Emotional landscape

Today she is reliving a memory in her mind! She had volunteered to offer counseling to a group of Maldivians – who had suffered great loss in Tsunami 2004. She was daunted by this task. These people had suffered one of the worst experiences – loosing of loved ones, loosing of lifetime wealth in fraction of seconds and everything washed away. Then came the long days in relief camps, fear of water in the water locked country and corpses which cannot be identified. This haunted them, fearing the corpses were the family or loved ones lost. What could she offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering?

She thought … “what do all these people want to talk about, once they could see a counselor?”

It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the temporary relief camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated after the relief shelters were built up, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can’t stop thinking about him. And I don’t know what to do…..

This is what we are like. Collectively as a species, this is our emotional landscape. She read a book and found a myth which said “There are two questions that human beings have ever fought over all through history: How much do you love me? And who’s in charge?” Everything else is manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

Bittersweet

The perfect couple! The most expensive wedding! A fully furnished apartment! And seven years of dating and courtship in bliss!

But after eleven difficult and torturous months of marriage she left her husband. When she finally made that decision she thought the worst was over. She stopped knowing him. They shocked each other by how swiftly they went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived.

At the abysmal fact that they both were bottom of strangeness was the fact tht they were both were doing something the other person would never have conceived possible: he never dreamed she would actually leave him, and she in her wildest imagination thought he would make it so difficult for her to go.

It was her belief that when she left her husband that that they could settle the practical matters in a few hours with a calculator, some common sense and a bit of goodwill towards the person they’d once loved. However, in few days she found that she was at a loss. How do you negotiate once you have offered everything? She could do nothing but wait for his counterproposal. Her guilt at having left him forbade her from thinking she should be allowed to keep even a dime of money she had made in the last decade. Not even any of her wedding or birthday gifts.

Time elapsed, without any word but silences were broken by his occasional communications reminding what a criminal jerk she was.

What was left of her was just her withered soul. She took her refuge from her nearest and closest friends: Mr. Loneliness and Ms. Depression!

Metaphysical Crisis

When I was nineteen years old, going on twenty, I experienced a true metaphysical crisis. It all happened when I was on leave in School holidays. I was going to be twenty in January, and there was something about the transition from nineteen to twenty- from teen to ty- that shocked me into genuine existential panic. I remember thinking life was passing me by so fast. It seemed only yesterday I was in primary. Soon I would be middle aged, facing the middle age crisis, then elderly facing menopause, then dead. And everyone else was aging in hyper speed, too.

Everyone was growing old.

My sense of helplessness was overwhelming. What I wanted to do was pull some massive emergency brake on the universe, like brakes I'd seen on fast racing , motorbikes!! I wanted to call a time out, as I did in my volley matches, to demand everybody just STOP until I could understand everything.

To my horror, here I am turning twenty wishing to be in Neverland with Perter Pan. The closer I watched time, the faster it spun, and the days went by so quickly that in made my head hurt, and at the end of everyday I remember thinking, "Another one gone" and bursting into tears.

The day came! I stomped, cried and hid from all the good wishes....