The Complexity of Simple Lives
I always wonder
how I can bring my world home
in ways that it becomes part of hers too.
So she knows the truth of me,
without the judicial eye,
to embrace my experience
as being part of an evolution
whose pieces mysteriously fall
into place as time brings in revelations.
.
I want her to be my metaverse partner
to navigate what becomes
an unravelling puzzle in a life
which we now live out in tired evenings
and busy weekends.
.
We are morsels to each other,
our best parts often left behind
in glassy cages with people
who couldn't finally care.
We are anomalies in search of balance,
despairing for our best behaviour
but always at the end of our tether
frantic to be good and all-embracing
but failing only because we are just too tired.
.
Maybe, we could just accept we are good people
who sometimes do wrong things -
but alas
nothing is ever so simple.
An ordinary life is so complex. In its unending inevitabilities and gordian knots it is both an unravelling puzzle and an enduring mystery. To mesh our life’s experiences with those who we love, is itself a quotidian Everest to be conquered. And we slip, and we fail, and we try valiantly and fail miserably. And then we pick ourselves up and start all over again, and then we fail again. And then we find a rhythm and we lose it. Recriminations and regrets galore come into the equation, and we again seek balance and again find ourselves in the deep end.
What is it about ordinary lives? Why does nothing find an equilibrium? And why, when it seems tranquil, it sinks in a morass of habit?
What is a complete life, and how does a couple find it? Does it exist in sacrifice and adjustment or does it reside in the brave singularity of lives which happen to find togetherness.
As love stops being a wandering minstrel and works towards finding tranquility in the domestic, the lines of everything gets blurred and within its confined confusion lies the truth of two fully alive people living half lives.
Hear the poem here.
Beautiful, Sunil.