My grandfather once told me that to ease the pain which arises from the vagaries of life, you must break from the world, and look at the falling skies from the depths of your soul’s anguish. I have spent my whole life in a deep isolation trying to learn the meaning of these words. There are times when I find myself inclined to sink into an abyss where sorrows blend with the dark river of time. In these moments I remember my younger days when I had a far more reckless attitude which managed to not take the form of recklessness in my actions, but still made me appear to be fearless in how I approached the world. This is not the full picture though, because, there is a certain amount of ruthlessness required for one to be reckless. And this is why, in part, I was apparently named after my grandfather.

The things which lead people to an unmoveable cynicism are sometimes as unchanging as the fruit they bear. My grandfather thought of children as brick and mortar; things and tools to be moulded to the design of one’s purpose. Perhaps he fancied himself a god, able to manipulate the laws of nature and the grammar of the universe. With no regard for noble sounding sentiments of duty and responsibility, his children were ordered around the convenience of the orbit of his universe. However, it was not this attitude towards his children which caused the greatest pain. On the contrary, you could say that the man was both blessed and cursed with the ability to feel as deeply as the waters of the ocean and be as detached or withdrawn as an indifferent cloud on a passing afternoon. My aunt once described him as a man who acted from the inspiration gleaned by hearing the music of the universe. Combined with a complex personality and a hefty ego, he had a large propensity for being self-absorbed. Yet, he was capable of being moved by the suffering of others. Therefore, his actions were painful because he fully understood the measure of his actions and their impact, and also, because it appeared that the concerns of those whom had no option but to look up to him were ultimately ranked to be of lower importance.

And as for me: I can think recklessly because I have been willing to act recklessly; relative to your standpoint you could even say I have sometimes acted recklessly. I sometimes worry about being a lost cause, and you could say that my biggest fear is being a failure. Except, like my grandfather, I’ve only recently begun to think of failure according to my own terms. I discarded some of my views on duty and obligation which I had given undue prominence. I say undue only because I feel I am not wholly able to completely disregard these ideas. I think they are important, and they form some of the fundamental cornerstones of my ‘values’. The kind of failure I fear is one born by the attempt to sail on my ‘own’ ‘unchartered’ path. But even that is not wholly accurate because that too is born from this idea that I ‘should’ fulfil a certain task.

On a ‘good’ day, and in spite of first impressions, you might very well describe me as someone who is balanced. I have structure and order to help keep me on an even keel. In a twist of irony, maybe the greater the need for order in one’s life – or the impulse to have such order – is directly related to the chaos of a given situation. Therefore, order or even ‘balance’ is merely a reflection of chaos. But this balance is a moving target, it is like walking a tight rope. Move an inch in the wrong direction and everything is juggled out of hand. Sometimes I think that the idea of balance is a myth, a phantom to be chased like a setting sunset. At the same time, I also find myself growing slow to anger, and seemingly maturing in patience or understanding, or perhaps sometimes they are the same thing. Unfortunately, it would appear that certain insights seem to only dawn with the passing of time, a kind of perspective that only life, through the years and in ages, can teach.

Four days before the old man passed on, I was sitting with my grandfather when this realisation came to me. My bitterness and anger seemed only to wane in the dull reflection of his eyes.

On that day, I woke up despondent. I recalled the dream I had just woken from. It was nowhere near as gruesome as what I felt and I could not understand why I was feeling such anguish. I did not want to get out of bed for a long time. I stayed in bed for a few minutes more. When I got up it was with such heaviness and I was on the verge of tears. Sadness can be a cold and punishing emotion. You cannot wish it away no more than you can summon the sun on a cold winter day. It stays with you in more ways than one.

The elderly sometimes walk with a crooked elegance of a multi-branched tree. I only realised this after someone close to me complimented my walk: my walk is a dance apparently, or I walk as if I’m dancing. I watched my grandfather move his arms forward before putting the next foot in front of the other in order to balance each step. At that moment, I could not help but have a sense that he was reaching out back to life, trying to touch it, or someone, with each step and movement of his hands. But maybe it was just frailty. And life, like his body, is frail like that. To continue the metaphor, it is like the branches of the tree, extended outwards and forwards, always reaching. There is a kind of sadness to this because when you see the arms outstretched and their waists wiggle as they balance themselves, they don’t touch something in the exterior world. Instead, that entire effort to walk as one gets older, the surmounting, was to find inner resolve to take the next step with that crooked elegance, which is given an air of grace by the necessary deliberateness of each movement. It is almost ceremonial, beautiful, but sad too.

