Everything Always Works Out In The End. Or Does It?

I have been pondering about the meaning of life a lot these days. And by a lot, I mean obsessively smoking a 20-pack of cigarettes in under an hour, hoping it’ll calm me down. It doesn’t really. Instead, my hands now refuse to stop shaking and my throat’s a little worse for wear. It feels like I spent the last hour giving head to a particularly lucky exhaust pipe.
You’d be better off trying something a bit stronger. I’m not talking about chamomile tea. Fuck chamomile tea.

Looking at life, and contemplating about what the future will bring forth has always been a scary thought for me. I prefer to take thoughts like these, bracingly as they come, with a variety of numbing substances assisting me along.

It wasn’t always like this. The future wasn’t always scary. There was a time when I didn’t even think of it. I was a sickeningly optimistic, naive, multi-colored-braces adorned kid. Life was simple back then. The braces didn’t help. Godawful intricate little food-trapping, torture devices.

I thought everything would nicely fall into place on its own. Everyone seemingly goes through life contented and happy. Why should I be any different? I thought the Universe had my back. Instead it turned and delivered a well placed kick to my backside. The kick jolted me awake to the brutal reality that life is never fair. They should make it a point of honing that crucial message into kids right from kindergarten itself. It would save the world a lot of rhetoric from starry-eyed idealists. No Sally, you and your hippie friends cannot stop global warming with your vegan diets!

I turned into a pragmatic, braces-free dude and started thinking about stuff a little too much. I am too bothered about supposedly trivial material things. Despite my best efforts, I never managed to attain Nirvana like the Buddha, so material things still catch my frequent fancy.

With the consumerist culture gripping the world, it’s hard not to want the latest shiny toy that can help you effectively ignore people in front of you on the subway (Or anywhere else for that matter. Dinner parties with relatives spring to mind), or the newer version, that can do the exact same thing but now comes with an aluminium body that is slimmer by a whole half-centimeter! A half centimeter! Can you believe it?!

Why is the future such a scary thing? Especially for young, quixotic, millennials with a hankering for relevance? It is because it is shrouded in uncertainty. You have no way of knowing with absolute certainty that all the dreams and hopes you have, will one day see the light of day.

What if I never get to travel the world? Never meet that special someone, fall madly in love and eventually screw it up like I always do? Never amount to anybody in life? 
What if the novel that I’ve been writing since I was a fifteen year-old pimply nerd, never gets published and instead gathers dust inside a lonely, forgotten hard-drive stuffed in a box in my parents' basement?

What if I never make enough money to buy that private jet I have my eye on? What if my brother was right all along and I really had been repeatedly dropped on my head as a kid?

Scary thoughts, aren’t they?

A friend of mine recently told me a story of how everything always works out in the end. She told me about a meme she came across years back, with a picture of a girl in a bear-trap looking all bad-ass and cool. She searched for the movie it was from, but couldn’t find it. Googling “Girl in beartrap”, with the safe search turned off, made for some very disturbing content.

So, after months of searching, my friend gave up and went about life as usual. After about 6 years, she finally found the movie one random, fateful day. It was a movie called Hard Candy. (It’s not about candy, hard or otherwise, trust me. Don’t go thinking about some Willy Wonka shit)

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but from her description of it, it sounds like a charmingly disturbing, yet strangely inspiring movie. What’s not to like about an innocent 14 year-old girl pretending to castrate a guy to teach him a lesson? Makes for some wholesome family television. Bring out the popcorn!

The whole point of my friend’s story was that everything always works out in the end. The Universe always provides. Sometimes it might take years and years, until you’ve almost forgotten what you wanted, or at other times, it might give you something totally different instead, but provide it does. The universe is like the Frank Underwood of space and time. It manages to tie up all loose ends, no matter what.

It probably will not make sense to you, reading the story through my poorly thought-out attempt at philosophical commentary; but at that moment, hearing the story from her, while walking under a tree-lined road, with the wind in our faces, it made perfect sense. I wanted to believe her. I do love optimistic people. The world would be a sad place if it was populated by gloomy, pragmatic, cynics like me —

“Are you going to do the dishes?”

“Whats the point? They’re gonna get dirty again. Best to throw it all out and live on takeout for the rest of our lives.”

“You do have a point.”

“Chinese or Pizza then?”

I long to have faith. To believe, like normal folks do, in things like destiny, fate, karma and God. It would be a relief to have some of the worry lifted from life. To place your trust in some higher working and hope for the best. I might even be a bit happier. Maybe.
However, with all the random shit that gets thrown your way in life, it’s hard to believe that it is all part of a grand scheme in the Universe’s master plan.

My experiences with life have not been filled with instances of refreshingly satisfying poetic justice. When bad things happen, they often do not happen for a reason. When figurative opportunity doors close, they get rudely slammed shut on my expectant face with a sense of finality, never to open again. On a few fleeting lucky instances however, when one door closes, a small window opens up just a tiny bit. If not a window opening, a silver lining makes an appearance and shines faintly, giving me a modicum of comfort. Is that the work of the Universe like my friend believed? Maybe the Universe just likes handing out consolation prizes instead of the real deal.

My mom tells me that I am too young to understand it yet. Perhaps as I turn 40, busy battling a raging mid-life crisis with fast sports cars, things might suddenly get all clearer. (That’s my Mom’s reasoning anyway. Something to do with gaining wisdom or some such shit.) Or not. No guarantee. And that is my fundamental problem. I need some sort of guarantee!

Now, coming back to my friend’s story; yeah, she managed to finally find the movie she had been searching for so zealously. But the question is, is it really the same? After 6 long years of waiting, when all the fascination and intrigue associated with the meme she had once stumbled upon, had waned, if not faded completely? Is it really the same as finding the movie six years earlier would’ve been? Is it still rewarding watching the movie after all the years? I never got around to asking her that.