Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Veiled Existence

There is only so much that one can know about somebody. The truth is that the picture is always incomplete. Add to that fact that we are all evolving everyday. What I believed yesterday might be a fairy tale today or what I will believe tomorrow might be even unknown to me today. But that should not be a surprise because how much do we even know ourselves. We try to complete our own picture everyday  not for others but for ourselves.

And yet, every single day while going through our daily chores, meeting the same people we met yesterday, we keep thinking that we know them. We don't. We never will, just as they will never know us. It is common for most of us to complain from the very teenage days or sometimes even before that nobody understands. The opposite perspective is always lost: that we never understand anybody either. I could extend it further saying that even if I understood someone at that one moment of interaction we had, it was lost the very next moment because we evolve every single moment. May be the everyday effort to understand every single person around us is like the myth of Sisyphus: futile but still repeated.

Then again it is necessary at some level to understand a person so that you can interact. As a part of the society, that probably is the most important code of conduct that we follow. We try to complete the picture we have no idea about by our own whims and fancies and then when we have done so, we claim we have understood everyone. An illusion we create, nurture and defend for life. What can we do, after all to err is human.

Credits:

2 comments:

khushi said...

I remember someone telling me a long time back..."I am happy because people do not know me" and this post reminds of the same incident.

Andrew MacLaren-Scott said...

Your thoughts ring very true

Just another year

This is my second new year after I shifted back here. Last time went in a blur. I sat in a corner, remembered the last new year and cried. ...