Answers By An Unknown

In the midst of a crowd, among the noises and the commotion, I try to sit quietly, and plan my next move. What should I do to calm my senses, to regain myself which I have been fast losing being amongst so many people at a time? I just cannot seem to find the answer.

It is so easy to lose yourself when one is with so many people at a time. Who am I now? Where do I fit into this new scheme of things? How to stretch myself? It is so hard to find what I want. So many people telling you what you should do, what you should not do. How to approach a problem, how to solve it. It is almost like you are fast losing your identity, because the way you do things is what makes you. How can you even try to break yourself and build a new you? Prejudice stops you and so does your vanity.

So, I sit back and observe the people around me. There are some who are constant sources of information. It is easy to read them. They are the ones who have issues which are trivial and they are continuously trying to cultivate it as an excuse to brood. Do I sound arrogant when I say this? May be yes, but I stop to think, why react to people who have no effect on you? Why react to situations which cannot change the way you get on with your life? Why not focus on issues which you have full control, rather than divert your energies to those which you do not have control upon?

And then there are some people, who can be phlegmatic and unfazed by people as if they are not visible, as if their words do not reach their ears. People around them are unimportant, their actions meaningless. I admire these people, and I feel intrigued as to how they can make everything related to them, when in reality, for an outsider, he may well seem to be someone who sits in a corner and looks at everything with expressionless eyes. Nothing moves him. You may talk to him; say something about why things are what they seem to be. He listens, with those expressionless eyes, and then turns to whatever he seemed to be doing before, that is nothing.

I feel flustered. When you articulate your emotions to human language, you expect a reaction, even a wry smile or a monosyllabic reaction. But then I stop, and I realize, what is the need to react to people? Is there a compulsion to always have a reaction? And that too for someone whom you don’t know? People have been forced into the relationships of acquaintances here, we all have been. But we cannot be forced into making reactions, to the people and to the situations around us.

But it is difficult for me to inculcate that behavior. I find myself thinking a lot, about a situation which I have no control upon. So much so, that I try to force myself into believing that it is under my control. Everything around is under my control, and if it has to be out of my control, then that shortcoming rests with me. This clouds my mind, and I lose myself because such things make me weak. The fact that things are out of my purview make me jittery and I question myself. And the answers are hard to come by.

I wish again that I could look at things without expressions and without emotions. I wish I could learn how not to involve myself with lifeless things, just like the expressionless-eyed fellow. But then, I would become him, someone I don’t know.