Chevaliers de Sangreal
Many a time we are simply oblivious to what lies in our surroundings. Blinkered by the vagaries of every day life, we attach ourselves to sub-optimal thoughts. Fettered by our desire for instant gratification, our habits follow a dotted path mired an endless circle of need and more need. Our poverty of attention, our inability to focus, and our brazen unwillingness to pause makes us less human. They make us less gratified and definitely far less effective than we would like to admit. What is it like to constantly miss the forest for a tree, to ignore the variables directly under our control and to try and alter those that aren’t?
I still remember what you told me when I had my first sip of alcohol. It was almost four years ago, shortly after my twenty third birthday. As I sat there, sipping a glass of deep red wine, you were one of many who walked up to me and uttered the word badass. Oblivion to American slang meant that I took badass to mean that my posterior might have expanded in the way the vast majority of fresh-of-the-boat transplants do after they spend a year in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Free, but scared I spent hours burning off the crowd-sourced label that my apparent backside got that night.
One of the most bandied virtues is that of stepping into another person’s shoes. The corollary to this lemma which never finds a mention is how difficult it is to step into another human’s shoes. To even imagine a subset of someone’s circumstances, let alone simulating their affective states, is by no means an easy proposition. This becomes vastly more herculean if it involves another human you’ve never met or know very little about. Whatever one’s sensitivity index might be, we are built as humans not to develop a deep understanding of someone’s plight until the context begins to move in a personal direction.
Three close friends of mine and I caught up with each other this week after what seemed to be ages. There is something inherently priceless about old school friends, a kind of camaraderie that is almost irreplaceable. We talked about many things, from our lofty high school misadventures to how scattered we were from each other in geography and in what we opted to study after high school. I felt nostalgic, finding it almost impossible to stomach the fact that I was in high school ten years ago. The year 2001 seems, by no stretch of imagination, not too far removed from now.…
