What is this life? Without a care…

I am not sure but this might be a crisis.

One thing doesn’t seem to matter anymore than another these days.

I grasp for gradations and emerge with nothing.

I wish for something that means more than another just so that I may want it more, or feel more.

Instead I am stuck with a vanilla detachment.

I miss the hierarchies that held me together.

A lucid sense of the things of value; that completely evades me these days.

So much opinion… all gone.

Now I am certain that a thing could be this or that or naught and it would be the same.

I don’t think it is melancholic – this loss of judgment, but it is a bit strange.

I try to analyze ­­– and I don’t think this is cynicism; it would be very embarrassing if it is existential angst, and quite lowering if it is just age.

This lack of clarity about self is also a newish thing. And I must say it ceases to be amusing after a point. As always with the inexpressible, Mirza Saab comes to the rescue:

Hum wahaan hain jahaan se hamko bhee
kuchch hamaaree khabar naheen aatee

Aage aatee thee haal-e-dil pe hansee
ab kisee baat par naheen aatee

Now that I have been actively thinking about it, with a cursor to my head, I think I may be able to give you the crux of the matter.

I have lost subject matter for my prayers.

I cannot think of what to ask for, no unambiguous desire, no stubborn ambitions, and no righteous demands.

Increasingly I feel as if everything is perhaps exactly as it should be… as it ever will be.

But you see that leaves me with very little do, and very little scope to be.

I talk about this probably because I feel a conflict. My generation has made an ideal of ambition. To know what you want and to achieve it – that beyond all things is desirable. Sure, there is a wide choice of ambitions: there is professional success, personal happiness, a great love life, money, fame, altruistic ambitions, a desire to be of service, or a need to fulfill a potential.

To have an ambition you need foremost something worthy of want. In this matter all ideas seem to have deserted me. Somehow without my contriving it, I seem to have turned out into the kind of person who is perfectly happy to watch the play, act after act till it unfolds its climax, or not.

And so I stand in the glaring spotlight of someone nobody is actually watching and ask myself, ‘Is this alright?’

I not sure how I’ll answer but I have a feeling I am going to say, ‘See how it goes’.