The Light Fantastic

The Light Fantastic.

For some reason I’ve got this expression in my head. I’ve never even read the book so I’ve got no idea about its real meaning, but I do love the imagery that these words evoke.

It’s amazing how life quickly settles back into a routine after something really majorly big happens. A week after the biggest emotional blowout I can remember in the last few months, the dust is settling and life is once again sliding back into a predictable pattern. An equilibrium seems to have been reached. When I look around at what’s left, there isn’t much. Now that I’m here, I can’t say I’m surprised.

My mother once said to me that, no matter what tragedy strikes us, the sun will always set in the evening, and it will always rise again in the morning; and the world will continue to turn one day after the next… no matter what. At the time I felt I knew what she was talking about, because I was old enough to have lived a little and experienced some curved balls that life can throw at you. But it’s during times like these now that I really understand her message. I had a few days in the last few weeks when I really thought I just couldn’t face them, or make it through. And yet, every night the sun would go down, and whether I slept or not, the sun would rise, and I was still here. Eventually after enough sunrises and sunsets, you find that you’ve been taken away from whereever it was that was causing you so much grief in the first place. It’s one of those things that it doesn’t matter how hard you pray for it, the ground will not open up and swallow you, even though you hope to god it would.

It’s ironic now to wake up in the morning and find that life has become routine once again, without anything more interesting than a new sandwich for lunch that I haven’t eaten before. It’s a welcome change from days that would literally change hourly, and that I could barely keep up with. And yet at the same time, this return to a routine seems to have taken some energy out of living, making me feel less alive. I can see now why people who live dangerously say they feel like they live 10 years for every day.

In many ways we do define our lives according to the major events we experience. Always looking back on our past, seeing the emotional peaks as they spread out over our memory, filled in between with long periods of routine. I guess that’s why the Tibetans and Nepalese cultures have such a good understanding of life; their landscape is a mirror of their lives. Giving them a perspective that the perhaps the rest of us lack. Or so they said when I was there.

Padwanna!

The The Light Fantastic by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.