Right Now

Right now, I have a choice. 
I can choose to tell my nihilistic friend where to stick it. 
I can tell cynicism to get his lazy ass off my couch. And then look up my old friend hope and ask if she wants to grab a drink. 
I can stop asking whether an article is genuine, and start being the genuine article. 
Accountable. Consistent. Morally obliged. 
Right now, I can keep dissecting race, or embrace the reality that even though we might look different, we’re all in the same race against time to avoid oblivion. 
It is no longer a problem for future generations. It is a problem for my generation. 
I can keep hating against the press, or keep pressing against the hate, the prejudice and the not-so-normal normal. 
I can keep reading about the latest X, Y, Z-gate or I can instigate my own little scandal. I could call it ‘Today-I started-giving-a-shit-gate’ 
Right now, I can keep talking about ‘them’ and ‘they’ or I can shift the narrative to the first person 
that needs to change- Me. 
I can acknowledge my indifference. 
I can watch from the sidelines or get some skin in the game. 
Right now, I can choose to make my voice heard. Or zone out and go along with the herd. 
I can keep speculating, pontificating and abdicating responsibility, or I can do something. 
Even a small thing. 
Because Small Things Matter. 
And the Ripple Effect is a thing. 
Right now, I can be steered by fear into a corner, or steer clear of the naysayers, the merchants of misery and the prophets of doom. 
I can sit back and watch the livestream of bile and vitriol gush past me or I can try and dam it, goddammit. 
Preferably before it flows into that ocean of negativity, the one where the levels rise higher with Every. Passing. Day. 
Right now, I can keep counting down to some imaginary moment in some utopian future. 
Or I can make this present, actual moment count. 
Because you see, at this precise moment all I have is this precise moment. 
So I can either choose to make a choice, or keep pretending I don’t have one. 
My life depends on it.

A few weeks ago, I remember being a little down. Things were fine on the personal front, but a few things seemed to be happening in the world that brought over a particularly strong tidal wave of negativity. 

Gauri Lankesh, a well-known journalist and activist had been murdered outside her Bangalore home in gruesome fashion. ‘President’ Trump was threatening to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. North Korea was stepping up the war games. Everywhere I looked, the forces of darkness seemed to be gaining ground. 

At around the same time, I went with some work colleagues to volunteer for a day at the Movement Hotel, a project started by a group of not-for-profit organisations here in Amsterdam. Their plan was to create a pop-up hotel run by refugees and professionals together, on the site of a former prison. The goal was to empower asylum seekers through job training and give them an opportunity of a new beginning in the Netherlands. 

While painting walls (badly) and hearing more stories of the people involved, I had a niggling suspicion that the universe was sending me a message. Here I was, being part of a project that was helping to transform a place of sadness and negativity into one that was open, bright and hopeful- complete with pink walls. 

‘Fear can hold you prisoner; hope can set you free’, was the tagline of that great film, The Shawshank Redemption. Over the course of those few hours spent with some truly inspiring people, I realised this was something that I needed to tell myself more often. Every day, I could wake up and decide to stay trapped inside the Shawshank of my own mind, or I could decide to be more hopeful. And not just hopeful in a passive, lazy way, but hopeful in a get-up-and-punch-holes-into-the-darkness kind of way. 

And while it can often seem futile, in the end that beautiful verse from the Good Book puts it best. 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it'. 
I’ll take that for now.

I live in constant fear of my worst fears coming to pass. It is not just a mild paranoia or chronic anxiety; it is more like a profound existential dread. The source of this lies not so much in the natural world (though the threats there are by no means insignificant) but rather in the man-made realm. I think about trains, cars and planes, for example, and of elevators, cable-cars and subway systems. I think of bridges and flyovers and underpasses. I even think of boilers and heaters and nuclear reactors, of cranes and pulleys and mechanical levers, and when I think of all these, I mostly think of one thing: catastrophic failure. 

It is a strange obsession, one that I justify to myself as a means to constantly have my guard up- to be prepared at all times like a scout might. And yet, it is at the same time a crippling affliction; a state of mind so negative it is bordering on the macabre. Why does my mind fixate on such things? I’m not really sure. Of course, failure is an inevitability; all systems eventually fail. It is a random event that one plans to perhaps delay, but can never avoid altogether. Everything we make is, in a sense, both fragile and transient just like us, no matter whether it’s brick and mortar, or iron and steel. In the end, cracks appear in everything. 

To live in the midst of these without being at the very least slightly pre-occupied with their decay has always seemed to me a little naive; perhaps even reckless. Of course, to be obsessed to such a degree seems just as foolish, particularly since I can do nothing myself to prevent such eventuality. Still, I continue to spend my time (my fleeting, finite, precious time) seemingly at the edge of imminent destruction. 

My wife reminds me that there’s enough negativity in the world already, and that I should be spending my time spreading goodness, beauty and hope. And instead here I am, casually peddling unfettered panic, blithely tossing the seeds of future phobias into minds that might already be a little frayed just from the compounded exertions of our modern day-to-day existence. For this, I apologise. 

But I hope I have adequately explained my own state of mind. I am actively working on changing it, but I fear there is a core of permanence running through. Perhaps that too might crack eventually; but until then, every time someone tells me about efficiency and built-in redundancy, I remind them about human selfishness and indifference. 

How, I ask them, can we expect our creations to be somehow superior to their creators? No, they are at best merely replicas; at worst, cheap imitations with all our flaws and none of the self-awareness. I remind them also about the story of the King who asked his courtiers to each pour a glass of milk into a large jar over the course of the night and the next morning the jar was full of water because everyone thought everyone else would pour milk and no-one did. This is us. 

And so I think about the things we make; I think about how maybe one more person getting into that lift will cause the cables holding it up to snap, or how one more emergency brake will cause the train to slip off its rails. I imagine myself, in fact, standing and staring at some breathtakingly beautiful thing, maybe like the Eiffel Tower, and thinking just how many more people leaning, climbing, jumping can it take before it keels over. And from there it doesn’t take much for me to imagine myself watching this remarkable human creation come crashing into me and for a few seconds before I am flattened under its weight, I would feel, for maybe the first time in my adult life, complete and utter calm. 
Now that, that would be ironic.