The thought of physical suicide is depressing to us because of the finality with which it ends. Relationships are murdered and faith is betrayed. Trust becomes a misbegotten child and we rue the fact for eternity. But what we don’t realize is that physical suicide is preceded by moral suicide which happens over many years.
We all start young, innocent and optimistic. In fact you could say that hope is as much a constant companion as our parents. It lives with us, sleeps with us and carries us through the day. Failures don’t rattle us and our innate resiliency allows us to look at failure as an event instead of as a judgement. We grow up and form constructs that defines us as human beings. These constructs are made up of our beliefs and learning that we have gained over years of swimming in the testing river of life. These pillars are our moorings as well as our foundation. They keep us rooted to our universe while simultaneously affording us the luxury for further action. We are confident only because of what lies beneath us.
Why then do we capitulate?
It is an unanswerable question for every human being. We start by narrow compromises. We err a little and console ourselves by saying that we should not be too hard on ourselves. We never attempt to make up for the mistake because the old adage rings in our ears “To err is human after all.”
There will come a day when every one of us is judged by the principles that we rely on. The principles define us not to others but to ourselves. They are the mirror that we sorely need to correct our edifice. But a day will dawn when we cannot look at ourselves anymore. Or even if we do, we choose to ignore what matters most. We choose to not see the rot within. We ignore a bit of ourselves.
Prior to that day, we were on a mountain climbing up looking at the peak. Hope was riding on our shoulders egging us on. We could see the beautiful skies and the ground seemed distant. Everything around us looked sweet and appealing. The rarified air breathed a powerful life into us urging us to keep climbing and rest no more. Rest however was a warrior in its own right and we had to yield and stop just before we had reached the very top.
When we rest, we are without strength or vision. We are just victims of a tireless force that browbeats us all into submission. It allows us to think about ourselves more than we should and forces us to reflect rather than act from within. The reflection brings untold stories of our sufferings and uses our failings as a motivation to prompt questioning of our faith. As the questions rise, so do the answers bearing with them the thick stench of self absorption. Our energies are now focused on our achievements rather than the external world.
As time passes on, the bouts of superficial reflection increase. Each interaction slowly corrodes the pillars that we had built up earlier. The principles are the first victims of our self obsession. We start to probe and dissect them. We question their very existence. We concern ourselves with how they should exist rather than wondering about why they exist at all.
You see each principle is a metric that is instilled in us since our childhood. We fail to realize that diluting the metric means that we have lots to decant and much less to measure. This becomes an endless cycle of digging deeper for value in the hope of convincing ourselves that there is indeed value in us.
We begin to dredge the bottom bringing up all the filth that we have buried since the beginning of time. We cannot fathom the grossness of our self and we prefer to bury it rather than exhume it. This has unintended consequences for every time we dredge we end up recycling the same goop over and over again. We eventually will get tired of this constant churn making us feel insensitive to our selves. We no longer care for the human being that is in us, we care more the apparition that we chose to be.
The apparition haunts us and beckons to us all the time. By now we have convinced ourselves that this is no stranger but in fact our own shadow. This shadow dogs our every footstep and slinks closer with every happenstance in our lives. One day we start looking at the shadow instead of the mirror. We see ourselves as we want it to be rather than what it actually is. The mirror tires of its inadequacy and disappears leaving behind a void that the shadow fills readily. The shadow seems to never tire of us and we in turn enjoy its fountain of truth.
We dip into the fountain because it is replenished daily from our own stores. Suddenly everything that is happening around us starts losing its importance. We are more worried about our fountain as it becomes the only reason for our existence. It nourishes us with its presence and fills our mind with its platitudes. It is taking from us and giving life to us simultaneously. We don’t realize that we are isolated from everything else due to this obsession with the fountain. We don’t notice that we are in an endless energy loop.
The energy loop creates a constant cycle of being low on energy when we give to the fount and being high when the fount gives back to us. This exchange starts weakening our self because we are unable to digest our own excretions fast enough to purify it. We are now being fed from the river of effluents and at the same time regurgitating it back. We are unable to release the effluents into the air around us and unable to breathe in the precious oxygen that could have oxidized our selves.
One fine day, the entire machinery grinds to a halt as we are now connected to the fount by a solid stream of effluence. No light penetrates this morbid connection. We tire of the constant effort required to liquefy this connect. We need desperately to inject pure water from the springs around us but we are inextricably bound. We are unable to break ourselves out and now it fills us up converting our bodies to a shape that we don’t recognize.
In a desperate effort, we wrench ourselves free and with gasping breaths drag ourselves over to the mirror for one last time. We hope that the mirror will cure us of this deadly disease that rests solidly within our veins. But the mirror stares impassively back showing us our true self that we had buried for eternity. We are beyond redemption and the mirror has shown us the way. We no longer belong to the world around us. We are now part of the decay. We have crumbled into obsolescence like a book whose pages have not been turned in centuries.
Like the lightning overhauls the clap of thunder, the jagged fork of moral death flashes across our skies.