The Comfort Zone

 Contentment is not an illusion. It exists. It is an insidious force, extremely real and potent than the most crushing of emotional and physical trauma. Once trapped within this make-believe world, with the fruits of all that you thought you could achieve with a minimal effort, it takes superhuman strength to be able to overcome this irresistible force of unnatural stasis. 

 

Contentment is the antithesis of human existence. Anything that has ever been achieved in the history of mankind was as a result of intense necessity or under great duress. The human brain is a remarkable entity, it can very easily lull you into a warm and inviting cocoon of inaction and hibernation. If you are able to push through the envelope and extend the boundaries of your mind, it will spark ideas beyond your comprehension. 

The default state of the human mind is very intelligently set to that of complete contentment with the availability of minimal resources. It is designed in such a powerful but effective manner, that unless we are in actual discomfort, it makes no effort to improve our lot in life. It is very easily satisfied with the resources it takes to keep the human body in relative comfort. And, yes, we cannot blame the human mind for this. Its main function is to keep us alive. It does this with amazing efficiency. Every primal need is communicated to the corresponding organ. If food, air, thirst, and need are all available in relative abundance, there is no need for the mind to dwell on other aspects of human existence. 

However much our frontal lobe is developed, we are still bound by these primal needs, and creative thirst is always a manufactured entity. Each individual contains within oneself a capacity for creative thought and expression. This should be carefully nurtured and cherished. Great creative genius is born in the throes of despair. 

We should learn to achieve an imbalance in our basal needs and their satisfaction, thereby avoiding getting into the comfort zone for a majority of our lives. This keeps our minds in a state of flux which provides fertile ground for creative expression. 

Reality

      As a child the world is your special place. A place where you can make things happen. The colors are bright and vibrant, the days are crisp and the air is fresh. Your dreams are huge and stupendous but still tangible to your mind. When there is so much you dont know about life, when nobody tells you there are things that can't be done, that is when you keep the faith. Then as you grow you are told that you are a frog and you are shown your well. The harsh limitations of reality become apparent by manifesting as your limitations. You learn that you can not fly to outer space, you can not travel into the future, you can not become the president of your country, you can not eradicate poverty, and most importantly, you can not be a singer.

       The world is your oyster as a child. There are no worries that attach to you since every primal need is satisfied by your parents. This gives you the latitude to dream. Then comes the day when you realize that so much has already been done by people that it is daunting to have to learn all that before being able to create something new. Tomes of knowledge assimilated by the human race meet you at every turn. The mind reels and you realize for the first time how insignificant you are in the scheme of things. How little you can hope to contribute to the goliath that is mankind's achievements. Hell, even topping a class of forty odd dunderheads is difficult. 

       You feel cheated. The big promised prize has been snatched from you when you thought that you were finally ready for it. You then start to make concessions to tailor your dreams to your limitations. You settle for Second-in-class, aim at buying a motorbike before flying to outer space, think about taking care of your family before you set out to change the world. Then you find that even these most basic of aspirations require herculean struggle to achieve. Nothing can be taken for granted and most importantly there is no free lunch. The sparkling stream of your childhood has run into muddy waters. You meander aimlessly and seek to adapt your mind to the possibility that you may never achieve what you once dreamed of.  

       Unhappiness provides the spark to the vapors of creativity. It acts as a catalyst that channels your inner sadness into words of anguish. There is no higher truth in the world than expression. When there is so much bottled up inside the pain shows plain in the words you write. 

       However the shadows of your childhood dreams do linger in the dusts of dawn. The red carpets still roll out in anticipation, but the aircraft is empty, no one descends, the flash bulbs go off in vain, the wind rustles past an empty tarmac..

The Garden of Contentment

The warm breeze is laden with the balmy scent of a million flowers
The leaves whisper softly to one another, the tales of days past
Evenings, with the azure blue skies,
the golden rays of the sun falling softly,
Imbuing the fallen brown twigs with a shade of light,
glittering like gold amidst the tufts of soft, sweetly pungent grass.

