The force of life

"What a death. What a life. What a chance. What a surprise. My will has chosen life? Still, it has had me spooked and many others besides.”(The Piano, directed by Jane Campion)

I experience the full force of being alive when I am at the lowest point in my survival instinct. But still, I have that instinct. Maybe my mind has been doing something which not even I can understand.

I have no idea why I wanted to re-read Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. Maybe it's because of the cold? That it's Christmas time? That I had had made friends with a few Danes? I couldn't even remember the plot. There was just this feeling, maybe it's like Miss Smilla's feeling for snow, something real yet transient.

"Let's call it a day." I told myself, "Let's finish it all." And yet I was trapped on a bus, sitting at the window seat, with a complete stranger next to me, blocking my way out. There was nothing drastic I could do. There wasn't even a window to open so that I could jump out. And the bus still had a long way to its destination. Miss Smilla only had some blunt knives at home. She found this comforting. If she wanted to kill herself, she had to at least go to a neighbour to borrow something sharper.

I was this close...And then these words jumped to my eyes: Anything is better than suicide. Maybe these words were the reason for my choice of reading. Maybe I remembered there was something like this in page 99. Maybe. The brain is too complex an organ; I would never know.

I felt as if life had slapped me on my face, real hard. I was swimming. I was sinking if you got the joke. Fear was in the air. Our survival instinct made us smell it out.

I felt love/loved in a hopeless situation. Why did I find it hopeless? Was it another survival instinct? May I just shut down everything so that I wouldn't be hurt? So that I wouldn't hurt? I had this fear of hurting people; I had this fear of intruding upon other people's life. But I couldn't keep my distance; it's as if I was addicted to this chaos.

Maybe it's just life. Like what we said on Christmas, it's life; it's shitty. A shitty Christmas in the literal sense could teach us a lot.