Woke up today and knocked over a plant while making my bed. I thought, surely, there is no worse way to start a day. I thought of the aesthetics of my life, of how important it is for me to have everything in the right place. I gathered the mud, which had managed to reach the farthest crevices and corners in the nanosecond that the pot had hit the floor and burst open from the bottom. Slightly frustrated but still mending my disposition, for it was still the morning and what I thought now would dictate my day, as it often happens, I quietly cleaned the floor, set the pot right, and vacuumed the spot. It occurred to me that all aesthetics comes at a cost, that things are beautiful because someone makes sure they are. Naturally, this cost is unknown to the beholder. To them, it has always been this way, and it will always be this way, and any beauty a fastidiously arranged array of plants invokes is ever-present and unwavering. But all aesthetics come at a price, too, and someone has to pay it in the form of time. And I realised this is how it will happen to me; this is how my years will pass. I will always remain balancing the scales of ethics and aesthetics, and both will seem easy to those who look at my life from afar. Only I will know the inherent cost of the just and the beautiful.
Recently, through things that have happened here and there, as things often happen, I have learned that we must feign action, even when it does not contribute much to anything. If things remain the same for too long, even when they are sailing smoothly, they call it stagnation. We must flail and moan about things not going well, even when they are on their way. Most people want to witness only this: motion. I reckon this is why the world is such a hot mess. There will always be someone who mistakes smooth motion for still waters.
But it takes a competent crew to know that the seas are seldom still and that there are waves even if the passengers cannot feel them; there are bumps in all roads, after all. But people rarely know this because an easygoing life looks easy. I could do that too, they say, unaware that they could not even clean the floor if they knocked a pot down.