The singing of the bees and the chirping of the birds,
like calls to a heavenly abode that tells you
of the beauty of the earth and the kindness of God

Where every whisper carries through the streams of sparkling water
so pure that but for its sigh you would never have known it.
Where every living soul is in harmony with every other,
and every fruit, leaf or animal craves for nothing more than what it has

Where every mellifluous sound serves to make the silence more complete
Where if one looks earnestly and long enough one will find the lord himself
Where the birds and the leaves tell the wind
of the sorrows long gone and the bliss of the world therein

Such a place there is, in the minds of men.
Such a Garden it is of contentment that once you pass its gates
not even the meeting of heaven and hell can make you turn back ever again.

The Withered Rose

The time was 11:53 pm.

The sound of water dripping from the tap was magnified in the silence of the two bedroom house. Crickets were doing their thing adding to the outre setting. The heat was oppressive and the sultry nature of the weather in these latitudes led to a sheen of sweat making those living in the house look as if they had just stepped out of a bath.

Mbeki, father of three, had actually just stepped out of a relaxing late evening shower and crossed over to the far end of the bedroom to lift the creaking wooden window up a few inches. The resulting draft of hot, stifling air felt surprisingly cool as he dried quickly. Walking over to the dusty mirror on the dresser he saw his profile reflected in the feeble light of an ornate table lamp on his right. The flickering light threw the left half of his face into shadow sharpening the craggy jaw and the steely glint in his eyes.

He then dressed and entered the drawing room where his wife was sitting at the dining table, reading the bible, his youngest son was asleep in the other bedroom and his daughter of fifteen was lounging on the couch reading a paperback by the faint light coming through from the open bedroom door.

He crossed over and turned on the lamp by the sofa and pulled a chair alongside his wife at the table. There were a few newspapers lying on it. He took one at random and tried to occupy himself until his wife was ready to serve dinner. His wife Miriam was two years his younger, homey and kind with blue eyes and a cherubic face. He now looked at her as she put her book down and enquired about his eldest son, Pablo.

The time was 12 am.

Pablo Mbeki, with a sprint in his step and flying hair ran into his parents flat.

"Where have you been?" asked his parents in amazement. "Whats the matter with you? Its so late already!"

"Oh, Don't ask!, its so incredible! I never expected this.."

Pablo was shaking with suppressed energy. He sank into a chair at the dining table.

"Its unbelievable!.. You can't imagine. Look!"

His sister jumped out of the sofa and went to her brother. His younger brother woke up, came into the drawing room rubbing his eyes sleepily.

"Whats the matter? You don't look like yourself!"

"Its because I am delighted mom. All of the country knows who I am! Till now only you knew there was a Bank accountant named Pablo, now all of the country knows it. Mom. Oh Lord!"

"What has happened? calm down and tell us first"

"We live in a civilized world, the papers report everything! If anything happens nothing is hidden, everything is known at once. Till now only famous people and celebrities got their name published in the papers, but now they have gone ahead and published mine!!.

"What do you mean? Where?"

The father turned pale, the mother crossed herself and his brother went closer to him.

"Yes! my name has been published! Now the whole country knows me, keep the paper mom in memory of it."

Pablo pulled out of his pocket a copy of the paper and gave it to his father, pointing out a passage circled in pencil.

"Read it"

His mom glanced at the holy image and crossed herself.  His father began to read " At eleven o'clock on the evening of the 9th of June, a bank accountant of the name of Pablo Mbeki..."

"You see,, you see!, Go on!"

".... a Bank accountant of the name of Pablo Mbeki coming from the Three States bar in downtown Brairville in an intoxicated condition..."

"Thats me!.. It's all described exactly!. Go on!"

".... intoxicated condition, slipped and fell under the wheels of  a twenty ton truck carrying crates of fruits and vegetables from the neighboring town of Knouse. Mbeki, at first in an unconscious condition was immediately rushed by the police to the nearest emergency care facility and there examined by a doctor. The blow he had received to the back of his head..."

