Saturday, October 13, 2012

Our Disassociated Selves


The world is suffering from a lost innocence, manifested in our hardened souls. 

This blog post is nothing more than an inner conversation my conscience has with me, frequently. A circular conversation that starts where it ends, every single time. It starts like this.

When was the last time you cried over something that had absolutely nothing to do with you?

When was the last time you empathized with someone else's adversity?

When was the last time you actually tried to do something about it?

Maybe we claim we do. Perhaps we shrug our shoulders and think in silence that it is wrong, that it is unfair but that there is nothing we can do about it. We shift the responsibility over to someone else, not knowing who that someone is. A proverbial savior of all things who is anyone but us. And we distract ourselves and go on with our daily lives, just like those who struggle for their daily lives go on too.

I am guilty of being in a state of disassociation. I look for a scapegoat. It could be anything. The media, the news, governments, politicians, people in power not doing enough, people on the ground not going about it the right way. Fact is, we're all in the same boat, just looking at things from a different angle. There's a huger sense of cause and effect that governs our lives. There's a unique sense of balance that may seem skewed and unnatural. An oxymoron I know, but somehow it makes sense. And again I digress and find that this is just another means for me to philosophise our human condition; our dissociative selves.

I watch the news and the constant bombardment of atrocities has made it the norm to expect to see and hear these advertises on a daily basis. So I instantly shut it out. Dissociate myself from it. Out of sight out of mind. A safety latch that I hold on to, allowing me to function in a world gone mad. There are many like me. In fact I have stopped watching the news.

I occupy myself with my goals and hobbies and doing my bit of good in this world. But it's never enough because my conscience pokes at me again and asks me...

When was the last time you truly, sincerely empathized with someone else's adversity?

And the bully of a conscience replies to the silence it is faced with: you're just like everyone else, lost in your disassociated self.

And I sigh and think yes and the world is suffering from a lost innocence, an innocence that at least I still possess and see reflected in children under five years old. And my soul is not so hard after all.

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