What is regarded as usual and normal lends so much weight to one's experiences. Given the relativity of our being and our living, the norms of the times can sometimes lighten the load of some of the heaviest of weights. And conversely, or rather, perversely, comfortable times can make heavy of some of the lightest of loads. Such is human life. And literature of a different time and place is perhaps our chance to see this mirror or this perspective so well laid out. For instance, just a commonplace sentence - the person limped, having lost some of the functioning in a horse related mishap. And it was such a by the way fact about him. But in modern fiction, perhaps it would become a defining fact. The scale and weight itself shifts with external shared comforts and discomforts. In times of wars, a living for basics, during times of relatively less clutter, but perhaps a general cloud of mishaps, the weight of the limp is felt differently when every other person has been impacted by a war compared to times of beauty magazines, where an average looking person can spend time thinking themselves something less than what in other times wouldn't even raise a brow. Even as I write this, I realize that one is never well-placed to say these things, one has only one's own lived experience. But still, it is something about the norms and the private weight that makes the load light or heavy.
What can one take away from it? Ideally, to keep moving forward as all these things are extrinsic, beyond one's control. One is born in a time and place and that is one's given. One begins from there, and lives and regards life. Perhaps the only takeaway is that when there is so much relativity there's little objectivity to one's experience, and hence experience itself is malleable to the light it is seen in. To regard it with that simplicity, and to keep moving forward irrespective of where life finds you.
When everyone around you goes through the same fate, however drastic it seems, there's a comfort of sharing. While if one carries a load alone, however little it may be, it begins to feel very difficult - all this in comparison. And hence this need of detachment perhaps or non-attachment as Gita says. One has to keep moving forward, to the next best action irrespective of what life lays on and around you.
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Still in the first few pages of the book. (early Jan)
