What If?

By Pradeep Damodara 

Satisfaction. Something we never really seem to manage to find. The mind is fickle, they say, and rightly so, and yet we haven’t been able to tame it. If you have bread, you wish for cheese. Once you get the cheese, you want ketchup. Finally, when you have the butter, toaster and Italian seasoning, you wish for that pizza!
 

Whenever you get something, something good, tangible, “satisfying”, that tiny voice in your head tells you it’s not enough.”
 

So  we’ve established that nothing is ever enough. Eventually, the mind comes to accept that… that and the fact that life isn’t fair. We never get what we want or deserve.
 

That’s when we shift from the more rational realism to the dreamscape and ask that fateful question: “What If?”
 

And so the word games start. Two syllables would never have meant so much than at that point, when this cruel, unfair world took away everything that we desired.
 

We delve deeper into the conscience, following unrealistic paths, courses of life that we know are impossible, yet seem so plausible in that moment of imaginary clarity, that we’re addicted to their outcome. We take solace in irrationality, and wallow in our self-pity, forever consoling ourselves with the day dreams of what would have been or what still maybe, only if our will be done.
 

The same two syllables we ask, always choosing the answer that better satisfies us. Yet, you’ve agreed the mind is never satisfied. The need is never met. So you’re stuck in the imagination, lost in the moment. And eventually you chance upon a roadblock you can’t surmount. An idea, a notion, which even ‘what if?’ can’t conquer.
 

Your two faithful syllables shatter, fail utterly, and you wake with a start.

You wake up, sweating, hyperventilating, crying. And you start to think: “What if?”

“What if I didn’t dream that??”
And so it is.
So it’s always been.