"It was from the shaft dad.. Go on!.. read the rest!"

".... he had received to the back of the head turned out to be fatal... and his body was shifted to the town morgue pending an investigation..."

The lamps in the drawing room and the bedroom went out at once and the entire house was plunged into darkness. There was a deep keening sound that made their hair stand on end and just as the terror was too much to bear the lights came back on. The chair Pablo was sitting at was empty and Mbeki was left staring at the penciled circle around the article in the newspaper clutched in his hand....

The Seed

A symbolic personification of the human life cycle with that of a tree, the trials and tribunals of an egoistic man aiming for the stars..

Do not blaspheme the bird for the place where it dropped the seed.
bloom where you are planted.
brown is the fallen branch
black are the rotting stumps
so very lucky is the tender green shoot
that it grew under the aegis of these
which through the rain and blazing sun
watched over the blessed thing


Flourish it did, in fine splendor
straight as an arrow,
to the stars and beyond did it seek
from its lowly tendrils
the fallen branch, the rotting stumps
looked on in tears of pride
at the beauty of life and God
in every sinew of the stalk
that now trembled with suppressed strength


Then one day when the red of the sky matched its fervor
the stalk thought its time had come
the branch implored to show restraint
the stump pleaded for more time
but when fire flows in the veins
and every bit of you strains with irrepressible energy
one knows more than all others
and steep did the stalk rise,
above the redwoods, the conifers and the pines
the sun at last shone in its face


The branch and the stump looked puny
their caution made the tree laugh
fear was such a sly adversary
you always have more of it
when you are past needing it
such was the day of the strangle-fig
the seed was now in high disdain
the strangle-fig was slowly taking root



The branch and the stump could not see
the slow death of which
the tree was now ignorant
its life blood was being sucked in red
the blackness was spreading upward
the shoot was grown too high
to see the loss of its origins
seldom is there a worse end
than one which you can not see



One day there was a downward glance
there was so much to remedy
the tree looked in disdain
at the thing that would be its end
and refused to mark out as its equal
with the simple confidence of futility
then one day the fear arrived
the sun was in the reeds by the lake
the air was full of malice
the birds were silent and cowering by the leaves
and the tree that once was a seed looked within
there was a blackness beyond redemption
nothing could describe the anguish in its silent cry
to the heavens did it keen
to the very stars that it had risen to meet
the day of reckoning had come to pass
and the core was eaten away in ignorance and piety



And thus ends the tale of the seed
which did bloom where it was planted
which was lovingly blossomed into life by two magical entities
that which rose to seek the stars and the sun
which was the tallest among the redwoods and the conifers
but the tree that was once a green shoot
forgot that the greatest weakness in life
was to not remember those who matter the most
and the strangle-fig did die with the tree which was once a shoot
since after all the blackness there is the white bliss of death
that the bird might have eaten the seed
were the things folklore is made up of.

All things silly...

"There is no higher silliness in this world than in the daily routines of men and women"
                                                                              - Rajiv Venkatasubramanian, circa 2010.

There is something so ironically strange about the way we live. There is no doubt, that mankind has evolved into a specimen of immense complexity over a period of three billion years, that over every million of these years there have been minute changes to the human edifice that was taking shape. The anthropologists only serve to reason out with astounding clarity of thought that we exist as we actually do precisely because we were made-to-order for the planet. They behave similar to movie critics who give reasons for the actions that the director elicited after watching the movie unfold before their own eyes.

If we, for the present, push aside all these complex and abstract sciences, what we have left on the table of life is a pyramid. This pyramid represents the entire life structure on earth with mankind on the top with a sort of a superior swagger to his expression. The very bottom is reserved for microbial stuff...

