The Screaming Silence

Silence, we as students hear the word every time some fellow classmate makes a sound, every time there is some sort of disturbance but what is silence in the true sense? What is the point of silence? What is it's value? Silence can be perceived as both, a punishment as well as a blessing. For many, it's a sign of escapism, for some it's a way to retrospect, for him, it was his life. He knew the value of silence, running from it provided him with a sense of joy initially because he was afraid to face it. Then one day, he did. He was surprised as he saw the virtues of it. His fast pace life, moving from one place to another was only to avoid the silence and once he took it in, it slowed him down to an extent where he finally stopped and saw what he was leaving behind, stop and think why was he doing whatever he was doing, where was he? He found himself while searching for answers were there in his past all along, he just didn't see them. The life he had been running from, the past he was trying to avoid, it all came back in a fraction of a second. He saw his sins, his glorious past and that stopped him from repeating the same mistakes. He now knew the value of it, he embraced it, propagated it but never fought it. Retrospecting is an important part of life because it stops you from repeating your mistakes and having a better present because the past cannot be changed. He was now the lord among the thieves, the one guy with answers to most of his questions because he knew how important it was to endure silence until it finally became soothing.

Everyone has had a past, a glorious one, a miserable one, an unmentionable one perhaps, or maybe just another memory lodged somewhere at the back of their heads but it exists, it has to. A friend once asked me," Wouldn't it be better if there was no past? Wouldn't life be much happier?" It got me thinking for a while but I realized, if there is no past, there would be a new war everyday, one wouldn't know the value of happiness because there would be no misery, mistakes would happen way more often and peace would be just another textual term. The past matters because no matter how it was, good or bad, it affects who you are today. What you are today is destined to affect who you will be tomorrow, no matter what you do, the past does matter and it always will. People say that, " If men were supposed to be equal, God would not have made unequal", I say, " God just made land, we drew a line saying 'This is mine and that is yours' so why blame Lord for our mistake?" That was a mistake made by our ancestors and it affects who we are today. The values given to us will be the values we pass on to our children with a few minor changes, that will affect our future. Our past is what differentiates us from the others, Oscar Wilde once said, "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry and their passions a quotation", without our past, we have nothing, we are only shadows of people, weak, vulnerable, an image of someone who we aren't.

That is the viscous circle of life and cannot be treated as a joke. A joke, isn't that what everything is now? Isn't that was everyone is? Aren't morals, ethics, promises mere jokes with vivid combinations of the 26 alphabets? When the ones we look up to are the ones bending the rules for the personal gains, life tends to be a joke and rules are nothing more than words inscribed on paper. A joke is meant to make people laugh, when everybody laughs at the miserable state of the world conditions, how are you to differentiate between what is serious and what is meant to be funny? If you make a joke, you must be able to take one too, if not then do neither.

People say that over time, you get immune to the negative aspects of life like anger, pain, distortion, jealousy even, I say that you cannot get immune to them, you just learn to set your priorities right and learn what to ignore and what to look forward to. You don't stop learning when you get your Masters' Degree or when your education is officially over, you stop learning when you are able to hear the screams behind the silence, see the tears behind the eyes, see the misery behind the beauty and actually do something about it. You die not when you stop breathing, but when you give up while breathing.