Man is not truly one, but truly two.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In the very beginning, there was some kind of warmth of before “knowledge.”
Not being happier, not even peace; simply the warm light and some relaxing aroma that was present everywhere, making existence feel not just tolerable but very relaxing. You woke up every day believing things meant something because they existed: the sky meant expanse of the world, love meant safety, and death meant the end.
You didn’t seek evidence or any sort of proof for it all. You didn’t have to. The essence of life, the joy of living was more than sufficient for you.
But somewhere between the question you never meant to ask and the never-ending silence, something started to change, deep within.
The light faded; not abruptly, but deferentially. As if the light, too, recognized that you were beginning to see things it had been trying rather too hard to suppress.
This realization didn’t happen all at once. It was quiet, somewhat inevitable. Like dust settling after years of moving through the air.
You saw, or, rather, you understood, that all that is all the things you loved, you worshipped, that you defined yourself by was all temporary performance.
The laughter, the faith, everyone’s never ending desperate search for meaning, for purpose, all of it gathering at one place to compensate the unbearable weight of emptiness.
I am not saying that no, there is no meaning to life, to anything we do. It’s just that meaning is only in play until you can look directly at it.
The moment you do, the entire machinery of believing is thrown off the course.
You weren’t enlightened. You were dismantled, completely.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.
Rainer Maria Rilke
And then it was about time that you started catching it everywhere, that moment where laughter stops just before it fades away, joy has a dullness once it has been named, there is a strange stillness behind every achievement.
You see people smiling, praying, falling in love and you envy their blindness. They are still inside the dream, inhaling everything that gives the lie to beauty.
You however, live in the painful aftermath. There are nights when you wish you could return to being your old careless self. Back to the time when the first light ray of morning was still divine rather than mechanical, owing you explanations. When hope didn’t just sound like a strategy for survival.
But just merely knowing won’t return what it stole. Rather it would just teach you how to hold its absence.
Eventually, you would just stop trying to escape it. You would stop chasing meaning to everything like you starve for those answers.
You get used to being with the nothingness. There is a funny kind of calm that comes from that. Not peace, peace would still count as hope, but a kind of stillness that feels much older than existence itself.
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
Sylvia Plath
The unsaid horrors of the world become something wordless, something honest. You think to yourself that nothing matters, and in that nothingness is some kind of terrible freedom.
You start to love again, not because it lasts forever, but because it would not.
You write, you lift, you breathe, not as some kind of defiance, but as a cruel acknowledgment of the emptiness. And when you look at the night sky, you don’t look for meaning, but for endlessness, and surprisingly it doesn’t frighten you anymore.
And final you tell yourself; you were happier before you knew.
But you’d still rather know.
Because being blind is mercy, yes it sure is. Â
But truth, even empty, is divine.
Discover more stories on Her Campus at MUJ. More articles by me coming soon at Vaibhav Chaudhary at HCMUJ; he who watches the world and its miracles closely, noticing what slips between moments, between the infinite realities.