Very simple riddles. Try not to solve these. I myself do not.
Things live so far as I live. I believed this when I was a child, or was just growing past childhood. Was I totally wrong? Perhaps, then, I rightly thought, for my exposure to a little world and fewer things, that everything around me had a value because I saw them and would have possession of them if I wished to.
I live so far as the things live. I believe this now. Am I not totally right? I know of the interconnectedness of people and things. So I must be right.
But the earlier notion has not lost its value yet. Some part of me is still childish. I don’t want to let it grow and grey. Am I wrong to wish to remain innocent at heart?
We become physiologically introspective, self-centered, so long as we remain in the bottom-most level in the Maslowan pyramid. And a large part of this self-centeredness lasts only till the moment of family building. The strictly personal and strictly outward are submerged into the family’s life, the one-step higher level in the pyramid. But the desire to escape, to the bottom, at times? Am I totally wrong to desire the escape?
Life is pervasive. I won’t cease believing this so long as I live. That we live makes us see life in everything. The fact of being surrounded by living things makes every lifeless object seem to communicate with us at certain points of our lives. But you may have a different belief.
You can have it.
Things communicate with us to signal the existence of other things. A natural spring beside a grove of trees in countryside tells of the life of the trees while the trees suggest the inevitability of their existence both for the water and the organisms relying on them.
One does not have to be so ‘ecologically informed’ as to understand greenery as a source of water, to know the relation between the tree and the fountain. The reality is a part of our perception about co-existence of lives in our surroundings.
But why do we resent the presence of flies and mosquitoes? Do they come with a plan to threaten our existence?
Because we love our lives and our well-beings so much that we keep flies and mosquitoes in the categories of life-threatening foes. We hardly ruminate from their side to realize that they collide with our lives simply in their every-moment attempt to sustain theirs. But this is a cliché, right?
I don’t think they think, plan and design a certain course of action before actually acting against us. Unlike the way we buy poisons for flies and poison and nets against the mosquitoes.
