To Live Anyway
On Being Rewritten by Time, Society, and the Silence Inside Us
We often are alone in the journey of life. We are represented as individuals, each holding a universe of our own, with our own kind, our own differences. The fact frightens me: that we have to live our lives with only ourselves and our understanding of this world. We never stop, as the thread of time keeps flowing. We come across some swirls, we meet people, we love them, and we forget them and the flow keeps going, never to stop.
It scares me. Scares me to love. To meet the aspects of my life I haven’t seen before. Being optimistic doesn’t change the fact; it only creates a falsehood, an illusion of not knowing the truth which can sometimes be helpful for the poor. Because life isn’t just limited to thinking. There’s our physical existence, which asks for growth through all sorts of things the most important one being food.
One cannot live a lifetime just by the ability to think deeply. It needs nutrition, food, and water to survive. A human has to go through fights and challenges thrown at them by a palliative society, which over time changes their sense of self. One doesn’t know how it was before. Who was I? The question cannot be answered if one is living a life of illusion and lies they don’t even know they’re feeding into fed into their lives, into their eyes, by a thin needle piercing through the retina without them realising. Slowly whispered words that made their way into the head, the brain, and the heart. And when these two couldn’t figure out what was causing the overload, they passed the pain on to the physical self. The body sickens, and the person becomes completely unaware of what is happening and what will happen to the self.
We slowly become strangers to our own reflection. We walk, we talk, we exist, but rarely do we pause to listen to truly listen to the silence inside us that keeps changing shape with time. And maybe that’s what frightens us the most: not the world outside, but the shifting world within. We are expected to evolve, adjust, perform and in that constant shapeshifting, something pure gets lost. Sometimes it’s our voice. Sometimes it’s our wonder. Sometimes it’s just the simple permission to experience aspects of our lives.
There’s something deeply tragic about not being able to trace your own journey. When the dust settles after years of survival, what’s left might not even feel like you. The childhood self the one who once laughed freely, who trusted easily feels like a ghost watching you from a different dimension, unreachable and unnamed. You can’t touch them, but you miss them.
perhaps there's a strange power in realising this. Because once we understand how easily we’re shaped how subtly we are reprogrammed without our knowing we start to take notice. We become watchful of the whispers, the illusions, the scripts we repeat daily. We begin to see which thoughts were planted and which ones were born from within. And from that awareness, a new kind of living can emerge not free from pain, not immune to loss but real, conscious, grounded.
What if we are not meant to be whole in the way we imagine? and What if becoming ourselves is not about returning to something pure, but in holding all that we’ve been without turning to stone? The mirror doesn’t always show you who you are. Sometimes it shows you everything you’ve survived to get here. It shows you what’s been layered over your skin, and dares you to peel some of it off not to become new, but to become real.
And in the end, maybe that’s all philosophy in knowing the depths really is. Not the pursuit of meaning, but the willingness to sit in its absence without looking away. To walk beside your questions, not above them. To let life remain unsolved and live it anyway.
Thank you for reading.
If this resonated with you, I’m truly grateful you made it here. Take gentle care of yourself.
If you enjoyed this post, I’d love to hear your thoughts feel free to share them in the comments.
the more we want life to make sense, more troubled we will be, answer lies in 'being' -- as you have mentioned in the last paragraph.
This was such a great read!
I am currently in that process of peeling of the layers that had come with those seeds that were planted. We all deserve to see our real selves, pure and real, reflecting back on us in the mirror. But it certainly takes a lot of effort and time to get there. One must be patient and understanding to get there, but once we do, it's a different kind of joy that can never be replaced.
You write so well, with so much depth. My writing style has been very objective and factual. So I am learning from your posts how to write with more depth. I wish you the best.