The Tears I Shed Are Not My Own The tears I shed are not my own- they rain down from memoirs of reservoir that are also not my own. The eyes through which they trickle down are also not my own and neither are the cheeks through which they flow. Sometimes the tears are accompanied by hiccups, wherein the chest convolutes and thumps at the power of the gentle drops that seem to spring out of nowhere. It’s during moments such as these that I’m forced to ponder the vicissitudes of who and what are these tears and why on earth are they happening to me? It takes nothing to cry except for the force and presence of emotional content you are experiencing at any given time; and this seems to constantly recur whenever you let your guard down and just become, in a word, vulnerable. Now this vulnerability has nothing to do with weakness but everything to do with the path you are paving and walking on in life. To spark off the tear, all you need to do is connect and connect as openly and as honestly as you possibly can with whatever’s around you. It could be a twenty second act about a father and son whose repented relationship is consummated and summarized to its bare essentials, in really, twenty mere seconds. Or it could be a simple scene from a movie where a mentor is teaching a protégé who has had it to the pits and thus challenges the mentor by calling him a tormentor, inciting a response whereby the mentor teaches the protégé the meaning of the menial tasks he’s been commanded to perform. In this case, its Jackie Chan’s character telling the young Jaden Smith in The Karate Kid that “Kung Fu lives in how we put on a jacket; it lives in how we treat people” and this heartfelt revelation- “Xiao Dre, everything is King Fu!” Such a scene resonates with a dunce like me. It tells me what I’ve suspected but never quite believed in; mainly the fact that we are the result of whatever we have been and whatever we are will result in what we become moment to moment; day to day and so on and so forth until you come back to the square-one scene that yet again reinforces what might have been forgotten, resulting in a spontaneous flow of tears you are not ready for. But that again is the beauty, for you didnt expect it and that’s why it’s spontaneous and beautiful. The tears I shed are not my own because so many fleeting moments of crime and punishment come compacted in a single outburst of some vague connection to something and someone. Even if the details are rather vague and fatigued, the essence is not. If anything, it’s the essence that is awake and aware of what is exactly going on in your emotional content and quotient, and here there is no surgical blade, yet it just cuts to the bare bones. This is when you cry, and still you see, the beauty is that the tears you shed may not be your own but what is your own is the recognition of that very truth- that it is not yours and will never be. We are what we are because of the thousand and one people that have hated us; the hundred and one people that have helped us and the few that have loved us. No matter what tag you garland them with, you cannot take away the fundamental basis because it is the very foundation of who you are, and really, in such a scene, everything is a character that, in the end, has somehow aided, guided and helped shape your own sense of being. This is when the good, the bad and the ugly just dissipates and disappears, because you see, they have helped you shed the tears that now enlightens you, and in that process, purifies your eyes giving you a renewed vision of the world and of yourself as opposed to just having sight minus vision and seeing beasts wherein dwells rather wonderful creatures who are seldom ghastly. The Mahatma touchingly said, “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.” It could also be said shedding tears only for yourself not only make your eyes wet but also snots your nose. But if you shed them for others perhaps your own insight will get cleansed, along with your retina and your pupils. If the tears you shed belong to everyone you have ever known; then you might as well shed them with love.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 20:47:36 +0000
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