Exploration

 Searching for truth is easy. Accepting it is hard. - old Jedi saying

I’ve been told by a huge amount of people that I can’t drive. Sure, I’m rough but these claims are slanderous! I just remind them how according to unscrupulous research, the way I drive is in direct correlation to my performance in bed. I agree though, my driving is terrible. I once hit a motorcyclist trying to change his lanes into mine. I didn’t slow down because I was replying to a text I got from a friend. While driving in Karachi, it is essential for the driver to never admit his mistake lest he be eaten alive by the mob. Once he or she (but let’s get real: no woman has ever survived Saddar) truly masters the art of the Jedi mind trick, only then can he drive on the broken, dangerous roads of Karachi feeling safe. Driving in Karachi also requires infinite patience, so my trick is to become super aloof to the middle fingers and dirty looks. Or maybe the detached, fatalistic driving is what causes the finger to be raised in the first place. Oh well. *goes back to being aloof*

But it can’t be helped, thoughts of all kind collide in the insides of my skull till I become numb to thought. One thing that helps me calm and arrange my thoughts in a coherent manner is the subtle influence of good music and good music is only music that raises at least the hair on my forearms. That’s when duality of nature comes together in melodic cohesion and I’m at peace, transient and illusory as it is.

I believe in God, because if I didn’t my mind would tear around the seams. There are so many questions and there are so many things that cause that itch in my mind that if I didn’t believe, all those things would hurl in my brain and I’d be a vegetable with no hope and no motivation…with no Grand Plan. God to me is not really a historic notion but a rather rational one: a string tying up all the loose ends in the universe. It’s math, really. Without a Constant, the equation just falls apart. Everybody has their own constants. The heart, the story goes, is made to love. When it doesn’t find divinity, it finds other things in naivety.  A tribal dude might adhere to a constant culture perpetuated by his environment, Gordon Gecko had money, Don Juan had women (as an idea, not individuals) and even the atheist, his Seinfeld-ish belief in nothing. I’m guessing Aristotle had the right idea when he said that humans are only different from animals on account of inclusion of the rational soul, capable of reflection. But unlike animals, this part of the soul was placed in the heart rather than the mind. And anybody who’s ever fallen in love knows that nothing hurts quite like heartache. Music mends my abused mind while the idea of Allah Subhanta’allah tends to the black depths of my heart.

The balance we strike in leading our lives is illusory, changing to whims and frailty of society. But balance by definition is a compromise and compromise does not exist in perfection. Somebody’s wrong is some other body’s right, no pun intended. But we aren’t perfect creatures and we make do, our animal instincts and base desires on one side and our ideals of civility and purpose on the other. There is a line that divides the dark from the light where aspects of both sides come together to form a comfortable gray. The shade might vary from morality to morality, with our own perfect barcode as a benchmark to judge all other grays, “knowing the hand of God to be the promise of our own”.

When the history of DC Comics characters became so convoluted and ambiguous, DC ran an in-comic campaign to clean up house, killing off variations of known superheroes that were deemed too outdated and merging the characters of the ones that would seem about right. Histories were finally settled so a character could be traced to a linear source. The merging of the parallel multiverses into the comic universe we’re used to today was called Crisis on Infinite Earths. This is the event that established Clark Kent as Superman, vulnerable to kryptonite and way way faster than a speeding train. Apparently “faster than a train” had more of an impact in the 50’s than it did on me. The Crisis was used to end that aspect of Superman history by making it the history of another superman from another universe. In similar fashion, the balance that humans strike in their respective lives is a product of deliberate ideology. The mix of black and white that we reach to attend life, the focal point of our duality, is what I call the crisis line. This is the line where we decide what to keep and what to throw. This is the place where all our moral ambiguities come together and form character. Too human as it is.

Because we’re ours, we walk the crisis line. - Johnny Cash (almost)

I have an exam in the morning. Goodnight.

 

R.I.P.