Pest Control
Your life depends on it
Earth’s ecosystem is balanced. At least it’s designed to be so, without distressing human interference. Checks and balances. If you think about living beings — formidable apex predators, low-lying fantastic fungi, plants — everything testifies about erudite perfection. No kingdom is above nature’s rules. Whatever is part of nature is at its behest.
We humans are no exception.
From the pestilence raging outside, we’re sufficiently sheltered. We’ve got cats hunting rats and gods raining karma on assholes. If that’s sorted, I think we ought to conduct a deep cleaning inside. I mean something beyond healthy bowel movements and toxin flushing diets.
We’re emotional beings. Having a brain the size of two clenched fists (or ten tennis balls) warrants that. We are born with a body beset with senses finetuned by 200,000 years of evolution.
That’s great, and that’s problematic. Because having a set of expertly and purposefully inbuilt physical senses automatically means that you’re able to perceive external stimuli — even without your own will. The gnashing of chalk against blackboard. Heady fume of petrol. Scorching summer sun. Blinding high beam of an approaching car.
There are numerous advantages in keeping all senses alert, but you’ve got to admit — sometimes it feels like you’re getting assaulted. War, famine, plague, injustice, cruel nonchalance. You can’t help it, unless you manage to completely escape the situation instigating your discomfort. The boon and curse of our senses.
But what about the rest of you?
Your physical senses and the consequent voluntary/involuntary reactions aside, there is another you in there. The one who lives within. One that sprouts each white-grey-dark “thought” and “emotion” in you. One from whom there’s no escape, till death reclaims the mortal shell.
We sort of train ourselves to forget that the I within is a part of the whole I. That our sensibilities reside somewhere deeper yet just behind the veil of our senses. The same sensibilities arising out of patterns curated and honed by their owner, the function* of which evoke all thoughts, feelings and emotions.
*f(my sensibilities) = my logical and critical thinking, my emotions, feelings, intuitions…
That’s the rest of you, if you discount your physical cocoon and the innate senses enabled by different parts of the cocoon.
We forget, almost too easily, that we are the owners of those sensibilities as well.
We’re the masters of our seas, and the captains at the helm of our sentient existence in the turbulent world.
We forget to observe the checks and balances within. We, whose brains are truly one of the greatest and most extraordinary creations of nature.
We feel that the world has tricked us into wading in muck, whereas it appears that we deserve heaven. We train our brains to acknowledge and experience the worst that’s on offer. Is this our self-preservation instinct at play? We habitually take the good around and inside us for granted. Our amygdalas stay worked up with incessant fight or flight alertness triggered by the seemingly endless tragedies we witness all around.
We forget, ever too easily, that we’re miracles of nature. That in truth, and in objective Reality, our very existence - the sentient being nesting inside us, is a literal miracle.
In objective Reality, we’re both the boon and bane to ourselves. We’re the pest tormenting and gnawing our insides from within. The ones carefully or cluelessly harboring the darkness that stares back at us when we look within.
And in the same breath, we’re also the fully qualified exorcists of our personal demons.
Our reality is a vividly imagined one, which means that our reality is whatever we choose to believe.
You and I, we’re not only nihilists and fatalists. I was Kafka once, I’m Thoreau now! We’re all mad here, remember?? It’s up to us to explore our own flavours of madness. And exorcise what we don’t approve of.
Hence the all-pervading, omnipresent checks and balances of nature.
We’re the pest control!
Complete, all in one, veritably self-sufficient Masters of Chaos — you and I.
Our power lies in the trick of realizing our power lies within us. It’s one of nature’s perfect satires. Our very life depends on us realizing who we truly are, what Truths and Realities we must dare to face and march in tune to.
The quality of our regrettably short life span is at the mercy of us conducting regular pest control in required doses within ourselves.
We see it all around us in nature. To this effect, there’s brilliant advantage in knowing oneself to be at the behest of nature, just like the other living things.
We are no exceptions. But we are extra-ordinary. So much so that we’ve named ourselves Homo sapiens, which translates as a wise man in English.
Alas! How easily we forget… And what a frightfully significant thing to forget too!
Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas
Viva la Vida!
