Chronicles Of My Past

Chronicles Of My Past
My past was following me like a faithful and obedient dog follows its master; unlike a shadow that disappears in the night, my past doesn’t ever disappear: it is always a part of me, through the day, and even through the night. It has certainly been gaining slowly and stealthily. I heard its footsteps close behind me; they   were padded and dampened by many aeons of time it concealed itself behind, but my past was always behind me: it can never get ahead of me, try what it may. This is the only belief that makes me happy, content and satisfied. I often pause to look at it while it trails behind me; more than once, I felt it was going to catch up with my incumbent pace, and overtake me, I almost wish I had stopped my tread to let it pass, but somehow, it remained behind me in its  slow and steady avatar, quite like a shadowy funeral train.

My past is an entity I should have developed a dissonance for a long time back. I should have fled from it when its claws moved towards me to clutch one of my arms in a tight grip. I feel like kicking myself today for not having done so. Quite a lot of the baggage of my past is still on me  and I feel quite like a mule burdened with more baggage than I can ever handle. It makes me quite miserable and uncomfortable, particularly when I see others who have shed quite a bit of their past and are happy and satisfied with their present. I badly want to get rid of at least some of this excess baggage.

A major problem created by the excess baggage is it makes my adventures on the track before me quite slow and uncomfortable. The journey is so uncomfortable that I find it difficult to move on. A part of me does want to get to an end, although this is where all my contemporaries and peers are; they got there a long time back; I couldn’t make it primarily because of the heavy burden of my past on me. Its heaviness puts so much of stress and tension on me that I yearn to put off at least a bit of it as soon as possible.

A part of the problem has been the utter lack of a reason to shed off my load. I need a definite reason to put down all this. There was a dissonance created by the heavy load, but it failed to throttle an urge to kick off the baggage as soon as possible. This would have been reason enough to shrug it off had I absorbed the dissonance in its appropriate form at the appropriate time. mournfully, I failed to interpret all these signs and signals life had been giving me; there hasn’t ever been a definite reason for me to throw away even a part of the heavy burden.

I have been waiting for there to be a formal occasion and ceremony when all or at least a small part of the excess baggage on me is taken off me, and this is why my life has been eventless for a long time. The very fact that I’ve been waiting for events to happen has obliterated the occurrence of events in my life. Those who have their lives full of events yearn for such an eventless life. There are hundreds and thousands of people who are prepared to give up all they have to barter my carefree life with theirs.

I sometimes wonder if they are really as happy and merry as they appear to be. Most of their happiness is cosmetic and fake. Somehow, I know this is true. Everyone has one or the  other problem in life, and one’s share of problems always appears to be greater than that of anyone else. My problems appear to be of great proportions before what everyone else has to deal with. On second thoughts, it is their acting-skills that makes them appear happy  and content. Everyone, I feel, puts up a show of being happy and content; no one is really happy. I wish I too had such excellent acting-skills.

But sometimes I wonder if it is so important to be a good actor in life. Life is quite a lot more than merely appearing to be happy and merry before others. It involves a lot of courage and perseverance to learn all basics of life, and one of them  is that one has to appear to be happy, regardless of one’s real state of being.

There are several layers of unhappiness and grief that lie behind all smiling faces. One only needs to explore into the depths of their nature to know their real state of mind. Almost always, a solitary plunge reveals many more secrets than one wants to uncover, and several others one doesn’t want to. There are a whole lot of secrets I have discovered that I often feel I shouldn’t have discovered. I would have been a lot better off had they remained behind the veils they were concealed behind.

Quite a bit of the world around us lies concealed behind opaque curtains. A plausible reason for all the mystery around us can be that what is not apparently visible to us has powers to rob us of at least some of our happiness and joy. In a small way, we were a lot happier and healthier before all the contemporary knowledge of the world around us caught up with us. We had more time for those close to us before the advent of satellite-television and internet. We did a lot more physical exercise than we do now.

In one way or the other, our past hounds us every single day we breathe. It reminds us that we were a lot better off in the days gone by. I wonder if this is really the case.