By:Syed Ali Raza Naqvi
Ken Poirot said and I quote that “No one cares until someone cares; be that one!”
We often begin our lives with a less representative experience: that of being surrounded by people who care deeply about us. We look up at the dreams and confusion of infants at a young age and we can find a smiley face or two that looks at us with great gentleness and great concern. They look at us like a little dripping lump in the corner of our mouth and run to wipe it off as if they were holding a precious cloth,and then they rub the fine soft hair on our delicate head. They declared us closer to the supernatural when, in the end, we managed to pull off our first smile. Applause cries out for days as we take our first steps, giggle, stagger, fall, and bravely try to continue our progress. There is a wonderful surprise and praise when we can hardly form the letters of our names. Throughout the early years, the adults wisely pressured us to eat broccoli or peas; they make sure we put on our rubber boots when it rains; they danced around us in our favorite songs, strengthened us and sang for us when we were sad or unwell. When we are worried, they try very hard to find out what the problem is. It is not just at home. At school, good teachers encourage us when we have a hard time; they understand that we may be embarrassed; they are determined to discover and promote the first signs, of our talents. Grandmother also greeted him. She keeps our pictures in her kitchen, always interested in our artistic skills – sometimes it can seem like she has no life other than the days we visit. Even people you don’t know completely sometimes take a big interest. The guy at the falafel stand in the market once offered us a free houmous release – because he said it was amazing. Very few older people looked at us intently, smiled and called us charming. It was really amazing, but (now) it was totally unexpected. Apart from anything that is meant to be arrogant or presumptuous, that is what we expected. And then, we grow up and are immersed in a horrible reality: we live in a world of astonishing indifference to almost everything we are, think, say or do. We may be late for youth when the point is really hitting home. We may be struggling to sleep at university or wandering the city streets at night alone – when it happens to us, with great force, how small we are in a broader program. No one in the passing crowd knows anything about us. Our well-being does not matter to them. They hold us to paved streets, and they treat us as an obstacle to their progress. Big trucks pass by. No one is going to hit ourhead or wipe our saliva now. We are small compared to the towers and the bright light-colored ads. We can die and no one can see us. It may be a difficult truth – but we do all this by focusing only on its darkest dimensions. We are always concerned about our invisibility, but we stop putting this thought-provoking thought into its proper philosophical intentions, that of saving us from another problem that is plaguing us all this time: a continual and very destructive feeling of consciousness. On the other side of our minds, we have not at all accepted the neglect of others, in fact, we know, and we suffer greatly, from how much (as we feel confident) others think of us. We are very concerned about how our voice sounds and is unfamiliar when we ask the waiter for more milk. We are confident that the salesperson is aware of the shape of our abdomen. The people in the restaurant where we eatalone no doubt spend a lot of time wondering why we don’t have any friends. The concierge recognizesthat there is not enough of its establishment and probably will not be able to pay the bill. At work, they still focus on what little we said last month about the country’s marketing strategy. The man we slept with four years ago to this day still thinks badly of us in a powerful but inexplicable way. We don’t really have any evidence of any of this, yet it may sound like emotional reassurance. It is very clear that our folly and the underlying sides are impressive and always present by everyone in general.Every step we take from what the world considers being normal, high and dignified is registered by the largest region. ‘They’ can mean we went in the doors, spilled things on the floor in front of us, remembered anecdotes, tried to show off and did something unusual with our hair. To free ourselves from this punishing history, we may need to use the idea of self-deception deliberately; we may need to challenge ourselves to determine how much time we spend on just being present for others. The way we think and feel about strangers is probably the best guide to the workings of the human mind: all over the world, we are the same people or people we know just as we know and deal with our daily experiences.
And here, the results can be surprising. Imagine that you are on an elevator, and you are standing next to someone on the way to the 20th floor. They know we don’t like their choice of jacket. They know that they have to choose another and that they look crazy and trapped in this. But we did not see the jacket. In fact, we never realized that they were born – or that one day they would die. We are just worried about how our partner reacted when we told mom’s cold to them last night. Either it’s the end of a two-hour meeting where we see that our partner’s hair is very different today, though we can’t put a finger on how – or they spend less money on cutting and thinking deeply about the wisdom of visiting a new salon. Or we see that someone has a small scar on his chin. They think that everyone thinks it is the result of domestic violence, which makes them very angry and close to wanting to return home and hide. But we have no idea how they got it. We’re just trying to deal with an overdue report and the onset of another debilitating migraine. At the event, a community acquaintance explains how they broke up with their partner. They feel thatthis is going to be a big deal for us. We try to fix our faces in the right way: was this relief from a tragic marriage or the tragic betrayal of a loved one? We don’t know and in fact, we just want to get back to some of our friends in the kitchen.Two people from another office meet at a work conference; the next morning when they went down to eat breakfast, they were embarrassed and ashamed, thinking that everyone would be judging them for their behavior. But we don’t: we’re just worried about the train home; we don’t even know how they should have lived their lives. In other words, when we take our minds as a guide, we get a more direct – and less stressful – idea of what will happen to the heads of others when they meet us, that is, in a very positive way, not so much. In the 1560s, Pieter Brueghel the Elder painted a work called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now hung at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. It shows the last days of the mythical man who died. But the ingenuity, and the eternal lesson of this painting, is that the sinking end of Icarus has been greatly
shattered by the cloth. One has to look closely at the lower right to see the burning limbs and the last moments of despair of a dying Greek. The drawing center is taken by a farmer who directs his horse improperly. A shepherd cares for his flock. In the distance, we see a bustling city with ships looming in and out of port. Everyone peacefully does not know that Icarus’ drama. The sun is shining. It’s scary at one level, and it’s very redemptive in another. This is very bad news and very interesting: on the other hand, no one can see when we die; on the other hand, and they are sure that we did not see it when we were throwing something at our bottom or doing our hair in the wrong way.
It’s not that we – or they – are awesome. Our lack of caring is incomplete. If we saw a stranger in the water, we would go inside. When a friend cries, we sympathize with him. That’s just exactly what, we need to filter. Our lack of day-to-day care comes with a logical and justifiable reason: we need to use most of our energy to wake up to wandering, and to do justice to our own worries. Then we have to think about our relationships, our work, our finances, our health, our lives.
Last but not the least be calm and relax and enjoy this small era of life with full zeal and zest because it’s a very shorter period in which we must enjoy each and every moment to be our last moment. So , stop thinking of what others think one of my friend Mashal once said that “ignore the people who ignore you” and I consider it to be a worth rule to be followed.
Smile, smile and smile again because on one cares of none in this petty world. Be caring, loving and loyal it’s your character but never expect that you will be treated same as you treated anyone …… Alas! Expectations ever hurt.