There is something about life. It is random. When we are born, we meet our family. Then, slowly, we find others. We call them friends. We play with them, laugh with them, build small private worlds together. And then, without announcement, one day they leave. Or we do. And we return to where we started, family. I think of this as childhood. A loop that closes before you understand it was even open.
But there’s more to life, we know, right? We grow up. We study. I’m not adding the word ‘hard’ after study because it would generalise the statement. And the word hard requires another discussion in itself. Coming back to the point. Get a job. Start earning. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, we realize the world does not work the way we imagined it would from the outside. The pressures arrive: work, family, health, and a hundred others with blurred faces. They simply sit on your chest.
In between these pressures, we try to find peace in our family. When our kids laugh. We forget, briefly, that we are a person with deadlines and only remember that we are watching something beautiful happening right in front of our eyes. Isn’t it amazing that only a laugh can do so much?
And then, if we are fortunate, comes old age. Life slows again, the way it was at the very beginning, before we understood the requirement of being fast. We can stand somewhere with the person we have chosen, or who has chosen us, and talk for hours. No one calls asking ‘by what time can I expect you. That phrase ‘by what time’ which governed us for so many years, simply stops. The phone goes quiet. Thought becomes possible again. Laughter comes easier, looser, closer to the kind we had as children before we learned to be careful with it.
I feel: to laugh again like a child takes a whole life. All those years, all that weight, just to come back to something you already had but couldn’t feel.
Isn’t life random?
