I was taking a walk the other day when it started to rain. I didn’t stop, though. It was drizzling, and I was okay with it. As I walked, I saw society trying its best to revive itself. I saw the neighbourhood coming out for whatever excuse they could manage.
One idea led to another, and before I knew, I was on a train of thought I couldn’t quite grasp. There have always been pandemics. There have always been wars. All of history is the same thing all over again, and again. It’s a terrible cycle. The further back you go, the more you see that it’s all the same.
So, what is it all about? What is it that’s demanded of us? What is the large question?
Perhaps, there’s something terribly wrong that we’ve been doing all this time. Perhaps, none of this matters anyway. Maybe, it’s some simulation where they change just one little thing and check if it works then scrap the attempt again. Who were they?
I kept asking myself all of these questions as I continued walking. Then, it hit me, quite literally too. A vehicle hit me as I crossed the road. I got up, dusting myself off. After an exchange of apologies, I shrugged it off and continued walking. It was then that I realised, though.
Perhaps, the grand answer, whatever it was, wasn’t in the grand questions but was in what’s right next to us. We could ponder over and wrestle with the broader questions as much as we wanted to, convinced we were doing something great. The fact would still be the same: that we’d miss what was right in front of us.
Perhaps, the most significant issues in history have never been about the grand struggle of the human collective but rather how oblivious each one of us was to our blind spots. We never see danger approaching because we’re too distracted, too lost in thought, too busy and full of ourselves, and too great in our heads.
Maybe the answer was in each person being fully aware of themselves by themselves. Perhaps, that’s when we’d become a better collective after all. When all of us know where we’re going, individually, when we don’t get involved in proverbial accidents, and when we don’t commit errors easily avoided.
Maybe it’ll be then that history would stop repeating itself.