Man, the finest specimen of evolution (lets give the God issue some rest) in the known history of the universe, has been created as a program execution. He is an end result of a complex multilevel code embedded in the double helix that is the human genome. An incredibly complex and yet precise jumble of sugars and phospates make up the double helix, while the connectors are made of high molecular weight bases, adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. These act as the binary numbers of computers, except in much more complex and mysterious ways than just state switching.


The human brain is indeed one of the most complex structures in the observable universe. I would say that if what I have just written is indeed true then I am the most inefficient combination of atoms anywhere in existence.
What have we done with the gift that has been bestowed on each and every one of us? Shouldn't our very existence define some higher purpose? should we not tirelessly train our living fiber to yearn, to require to know, to not rest until we unlock the secrets of our beginnings? Because therein lies the holy grail of humanity, to know where we came from must be a puzzle so important to everyone of us that we should burn with ignominy to be kept in the dark regarding something so essential to our self discovery.


Instead I find that we as a species are so reticent, so unbelievably slow, that the average man never uses more than a small fraction of his actual powers. 


The amount of work we can accomplish if we just let go, if we can reach out and shut down all our innate inhibitions to focus on the one thing that we should want above all will be magical. 


The fanatic in me aches as I gaze upon the stars in the sky billions of miles away, since I can not see for myself the cataclysmic fusion of hydrogen atoms into pure energy, since even after knowing so much regarding the process man is limited by the tiny constraints of space and time,  just like even knowing the exact sequence of the human genome we are nowhere near the day when we can alter a section of the code to make that a painless panacea for mankind's woes.


" Selective stupidity is essential, stupid selectivity is existential"
                                    - Rajiv Venkatasubramanian, circa 2010.

The Epitaph..

Fresh drops of dew hung provocatively off the blades of grass, reflecting the paleness of the crescent shaped moon which shone upon the desolation that was the Marthvode forest.

A lone man trudged on a winding path through the brambles and bluebell bushes. His rough beard was visible, by the flickering light of a burning torch, as the long locks of his unkempt hair parted to the sway of his stumbling gait. His slate gray eyes could be seen intermittently, eyes of steel, which mirrored only his resolution and not the sorrow and anguish he felt.

The coffin made deep troughs in the soft forest earth as he dragged it with the help of a fraying rope attached to a ring at the top of the lid. He was perspiring badly, rivulets of sweat flowed through his face, burning his eyes as he struggled up the unforgiving slope.

The cottage was visible now. He had made the trip without incident. This part of the forest was home to one of the most feared species of wolves mankind had ever known. They were known as the Mortesci. Their attacks were unparalleled in history for both speed and viciousness. They had a distinct way of attack. They usually come alone to the prey's lair and mauled it. Then they used a distinctive cry to call on the rest of the pack to finish it off. It was thought they considered it a sport to kill as they never consumed meat. The baying of the Mortesci was considered the last thing a man ever heard, as there was no one living who knew how it sounds.

He left the coffin at the foot of the rough wooden stairs leading to the door. Suddenly, he felt a cool draft of air at the back of his neck, a feeling of indescribable terror washed over him. He felt a creeping sense of uneasiness which he could not explain, He was alone here in this wilderness with .. with...

He looked down at the coffin. He could not stop the tears from running down his cold cheeks, his eyes closed involuntarily, only yesterday had he loved her, caressed her, ruffled her hair. Life wasn't fair, God did not exist, there was no greater trauma on earth than what he was going through right now. He threw his head up and cursed the heavens, somewhere, a bloodhound bayed.

The knob felt cold to the touch, he carried the rose wood coffin into the cottage and closed the door. The only light came from the torch he carried. He set it in a corner and looked at the room. There was a wooden table along the wall to his right, a window was set on one wall barred by a moth eaten curtain. He went up to the window, drew aside the curtain and pushed it open. It opened with a creak and a gust of cold wind gushed in extinguishing the torch.

