There’s this wonderful scene in ‘The Hurt Locker’ in which James talks to his baby son who is fully engrossed in playing with his toys
You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don’t ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older… some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.
Its probably a generalisation, but I’m sure many people can identify with that. Figuring out at some point, that all the things and people they cherished, or they themselves, have moved on. In fact, there are many who might be even more unfortunate and realise that have nothing to love, going through the motions of life, as a job to be finished. But it could be even worse.
Quite a morbid line of thought, but one that I felt compelled to share, because it made me think about so many things we take for granted. Sometime back, I had written about the ‘alone’ people I see in many places. Well, there’s another kind of people I have seen – sometimes during daily commute, at other times, when I travel.
The kind of people who make me wonder what it is that makes them hold on to their life. The easiest example I could give are the beggars – no, not the ‘professional’ ones who haunt our traffic signals, but the ones that frequent obscure places, where there’s hardly a chance of them getting anything, the ones who don’t even ask. They sometimes look too old or invalid to move out of there. There are other examples too, ones that need not be at such levels of despair, but you probably get the drift.
So what makes them plod on? A hope that things will become better? A dogged belief in the sanctity of life? A dull notion that life has to be lived on unto its natural conclusion? Or maybe they are in a state where they’re okay with what they’ve to live with or what life will dish out next? Or maybe they’re afraid that the experience after death will be worse.
I’ll end where I started from – ‘The Hurt Locker’. To quote James again ‘Everyone’s a coward about something.‘ Sometimes it’s life, and sometimes it’s death.
until next time, alive and clicking 🙂
I always thought it was strange that more people are not committing suicide. I mean life’s no cakewalk, there’s no guarantee things will be better tomorrow, day after tomorrow, but still, we go on. I guess we are not only imbibed with unending optimism but also suffer from a bad case of memory.