever enough. One thing leads to another leads to another and another and another, like a colossal snake swallowing its own tail again and again and getting fatter by the second in the process. Not the most pleasant imagery that obviously but it captures what I want to say quite succinctly indeed. I am more or less set now. I have a clear idea about where I am and where I am heading in the next few years. I should be heaving a giant sigh of relief and throwing back a drink or dozen in celebration. But I am not. The snake makes yet another round.

There is so much more to do. So many more worries to notice and take care of. Gaining in life means you also get capable of handling more and more problems that were previously out of reach. Ignorance is no longer bliss. There is a whole new world of potential sorrow and pain waiting out there for you. The veneer of stability is at best a flimsy fabrication of our fertile human imaginations. Doesn't take much to poke holes into it. A throw of the dice, a bad game of chance and we are back on that rickety little coracle we started this ride on in the first place.

What to do then? Keep bailing out water from your leaky boat or turn around midway and head for safer shores? No one will really mind if you do the latter. They'd be disappointed yes and you'd have to settle for much lesser, but there will be that sturdy ground beneath your feet that you wouldn't be swept off any time soon. There will be a surety and certainty about your place in the grand scheme of things. Call it acceptance, destiny or plain old satisfaction with one's lot in life; everything will just be a lot more saner. No more craziness. Just lots and lots of plain old sanity.

And so I guess it is with everyone. We row and row and row till we can row no more; the scope of human life, the very meaning of our existence firmly set in the strength and firmness of our sinews. And on and on this goes, one birth after another, towards the endless horizon. If there is such a thing as nirvana, maybe that horizon is not that endless after all. Maybe there is a spiritual Valhalla somewhere out there just waiting to be found. Or maybe there is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just you and that coracle and an endless expanse of water. 

The journey or the end? Which is better? Is the end just a stale dour full stop on the music sheet, or a  lead-in to a whole new stanza? And the journey? A waste of time or the actual true meaning of life? I always wonder, always end up writing a whole bunch of nonsense about it. As long as these philosophical meanderings keep me writing I guess it is fine. Been a while since I wrote anyway, I have a lot to be thankful for and a lot more to be thankful for in future too. I hope so at least.