Life with disillusionment

It's been a long long couple of months. It's strange how you often have an image of how your life is going to be like and it crumbles into bits, isn't it? Or how you spend a considerable amount of time feeling extremely contented and happy in life and then, poof! It's as if someone has upended you, or the world around you, or both. Of course, it's very easy to feel happy and contented with life when it is going your way, as easy it is for everything to go haywire.

When I was younger, my mum's favourite adage was that whatever goes up comes down, that things always moved in a circle of favourable and unfavourable, that life is a great equaliser. Happiness will be followed by sadness and sadness will be followed by happiness. In this vortex of emotions is how we shall and do (and always have) exist. Of course, this is probably what everybody's mum probably said. I wonder why it was so much easier to believe it than it is now. 

We've read in novels of fanciful protagonists who had committed the folly of thinking that life is always going to be a walk down a rose garden. We've also read of protagonists who were so steeped in the romantic notions of tragedy that they would imagine every aspect of life to be one. And both are ridiculed as unrealistic notions of how life really is. But isn't life mostly about going from one to the other? When things are going your way, it is very easy to believe that things are always going to remain that way. And when things aren't going your way, it is again very easy to think that they never will. Both are ridiculous, you say? But then what is not? What would you say if one spent their happy days waiting for something to go wrong because that's how things work, right? If you're happy for too long, then something is going wrong. Similarly, what would you say when you feel a perverse monstrous sense of relief when things do go wrong because then at least, you are not waiting in anticipation of it happening? Depressive or realistic?

There are fewer things more difficult than being faced with one's mediocrity. How it feels to make one's peace with it is something I am not yet equipped to write about though. That's an accomplishment that still eludes me. All our lives, our parents, friends and well wishers assure us that we are special, that there is something about us that sets us apart from others, that we are meant to accomplish great things, that at the end of our lives we'll leave behind a legacy which at least a few people will have the occasion of remembering. And we let ourselves believe it. After all, who would want to live with acute consciousness of their mediocrity? Who would want to be continuously aware of the fact that their life is going to be the same as that of a billion other people, that their biggest accomplishment will be the fact that they managed to lead an unremarkable quiet life till they faded into oblivion, till the only people who remembered them were childhood friends who had at that point believed that they had been cut out for great things? Who would want to admit the fact that not everybody is meant to do great things and that the biggest service they could do to themselves and the world is to leave brilliance to brilliant people.