In The Silence Of My Solitude - A Novel (Part 11)

                                               15. The Relativity of Everything

I couldn’t sleep that night. For a while, during that night, one emotion canceled another. The emotion of anger and shame worked against the emotion that came from fear. That resulted in apathy, a peculiar calmness -- a sense of surrender.

That calmness turned out to be transitory. Once the calmness had gone, my mind started the familiar process of problem solving by replaying the events that had happened couple of hours ago.

Did my eyes lie? All that stuff was just my imagination? If it was just an imagination, then, Why did I imagine in that particular way? Why did I imagine a midget? Why did I imagine a hooded figure?

No. It was not my imagination. There was no precedent for such kind of incidents happening to me. But, in dreams, peculiar things happen. Right? But, that was not a dream.

I was being watched by someone. Who would that be? A thief? If it was just a thief, why he looked back at me when he jumped the wall? It was, almost, as if -- he had no fear.

But, what surprised me was my Dad's behavior. If at all there was any peculiar behavior during that incident, it was his. I couldn’t understand why he refused to believe me, why he looked at me with doubt, why his face betrayed a sense that he was looking at a crazy guy.

I remembered the sense of victory I felt the day before, when I solved mysteries by my persistence and intelligence. I discovered that the mysterious object that my mother was looking at with fear was in fact a normal football. I concluded that my mother was psychologically disturbed. During that process, I might have discovered a new technique in programming to uncover the blurred traveling objects in a photograph, that too in a span of 5 hours. I was not sure about It though, but I might have.

But, all that happiness, that victorious feeling, a rush of feeling coming from the satisfaction of solving a mystery; turned out to be a starting point for sadness, anxiety; and the events turned in such a way that the ending point of the mystery became a starting point for some more mysteries.

I didn’t doubt my dad when he said that there was never a football in the house. Football was never a popular sport in that town. In fact, I had never seen anyone playing any sports, except cricket. Even if someone had brought a football to our house, I didn’t see any reason why the existence of that object brought fear in my mother.

All through these waves of thoughts and doubts and analysis; one thought prevailed through the end, the thought – What if all this was just my imagination?

What puzzled me the most were my States of mind.. I was fearful at one time -- body shaking, sweat-bathing anxiety; and another time, It was the rational mind; and the next time it was the mind full of Action. At one point, every thing looked clear, and then it transformed to muddy waters, and then, all I was looking at was a huge dark wall, almost like an abyss.

Isn’t that moment of clarity a permanent state of mind? Why am I not able to forcefully transform my mind into that perfect state? Is moment of clarity a relative term? If everything is relative, then does it mean that we are able to enjoy the clear waters of Hawaii only when we experienced the pain of muddy waters elsewhere? Is pain and pleasure the sides of the same coin? Can we find that true happiness without experiencing pain? Is pain a requirement for self-knowledge?

Does beauty exists without ugly? Does compassion exist without cruelty?
The beauty of the night sky, is it absolute or relative?

If everything is relative, then what is absolute in the universe of human emotions?

In the physical realm, If speed of the light is constant, then what is the counterpart for that constancy in the realm of emotions?

When thoughts come in waves, sometimes canceling each other just like the crests and troughs of two waves; I tend to wonder – How many people exist in my mind? What is that particular thought which I could catch and say – ‘Yes, This is Me’?

Thinking itself became a boon and bane to me. On one hand, it solved problems, but on the other, it made me question – Who am I? But, how could I run away from thinking? How could anyone experience the joy of mystery without thinking? Didn’t that thinking gave enormous pleasure to my heroes … Sherlock Holmes and Einstein?

I cannot escape from thinking. I cannot escape from that burden. I got to think.

Even when I was in that state of mind which I loved, and vulgarly named as ‘fuck it’; there was a thought which put me in that state. An observer was watching that state. But, an observer itself is a thought, right?

Look at it this way. We cannot observe something without the existence of an observable. When we observe something, it gives us a thought, and that thought itself tells us that we are the observer. So, that begs the question – Do we exist only in relation to others?

Is all our existence…relative?

Continued here...