A thought at 12 AM

When we care about something and we love it to bits, we all inevitably think and imagine the day that we will eventually lose it. It’s a guilty thought which lurks in the darkest recesses of our mind and harshly plagues our consciousness. We try to shunt and block it out, but only for it to regrettably remerge during the brief moments of time where we aren’t distracted by our busy lifestyles, like during the brief moment of serenity as we lay in our beds, our minds desperately exploring and rerunning our day’s experiences before we shut it down and let the subconscious dreaming sequence take over. It could be a hobby, a toy, a special time, a person, hell it could even be the state of your perfectly sculpted body for all we know. But it’s something about that raggedy old teddy bear or something about the beat of that song. It is something which may seem so insignificant to others which means the world to us. These little personal treasures which carry a special meaning bring us a feeling that only we can enjoy. An experience that is indescribable and unparalleled to anything we have ever felt. It is a feeling that words can never encapsulate, no amount of money can buy or neither substitute; nor any scientist could make better with research. It is old, it is aging, it is flawed, yet it is beautiful in its own special way; it is human. It is this trait that makes them so appealing to us. It is a constant reminder to us as humans that nothing, whether organic and so complex like us, or engineered synthetically after much thought by evolved species like us, is ever perfect. This imperfection that connects us serves as a portal from which we can reflect and ponder. A position from where we can relive the joys of that specific moment of the past. It is like an intangible storybook where the ink is our memories and whose pages are the vast expanses of our mind. It almost seems like we can project and replay that scene of our lives, where we know the twists, where we know the jokes and the funny parts, sometimes even the nail biting and undesirable parts. For that feeling I have been harping on about, we get a sense of value. For such a thing so precious to us, we learn to treasure and marvel at the joy such an object brings us. And sometimes we just need to step back from our busy lives and bask in their significance; for they hold a key to a fraction of our past; a little bit of our life lives in them, forever trapped but always open to reflection. In the hectic and rapidly developing lifestyle of the 21st century while we must constantly be concerned with our future development, we must never forget the past. No matter how bad or how good, how lucky or unfortunate, we must learn to occasionally reflect and re familiarise ourselves with our past. After all, without the past, there would be no future, but if there is no future, there is still the past from which people can revel on. A blinkered and strange view maybe, but then again, I’m only human.

~L. Ling