Dear Awareness,

I’ve always sworn by you and your mesmerising ways of setting everything in order…
I’ve read books with your name on their covers and highlighted quotes the moment I perceived the slightest hint of you in them..
And with every read and highlight a false sense of knowing you and your ways welled up within me..
An illusion that your presence intertwines with my every moment of living…

I prescribed you, or rather the quotes and books to other people, like a magic pill that solves all pain and quiets the raging questionings of the soul…
How could people live without you? I’ve always asked myself that, while rather unwarily succumbing to the first taboos of awareness, that is to judge no one…

And as I’ve progressed into what I thought a journey on your paths, I became increasingly aware of one thing…
That all my reading and highlighting and prescribing didn’t prevent me from avoiding you like the plague…
Yes, that’s probably the only thing that I can say I’m aware of…

You’re not free and you’re not liberating like the way you’re depicted by romanticised authors…
You’re clunky and heavy and come at a severe cost and that cost keeps on increasing…

So you tell me I should be mindful of what’s happening around me at all times?
I have no problem with the occasional laughter of a child or the air left by soulmates blissfully in love with one another…
But that’s not everything that you’ve got in your basket, isn’t it?

I also need to be mindful of the mixed cries of children and animals and the collective planet…
Of the sound of guns and the screams of rape…
Of the desperation of those without a roof and the ingratitude of those who have more than their fair share?

I should have it within me to think of those who have no food, probably whilst I’m eating…
Those living with disabilities, just as I enjoy the youthfulness of my body and my ability to walk and run and swim all over…

I thought maybe if I do a little something about all of those negative things that you want me to be always reminded of, I would be better off and obtain some peace of mind…
And that was probably more foolish than seeking you in the first place…

For now, I can not only hear about these things but see them in front of me…
And not only that, but I can notice within me an acquaintance for such miseries, where rarely anything moves me anymore…
And boy, the awareness of that feeling makes things go far worse…

Can we get back to the drawing board and see what we, or rather I, have missed?
Was I too greedy with you? too fast? too ambitious?
Or is all this whirlwind related to the one message that you keep insisting on and I keep on forgetting?
that I am mere mortal, and that my work and intellect have nothing to do with the sun’s rising or it’s setting…