Anything for starters
I contemplated for too long about what the first post here should be about.
It could have been anything- and that, perhaps, is the scariest thought. Anything- so endless and so engrossing. You start at the first distraction from the monotony of nothingness, and then, you fall into the next and the next and so on. And then, once you snap out of this totality, you still have nothing, contrary to what seemed like the easiest possibility- anything. And having explored these endless hoofs of distractions, you assume, there is nothing worth noting about anything- nothing remarkable about anything- and that, is scary; the thought that of all the things that could have been, nothing is such that is being so warrants notice. And just like that, everything funnels into nothing instead of something that could even be -passable.
Passable! Yes! Passable could be another word for anything in our context, dear reader. We know this, deep in us, that what we want to sell as anything, still needs to be something that passes an invisible test- a test of being something worth the attention that we have been entrusted with. It cannot just be anything! That would be scandalous! It has to suit its environment. Anything that doesn't suit its environment perishes- we want anything we create to be imperishable- that's the most human thing. It has to be digestible too. Uninterpretability breeds obscurity; obscurity breeds nothingness; and nothingness, I hope we can agree is different from anything-ness. Most important of all perhaps, anything we share needs to represent us. We cannot negotiate on this! We are so defensive; even about our borrowed beliefs. We cannot just say something without the comfort of the knowledge that the word is- ours!
So, I needed something that was qualitative, relatable and representative. And I needed something that I could find without the dilemma of choosing something from a painful infinity. And the answer was obvious! I had to write about anything.
As thinking beings, we are cursed with an abundance of ideas. Every thought quarrels within us- (second) to survive and (first) to be the most pervasive one. In the battlefield of our mind, a constant war is being waged between these different factions- different ideas about who we want to be, what we want to be seen as. And, as in the most Kafkaesque tale of all, in the end, no thought survives. All that remains is a heap of residue from these battles. And we, who could have picked any side and won, lose. We lose in picking anything.
This dilemma, if nothing else, I think is a relatable one. And I hope it is, therefore, worthy of being picked as the first post on this page.
