I spend time.
We The People: A Reflection On The Value Of Life
BRC, a Dalit non-binary autistic person, talks about choice, will, finding solace while constantly wondering about the next meal or safe house, and the rule of evolution to forget trauma and sadness
I spend mellifluous days with changes in the seasons being the sole reminder of time. Books are memories I can safely carry, the rest force me to discard. What good is a human without their memory? I often wonder if the state of bliss can be achieved if memories are erased. If the self-constructed; is consciously, carefully taken out of reminiscence.
Part of the paradigm of remembrance are the people who share or know our memories. If no one knows your memories, do they know you? Who will they remember you as? It may have as much significance as the cloud passing by every day in the blue skies; or the magnificent rainbow—no matter its splendid nature is bound to be forgotten.
The people who are seen and exist everyday but do not make it to memories. An irony and living crisis of the collective - why are the people most seen to the world, who live the most exposed lives with their bodies, their belongings, and their existence bound to be the most forgotten? If it is the nature of evolution to ignore the sad, hurtful, traumatic sights and focus and shift sight to the pleasant, then, such humans are monsters of evolution.
How do you spend your days?
Really, nothing
How are you?
I don’t know
What’s happening?
Nothing
The answers are closer to the forgotten than believed. It is not depression or sadness. It’s a state of life. If there is a way to change it, no one has found it. The communist-philosopher might say, why bring them within the capitalistic production system making them a cog in the wheel where they bear no meaning.
They bear no meaning now. Well, they bear no meaning of their own volition. Choice. Will. The socialist-philosopher advocates right of life with access to life, more than the mere bare minimum suggested by the government-corporates. Can one make meaning if one has to constantly wonder about their next meal, next safe house, next health condition? The busy life depletes leisure, necessary for introspection, to question, to arrive at answers or a meaning. Yet, there are people with access to such means; and yet find a still quiet. And, it cannot be dismissed as nihilism or absurdism. If we do, we might have to re-evaluate the role of individualism vis-a-vis feminism.
Life remains. Life reminds to remain.
Yet, the cause and reason despite all the world’s extant gods are failing apart from the proposed grand design. One can only pierce the soul to reach through the pain, while others may prefer the still quiet while remembering life does not require pain.
BRC is a Dalit non-binary autistic person.
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(This appeared in the print edition as "The Forgotten")
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