If there’s anything deficit from the face of this Earth at all, it wouldn’t be money. Afterall, why should there be a lack of it, when everyone is deeply involved in this so-called ‘pursuit of happiness’. Nobody wakes up to smell the coffee, nobody ever stops at sunsets to catch the brilliance of burning crimson rippling slowly, albeit steadily, down the horizon.
I’m sorry if I digressed, but what I’m really driving at, is conversations. The spoken words, the imaginary lowercases and capitals that make us human, although I can safely assume that most of us have already transmogrified into pseudo-drones. It’s the little things that we grew up with, since the inception of our fragile lives; things that were imparted to our little minds even before we learnt how to spell “M-O-N-E-Y”, let alone earn it. But as we grow older out of our puberty cocoon, and flutter nearly aimlessly into this callous world, we left these things behind, locked up in the possibly spider-infested closet where we laid our skeletons gently, seated upright with arms akimbo. Not necessarily intentional, but we subconsciously do.
On a daily basis, we’ve brushed shoulders, literally or not, with hundreds or even thousands of people. The comedian, the accountant, the computer engineer, the waitress (the one with the pale blue eyes, streaked blonde hair, and a nearly-rexic frame), the retiree, the avid stamp collector, that one who somehow wears her heart on her sleeves, like it’s even possible in literal terms. And sometimes, we forget the world, in a sense that we feel all alone, beat up, and trapped in pit of rapid quicksand. What we fail to notice is the fact that all these strangers, some of them you might encounter every other day, are really brethren alongside you. They need to seek an object of solace as much as you do.
Speak to them. The one who serves your dinner with a frown upon her face, the cranky old man who clears your table to provide you an apt environment for eating. With initiation comes realisation, the random epiphanies you’ll inevitably learn from the mouths of perfect strangers, as you slowly journal those chapters in your mind, ones that you will look back upon and give yourself a tiny nod of agreement. You’ll find the agendas of poverty, filielty, heartwrench, embedded within everyone. And you will comprehend their joy, if any, amidst the rubble caused by the falling of their brick walls. And you will see the melancholy behind their thin smile, if any. And you will realise we all cry the same way, bleed the same way. And you will realise, you aren’t the sole individual who has had your feet placed on fiery coals; you will see faces of age, scars that are left even when things get stitched back together; you will learn to walk a day in their shoes. In a morbid manner, you’ll realise you’re not the only one waist-deep in this savage pool.
Everyone has been placed on a pedestal, and been down the abyss in points of their lives. Everyone has a story to tell. Would you be the one who listens?
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