Still Paradise

There are times when you feel like you can’t move. You don’t want to move. And you wish the world would stand still too. Go quiet. And calm. Tranquil. Like a big peaceful hammock, rocking you soothingly. And every relation, all the ties to the current of life would cease. No work, no familial obligation, no bills and budget and bank balances, no mobile phones or internet. No one to call you, no one can reach you.

And all of it feeling perfectly right. No lurking feeling at the back of your mind as if all of this serenity is a bad omen, as if it will cost you direly. Absolutely no strings attached. Just clean, delicious air to breath, and a vast empty canvas in front of you to paint wherever you want, whatever you want: no obligations or standards imposed by art or aesthetic, or human knowledge, holding you back either. No one to say you should have employed oil on wood, or the foreground should be more captivating and bright than the background, or that your abstract art is not properly abstract. No restrictions of matter or plot or technique or literary devices, or even rules of grammar, spinning and weaving your words, forming them into paragraphs, sections, stories.

Just plain and pure air to breath, and nothing but the clear blue and green and earth-brown to drink in, with gravity light on you, and silence elevating and uplifting. No pressures to strive for survival and sustenance, no need to smother one’s own identity to gain relationships and contacts. It is your own world- your very own. That which no one can take from you.

This world is not going to go still for you. Or clean. Or soothing. Or free. Granting freedom is the last thing it will do. It’s like taking oxygen from it, dismantling the very foundation on which it thrives. But the one thing it can’t do is to take your own paradise away from you. Or to tear it to pieces. This world sometimes does feel its existence, and then it tries to suffocate it into annihilation. For it can’t bear to see the possibility of an antidote to its own poison. But the paradise is still there; it is light as air, therefore, it knows no submission. It is nothing transcendent, no creation of a poet’s mind, or a lunatic’s. No result of schizophrenia. It is the paradise of a common man’s mind. So ubiquitous, so earthly. And yet so unknown, unrealised.

It is not a flimsy dream. It is the tiny corner of freedom and sanity in everyone’s mind, kicked into oblivion, struggling to find it’s way back, and pushed to the depths of unconscious back again. Sanity, more or less, is there in everyone. Yet so few are sane.