Once in a while, lucidity seeps into the mundane and offers a clarity of vision, which stands apart and out from the ordinary. I have been around events and coincidences to realize that if given a chance and some lease, the problems and issues usually sort themselves out. What is right and what is wrong can never be denied and those who deny them will reap the bitter wages of regret. I have seen enough tricks of the vocabulary and heard enough tales of Orwellian humor to last a life time and in the end, they have only left me sad; sad at the grief that stems from a loss of hope.
Hope is a very elusive commodity and it is so fragile that it must be protected and it must be nourished constantly lest it withers away. It is the theme that binds a myriad story of life and like the contortations of the Gordian Knot, it must never be untangled for the supreme mystery of hope lies not in its attainment but in the dream of its eventual actualization. The loss of hope is a tragedy never to be surpassed in the long drama of human toil and joy and therefore, we must remind ourselves what hope really is and what the world without it will resemble.
The loss of hope can lead to suicide and it can tear a country apart and it can bring a night of despondency so dark that it becomes impossible to believe in the light of a new dawn. Worse than the loss of hope is the disappointment in hope itself and that creeping sense of alienation which comes from a betrayal; an act that makes us question the very things we believed in but do not believe in anymore, because the believe in what we once cherished becomes the pathway to a certain heart break.
I cry for my country because my country is crying and there is a lash that lacerates me and leaves me pained and in all my pain and suffering, I see the shadow move across the land and beneath the shadow exists intolerance, death, indifference and sadism. I have gone through many different avatars and I am not the child I once was and nor am I the man I once used to be, but a reed caught in the dilemmas of opportunistic winds that blow across my way.
How many times will I ache to see the end of this contantly lightless dawn and in of all this, I refuse to accept this ritual as the hallmark of envitability. I do not believe that change is unthinkable and nor do I think that it will not come; for like tide and time, all must move forward towards that infinity in space where time dissolves into a memory that ripples through eternity.
I believe that the wages of sin is death and my country has sinned and it will have to bear the long and hard suffering, that is its due, before it is purged of the evil that resides within it and mocks all those who stand against the forces of hopelessness. In this battle for the soul of my poor country and its hapless citizens, there must be hope in the final settlement of accounts and a hope that out of this fire of blood and tears will arise a better world in which to build, create and to love and be loved.
There must be a believe in the final victory and though I may not see the end of this battle, I know the end and the world that emerges from these ashes will be a far, far better place than the present. The question then becomes not one of courage to battle the foe, but the question of how to believe in the hope of a future when there is no reason to cling to such a sentiment and when all around us, there is nothing but the chilling echo of a souless voice that heralds only the arrival of sorrow and misery.
In the very end, I will not accept this bleak reality but struggle against it and in that struggle will lie my salavation. I have nothing to lose but my hope and that is one option, which I refuse to consider as a final option to be compromised upon the alter of expediency. The power of change lies in the individual and when the many become one and the one become many and we believe in the change itself; change we wish to see, then that very change will occur.
I may be not around to see the change, but I have hope that the change will come sooner rather than later and it may be delayed but it can never be denied and in this hope, I will hope
2 comments:
Perhaps we are those who have lived unique lives - close enough to the generation of our grandfathers who fought the first World War, to our fathers who fought the second, we to have experienced the sense of looming fear bred of the dawned Nuclear era, the Cold War, other wars, the menace that had us quaking in our beds at the thought of planes in the night delivering exactly what monster had been created to end the loss of human life for another, more insidious end.
Perhaps we have seen more. Perhaps we have been Pakistanis and endured loss of natural liberty in the name of a necessity framed as national survival without knowing what that Nation stood for other than its representing not-another-Nation. Perhaps we have seen our brothers go off to wars created out of the ambitions of other nations in whose interests we have taken a stake. Perhaps we are the generation that has more reason than any other to lose hope and yet to choose to cling to it.
We have seen the dawn of a new era whilst having existed under the old dispensation. We saw the beginning and the end; the facility of the hitherto impossible, the barriers downed and new ones erected. We have seen the necessity of hope because we have looked into the mirror of a world without hope and have perhaps turned away because it is indeed bleak, bleaker than we can possibly allow ourselves to succumb to.
And therein lies the source of hope. Those of us who have had children tremble at the notion of the eternal present that surrounds them. Unlike them, we carry within us the knowledge of what has gone before and the ability to see what will lie ahead if the expedient of an eternal present ignores both the past and the future.
For this reason we have hope, we must have hope because we have seen the advent of miracles, the ability to speak across former boundaries, new freedoms, and a world that by necessity is now all-inclusive or it risks doom.
Hope exists because it is no longer a case of the 'I' who is writing being a reed rattling in the wilderness. There are no more wildernesses. The 'I' who is speaking is speaking not to those who can physically hear me, but to those who can read these words.
And if enough of us desire change - and are prepared to do what it takes to further the cause of change - then it will become a matter of collective will. We have seen the past and if we remember that past, we will shun the notion of an eternal present in which people are lulled into complacency with 'how it is' to aspire to 'how it might be.'
Maryanne
Beautiful words!
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