Growing up, I enjoyed being in the company of people older than me. At a very young age, it just made sense to me. If I wanted to understand how to go about life and what lessons to draw, it seemed a good idea to be in the company of those who have gone about it already. I am not sure however, what made this gravitation possible. On the one hand, I think it is a basic instinctual response regarding survival; so, a survival strategy if you will. I think my childhood made it such that I had to think long term. I have always gravitated to listening to other people’s stories, to understand who they are, to break down their core and basic motivations and impulses. I am never sure why. As an element of basic strategy, the more you know and understand about your environment, the likelier you can achieve or avert certain outcomes. On a more romantic note, I do find that I simply enjoy their company. The topics of conversation are broad and enriching.

Before he got really frail, my grandfather used to just call me and say that he wanted to talk. In those days I was no more than 9 or 10 years old. I would go to him and instead of ‘talking’, he would just tell me to sit down, and we would sit in silence for long minutes, sometimes nearing an hour or more. This habit of his never changed. It was only when I was older, laughing at myself, that I realised that maybe he meant for me to be the one to do the talking. I was comfortable in the silence. Even though I learnt to compensate for more withdrawn people in conversations by taking on the role of the ‘talky’ person, being a reserved person generally, I felt no need to draw him out. This time around was no different.

I sat next to him unable to get one question out of my mind: what is the point of it all? I looked at him with different eyes and I was wondering what the sum of his life’s actions were: where one started counting, and where the actions to be included in the sum would end. I was less harsh or critical in my attempts at measuring the sum of a man. Today I find myself thinking of questions to which I know not the answers, and I find in the manner of being of that old man, a gateway to temporarily suspend the burdens of life. I was 16 when my grandfather passed on. At the time, life and the world did not seem to hold out much meaning for me. I was part of the swarming mass of life with no certain future. Or at least, I did not care enough about hopes for the future. And if I had such hope, I did not care about actively realising any dreams and ambitions I had; I only knew the things I wanted to escape or run away from. And life was one of them.

Heightened by a general teenage angst, I was at the height of my aloofness and indifference. I wanted to feel so disembodied from living I barely ate. We only got to eat together as a single unit once per day at night because in the morning everyone was in a rush and no one was home in the afternoon. Apart from mandatory supper where I could not escape eating as a sort of ritual family activity, I had for some reason the idea of only eating an apple for the whole day. I was also responsible for making our meals, so I could control the rations I got to eat for supper too. I had severe migraines as a result. I was chronically late for school, bunking class and sometimes getting into trouble with my teachers. I never meant for the last bit, but I deliberately dodged coming to school. When my granddad died, I somehow thought of he’s passing as more figurative or metaphorical than real because it coincided too closely with my own ‘passing’ as it were because I felt like I was done with life. Being his namesake, I symbolically became my father’s father. Not only that, being the first of his male grandchildren, I had the odd patriarchal task of going to see his final resting place, so I could show and pass onto future generations the knowledge of where their heritage lies.

My dad still calls me ‘dad’ to this day. There’s a bitter sad irony reminiscent of my grandfather in how my relationship with my dad is strained by a distance and indifference on my end toward him. I am only recently trying to blunt the sharpness of this coldness. And because I am getting older, I am gradually presumed to assume the title of ‘dad’ more earnestly. I am also approached with a difference and respect marked by my increased age. This also forces me to act more mature; that is to say: in this light of assigned seniority, some of my resentments could very well be interpreted as being childish grudges to be abandoned with the passing of time. That is true too to an extent. For the past is very much alive in the present. I sometimes forget that these are not just memories I remember; they are actively evoked precisely because of the way things are now. But childish as they may be, they remain powerfully locked into my psyche. They have shaped, for better or worse, myself and how I interact with the world. The worse for the changing, right?

That is the lesson behind the vague mystical words of breaking from the world and looking at the falling sky from the anguish of my soul, and the meaning behind my inclination to “sink into the abyss of life”. The true meaning is not necessarily in the almost too positively optimistic image of redemption and transformation. Whilst I do not shun away that possibility, the darkness in the imagery of “breaking from the world” and ‘sinking to the abyss of life’ portrays and acknowledges an unchangeable fact in how certain things have marked one with a permanent stamp. Or more crudely as my friend once said, you’re fucked up for life. The next best thing is to minimise the damage resulting from that to others, and this I think is where the true redemptive or transformative value lies. We are who we are as they say, pain and anguish, happiness and joy or sadness and sorrow. And our potential lies in the ability to move between sinking beneath the depths and rising towards the sky.