The universe keeps throwing contrasts to our lives, and expects us to walk with them, unfazed, taking them in our stride. And frankly, there is little choice.
We are making love, and in the next room a parent we love is taking her last breath. The spring outside our window is filling the world with its colour and aroma, and we lie ill, confined to a room. Someone we love dies, and the funeral passes a marriage procession. That's as cheesy as it can get, but so is the truth of life's contrasting metaphors.
The primary contradiction is often an unhappy outside life contrasting with a serene inner life. Or the attempt to lead a straightforward life in a toxic ecosystem.
However much we might wish for a peaceful life, the outer world keeps impinging with its urgencies, desires and insistencies. Even if we shut ourselves to all external influences - media, people, messages - we are bound to face the terror of ordinary things.
A very important component of this is always that we allow things to affect us. We are humans, after all.
But then, after being continuously battered, there is an inflection point, when we stop caring. And start learning to hear only one voice - the one inside us, unencumbered by the hard consonants (of the continuous commentary) of a forever-aggrieved world.
That's when we find the serenity inside of ourselves, completely inured to the slings and arrows, the aggressions and aggrieved nature of everyone and everything around.
Finally we understand that the world will always complaint, find reasons to protest, disrupt, throw grief at us when least expected.
That is the world's prerogative.
We need to find our peace, in our own way - in our lives, our passions, our inner worlds.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on what home can mean to us -
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The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -
Betelgeuse by Sascha Ende
Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/betelgeuse
Licence: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