The silence was absolute, the only light was the feeble rays of moonlight clawing through the treetops. His feeling of dread returned and beads of perspiration formed on his forehead. His hands fumbled through his coat pockets for a match. He lit one and through its feeble light, he could see the coffin, as he had left it, at the foot of the door. He reignited the torch and closed the window. Then he carried the coffin to the table by the window placed it gingerly.

Slowly he opened it. He willed himself to look at her one last time. He had to. Their ancestral rituals demanded that before the burial two important sacraments had to be carried out. She was wearing a pale green gown encapsulated by a little white belt at her waist. She looked so serene even in death.

Carefully and with infinite tenderness, he lifted up both her hands and placed them on her waist just above the belt. He was now oblivious to the tears that dropped from his eyes onto the floor. He removed a soft white silk lace from a recess in his coat and delicately tied it around both of her hands so that they will not be separated easily. Next he started the second ritual, he slowly picked up a pinch of dust from the hard wood floor of the cottage and sprinkled it in the right corner of the coffin, near her left foot.

He had first heard the sound when closed the door to the cottage. He did not realize its significance then. He now heard it again. It was a low breathing sound, more like a rush of air through leaves. It was definitely not a human sound, it was unearthly, especially in the silence of the forest where even the smallest of sounds get magnified many times.

He silently walked to the wall that was furtherest to the coffin and took the shot gun that hung there. It was his fathers' gun. It was always kept here and kept loaded. He crept to the door and after a longing look at the coffin that held her, opened the door silently.

A sliver of moonlight fell over his forehead as he looked out cautiously, the forest was dark and silent. That in itself was a dangerous sign. The absence of the sounds of the crickets, moths and bats indicated the presence of a predator in the vicinity. He was torn between the necessity to go outside and the longing to stay with the coffin, protecting her.

He then saw it. The darkness at a point in front of the trees was a shade deeper than the background. The dark shape slinked away into the night probably aware that it was spotted. The forest suddenly came to life all around him, crickets, beetles and bugs started their low toned buzzing.

He again stood in front of the coffin, slowly reaching out to close the lid for the last time, when it attacked. He was shocked at the ferociousness of the aggression. The creature had thrown itself with tremendous force at the only window of the cottage, baring its teeth that made a dent on the wood causing it to splinter in many places. He wondered at the intelligence of the beast as it had the ability to choose the weakest point of the whole cottage. The door was made of sturdy oak and the walls were constructed with many layers of bamboo to withstand the cruel winters. The second charge of the animal broke the window in half. the cold breeze again wafted in through the cottage extinguishing the torch and engulfing the room in darkness for the second time that night.

The beast was inside. He could hear that same unearthly sound, feel it in his bones. He knew the legend of the Mortesci, and the blood chilling stories told of it. He also knew that he had foolishly left his shotgun resting against the wall near the door. In the darkness he was completely at a disadvantage, the Mortesci could see in the dark. He tried to creep towards the door when it rushed at him knocking him over. Suddenly he heard a new sound, a patting sound he never had heard before. The beast turned away from him and went towards the open window. He grabbed for the shotgun at the door in one swift lunge and tried to get into position to fire. But before he could loose a shot he was knocked off his feet by the beast with a speed beyond comprehension. He struck his head against the floor and lost orientation. Then something happened which he did not understand, he had fleeting images of the beast near the window, and again of , trying to charge him, when it paused and writhed in agony, he then blacked out with a final glimpse of it vaulting through the open window and running off into the night.

He staggered out of his stupor after a few moments, he was delirious with pain from a gash to his forehead. If folklore were true, he was the first man to have survived an encounter with the Mortesci. He relit the torch and approached the coffin.

She was lying just as peacefully as before, but her hands were free and the silk lace lay to one side as if it had been sliced through. Also there were a few strands of brown hair under her fingernails. Her face looked serene except for her mouth as teeth were clenched together and a clump of brown hair was visible between them....

Legend has it that the Mortesci were animals that roamed the jungles instilling fear, had long curved claws and furry brown hair....